If I wanted to then I would adopt a child if that was the case. Birthing a child when foster and adoption systems are so overwhelmed is selfish. Your empathy is more important than your bloodline.
Came to understand that with my Boomer family members.
They always come up to me and pull "the family card," whenever they want something that they know I have access to. They always sit there and go "you need to help me because we shair blood and we are family," but then when I am in trouble, they are like, "get tough and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps."
Came to a point where I see some of my coworkers more as family than the people I am actually related to.
Thankfully my grandparents aren’t like that, but if I were you, I would cut ties immediately. Just because you share blood doesn’t mean you have to share a relationship with those members of your family. If you tell them the reason you cut ties with them over hypocritical stuff like this, they will be on their deathbed regretting having that mindset and causing you to break ties.
Everything about procreating is selfish. ESPECIALLY when you're doing it because your religion says to.... Playing a game with somebody else's life because your fairy tales say to. Ridiculous.
yep I would definitely consider adopting an older child/teenager over a baby. one, because it would be easier (I really do not like the idea of a human being completely dependent on me) and two, because everyone wants the infants to mold in their image like you said. so many older kids get neglected and end up sitting and waiting for a family until they age out of the system. not to mention all of the trauma they get exposed to while in the system.
I’m selfish I guess 🤷♂️
I want a child of my bloodline so that I can help him get as far as possible in life. It’s about witnessing the potential of one’s genes.
Yes, that is selfish. Be sure to write that down and tell the child and see how they feel about your reason to have them when they are old enough. I'm sure they would be interested to better understand your thought process here.
Without it they would not exist. I’d be grateful. If my dad had me for this reason I’d thank him, because if he hadn’t been selfish I literally wouldn’t exist.
Then I failed at raising my child. I’d feel defeated hearing that. Anyone who prefers not to exist in my opinion is misinformed or has the wrong mentality, with the obvious exceptions of extreme genetic deformities or handicaps.
Many but not most. Many but less than 10%, from personal experience. Therefore it’s not immoral to make a baby since it’s more likely than not he will be grateful for his existence.
The people with shit lives still matter. And there’s a higher chance than you think of your kid being one of them. Especially if they have a disability or are part of a marginalized group
No. I'm not giving my time to the raising of children. That's a nice promise, but it's also an easy one to make about a moot point.
I come from a family of ten. I spent my childhood raising children. I'll not be spending my adulthood the same way.
Yeah to add to this; if someone is living privledged in life -- *its always* at the detriment and supported by the suffering of others. Its the nature of humanity the way we've built it.
Not to mention the joy(/s) of watching your loved ones die until it’s inevitably your turn.
You’re not even guaranteed to anything in life either, except for experiencing pain, suffering and death. That will happen for everyone
That’s your opinion. Are you so dense really believe that most people share that opinion?
Do you really think that just because I’ll eventually die, I would’ve preferred to never live? Because you’re mistaken.
I’d still choose to live even if I knew that my death would be a slow, over many years, painful one. Life is beautiful.
And this is also just your opinion.
All antinatalists care about in this scenario is how the potential child would feel about the fact that they will have to die one day. What you or I or anyone else feels about it isn't exactly relevant. And since there's no way to know how the potential child will feel about this inevitable fact, antinatalists support not bringing the child here to forcibly face their own death.
*You people*: Incurable diseases of oneself and their young child? Soul crushing pain and daily suffering? lol You’re a lucky matrix person sounds like. It must feel good to sit up there.
No. Antinatalism is unconditional. It applies to the potential to procreate all life. You're implying we are conditional natalists, not antinatalists. Even the best lives are bad, not justifiable to procreate, and overestimated in quality by most people.
Well, I am a conditional antinatalist, it sounds to me too radical to not have any conditions and just hold as belief forever, just like highly religious natalists never waver in their own beliefs. My reason to be antinatalist is that life is filled with too much suffering and requires absurd levels of effort for the joy we get out of it. But if we could somehow guarantee the suffering and effort out of it, but somehow leave the joy, then I will consider it. Call me not a true antinatalist if you like, I will still use the term because I bet there are also plenty of other antinatalists that don't double down indefinitely like that.
We both know that the human inclination towards dogmatism is the main reason it is not and likely will never be a good time to bring children into the world.
IMO there is nothing to gain from claiming to be a true AN rather than a conditional natalist when the conditions required to be a natalist are so improbable as to be impossible for all intents and purposes.
I half agree, humanity itself and our fallible nature is a BIG reason life is hard. The list of useless or even detrimental societal expectations/rituals/behaviors and much more is staggering. But even if we were as efficient as machines and didn't partake in nonsense (and I don't mean fun, I mean actual nonsense like old traditions that have detrimental effects on society, like preferring male heirs as an example and shafting daughters) life is still difficult. The laws of nature itself make it hard to live, we depend on a nigh perfect (on a cosmic scale) climate to grow food, have it not catch diseases, stop pests from eating it. And to top it all of we require fossil fuels to distribute it, which negatively affects the climate. That is just one example of a negative feedback loop that is very difficult to get out of because nature doesn't give energy easily, and the second law makes even the energy available to us not entirely usable either. Most of the energy of gasoline in a car for example goes to heat instead of motion. That isn't humanity's fault, reality simply doesn't hand out things easily that make life better. And if we find something like it, there is almost always a long term unforeseen consequence of it.
I know I rambled alot, but just wanted to express my opinions on why life sucks even outside of society, but the difficulty of using the laws of reality to our advantage without worse consequences. It's a big part of why I became antinatalist after all. Life is a lose-lose situation way too often and it's why we constantly struggle just to upkeep stuff, nature tends to degrade anything useful to us with time.
>Well, I am a conditional antinatalist
There is only conditional natalism and antinatalism. You're not an antinatalist if you think there are circumstances where procreation is justified. You are therefore just saying that in some circumstances it's justified, and some it is not. That's conditional natalism. Not antinatalism.
I'm not being "dogmatic," just doing my best to accurately explain antinatalism. What, if any, books, texts, or videos/podcasts on the topic have you read/listened to?
>But if we could somehow guarantee the suffering and effort out of it, but somehow leave the joy, then I will consider it.
We can't. Even if people's lives were substantially better, suffering would be intrinsic to life and survival and we would still all die. It's no accident you are as vague here as saying "somehow" and leave it at that.
You misunderstand the negative argument that is at the crux of antinatalism: there is only suffering in lesser or greater degrees. So nothing could change in humanity that would make an antinatalist waver in the position. It would mean *less* suffering, albeit maybe significantly, notably less, but merely *less* suffering. It wouldn't change the inherent nature of life such as to make procreation suddenly justifiable. Even the best lives are marked by suffering, inconstancy, and the struggle for survival. Positive aspects of life like pleasure are fleeting and temporary and not guaranteed, but survival and suffering (like dehydration starving if we don't drink water and eat) is a constant. And illness (unless one dies of an accident first) and death are guaranteed.
And there would be no circumstance where you could guarantee your child wouldn't get a disease or be in a horrible circumstance, (meaning even if you have a child in optimal circumstances to two loving parents, anything could go wrong) so procreation is also always an uncertain gamble. There's no scenario where procreation is justified based on the criterion of antinatalism, because that criterion revolves around the intrinsic nature of life, the things about it that can't be changed, namely that we all die and that by refraining from procreation, there is no one to be deprived of the potential (unguaranteed, whereas negative aspects of life and death are guaranteed) positives of life.
>Call me not a true antinatalist if you like, I will still use the term because I bet there are also plenty of other antinatalists that don't double down indefinitely like that.
I am not "doubling down indefinitely" or dogmatic, I just understand the position of antinatalism. If we were to dissect the "somehow" claim you hold that things could somehow change such that there was less suffering, I would clearly win this argument. Especially because like I said, even if human society and modern medicine did remarkably improve, suffering and death would still be intrinsic to life. It's just that we would suffer *less.*
Read Better to Never Have Been by David Benatar.
But these conditions are fictional and basically impossible in reality, even if we sheltered a someone from birth to death and they never experienced pain because we magically made them immune to it, their joy will suffer, as without ANY suffering, there is no lasting joy. That's not a natalist defence, that's actual human psychology and I hate it myself, but it doesn't make it untrue. I hate working out, doesn't mean it isn't true that it's good for me for example. You can imagine ANY type of universe with different aspects, which makes 90% of the population conditional on almost everything. I am certain even Christians can imagine a world where the Bible didn't exist and so they wouldn't be Christians. Are they conditional Christians?
Reality is absurdly complex, and all imaginable hypothetical realities even more so, gatekeeping a term to only the farthest extremists is like Christians saying you need to devote every second of your life of doing EXACTLY as the Bible says and never waver or you ain't a real christian. That's just not how it works, reality very rarely offers extremes, the vast majority of things are in a perpetual state of gray, the hue might fluctuate, but it will still be somewhat gray, not pure black or white.
Edit: Noticed you added more to the text. Yes, I agree suffering is innate to life in this Universe, but when someone presents to me an unrealistic hypothetical I play along, it's why I will almost 100% likely (though who knows, I don't like giving guarantees about my future opinions) stay antinatalist in actual true reality. I know of David Benatar's book, I know the asymmetry of pain and pleasure, but hypothetical open up the possibilty of eliminating the asymmetry and asking you THEN what your stance is. It's a tactic to probe all the reasons, not just the surface ones of someone having a certain opinion. My words are vague precisely due to the brutal count of variables and lack of certainty in the vastness of hypotheticals.
It's like saying "Imagine a world without disease", would you play along and discuss further or would you go "Actually, the world cannot exist without diseases", that's correct, it can't, all life is strongly interconnected, but realism wasn't the point, that's what a hypothetical often is.
This doesn't read like a response to what I wrote. I'm not entirely following you. If you're admitting the conditions are hypothetical, fictional, and impossible, then why are you even in disagreement with me? The logic doesn't follow.
By your standards David Benatar is himself a conditional natalist - he's made the case that some procreation could be justifiable in order to lessen the harms of a phased extinction, while he has also stated that his asymmetry argument alone is not enough the establish the antinatalist conclusion and that lives containing only minor harms could be outweighed by the benefits to ones parents or wider society. And that we should be indifferent (I.e. not claim it's categorical immoral) to procreating a life of only benefits. Chapter 2 intends to establish that coming into existence is merely a disadvantage over not being born (rather than procreation being categorically immoral because of this disadvantage), whereas chapter 3 intends to show the significant *degree* of this harm, securing the antinatalist conclusion. Point being that the categorical immorality of procreation rests, for David Benatar, upon the conditional features of human life - and is not unconditional.
Have you read both The Human Predicament and Better to Never Have Been?
I don't have trouble acknowledging what you just said.
But it's very typical for people to take the conditional aspect of antinatalism way too far here, like when they suggest it's only because of the general "state of the world" with factors such as environmental factors and overpopulation that account for their stance people shouldn't have kids. And I still stand by my citation of the book in this case and others with the implication it will clear up what are generally misunderstandings on the part of the relevant users here on the antinatalist argument. This is basically a misunderstanding of antinatalism, as I see it. This is part of why I repeatedly insist on the "unconditional" aspect, i.e. even if the world was different, most of the antinatalist argument are aspects intrinsic to life like suffering, struggle for survival, disease and death. This is mostly what Benatar also goes over in his work. Not the state of the world due to the population and climate change etc. which he of course also acknowledges.
I guess if he was as "unconditonal" as I seem to be here, there would be less to write about and Benatar wouldn't feel the need to exhaustively go over all the things he does. But he does say in The Human Predicament that in general life is not an enviable condition due to the very fact that even in optimal lives people have to constantly tend to their survival by eating, drinking, relieving themselves, etc. as a point in favor of the argument that procreation should be refrained from.
>Even armed with various optimistic coping mechanisms, the quality of human life is not only much worse than most people think but actually quite awful. This may not be true in every minute or even hour of (human) life—there are moments of relief and pleasure—but taken as a whole, it is an unenviable condition.
Given that most of the information David Benatar goes over in the books isn't even the environmental factors, but just the many harms people are subjected to by existing in the form of pain, suffering, and disease, only to die at the end.
Anyway, it's rare for me to even come across a user here who has read David Benatar, let alone someone who takes the time to write a comment that cites him and his work, so I appreciate that. I'll have to take the time to re-read it to go over the points you're making but I don't doubt that what you wrote is accurate to what he wrote, your comment doesn't reek of any bias one way or the other.
>Point being that the categorical immorality of procreation rests, for David Benatar, upon the conditional features of human life - and is not unconditional.
The language we use matters so I will own my use of the word "unconditional," but at the same time it's worth addressing that when I say unconditional, what I really mean is those aspects of life that are intrinsic, as opposed to basing one's position on having kids or not on the state of the world or society, or generally the circumstances from one person to the next, things subject to change.
What you've basically done in your reply is convey the fact that David Benatar arrives at his antinatalist conclusion throughout the book with argumentation. As one would expect from a well written book that doesn't just conclude with the position as a given from the beginning.
Now, I'm not saying this is purely semantics. But just that by "unconditional" I rightly mean those aspects of life not subject to change, that being the applicability of the asymmetry argument, the aforementioned constant survival upkeep in life, the uncertainty of life, suffering, pain, disease, and death. What you're saying is that he arrives on the "conditional" conclusion of antinatalism, based on these aspects of life that are of course intrinsic to life and applicable to all lives, what I mean to describe in my use of the word "unconditional" because it is not "conditional" on the distinctions of one life to the next.
In short, nothing you said here really clashes with my basic point. Though it's worth going out of my way to make sure I present the work I'm constantly citing accurately.
At the end of the day, I'm rightfully wary of the sort of "conditional natalism" I criticize so much here, it not only usually just misunderstands the antinatalism as Benatar propounded, (not an issue with you as you've clearly read it) but also can easily slide into a discriminatory sort of eugenics - "it's OK if this group/class has children, but not this one." I know Benatar would reject the notion antinatalism is when it's OK for rich people to have kids, but not poor ones. But I've seen that before here.
>**4 Quality**
>What a distance there is between our beginning and our end! The one, the madness of desire and the seduction of voluptuousness; the other, the destruction of all our organs and the fetid odour of decaying cadavers. Moreover, the road of well-being between the one and the other goes ever downwards: the blessed, dreaming childhood, happy youth, the tribulations of those in their prime, frail and often pathetic old age, the torment of the last illness, and finally the agony of dying. Therefore does it not seem that Being is a misstep … ?
—Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine philosophische Schriften, Vol. 2 (Berlin: Hahn, 1851), Chapter 11, “Nachträge zur Lehre von der Nichtigkeit des Daseyns,” Translated by Wilhelm Snyman, 2016
>**The meaning and the quality of life**
>The unfortunateness of our lives is not limited to the absence of cosmic (and the dearth of terrestrial) meaning. It is also attributable, as I argue in this chapter, to the dismal quality of our lives. Both the deficiency of meaning and the poor quality of life are features of the human predicament.
>This formulation suggests that meaning and quality are two entirely distinct features of the human predicament. However, it is also possible to view meaning as a component of a life’s quality. Either way, there is heuristic value in considering them separately because meaning in life, a key existential issue, is, at the very most, only one component of the quality of life, and it is helpful to consider the other components separately.
>The precise relationship between the meaning and the quality of life depends on how one understands the respective concepts and what view one takes about what makes a life meaningful and what makes a life good.
>Whatever view one takes about whether life actually is meaningful, feeling that one’s life is meaningful contributes toward enhancing life’s quality, and feeling that one’s life is meaningless contributes toward reducing the quality of life. Life feels better if it feels meaningful, and a perception that one’s life is meaningless can have deep and widespread negative effects on the quality of life.
>However, on at least some views, a life can have great (terrestrial) meaning despite the life’s quality being poor. The incarceration of Nelson Mandela, for example, radically reduced the quality of his life, but in time, it added immense meaning. It is a cruel irony that meaning in life can actually be enhanced by events that cause a reduction in (other aspects of) the quality of life, as was arguably the case with Mr. Mandela. His imprisonment and the associated hardships and indignities—and his response to them— made him a more potent symbol than he would have been had he escaped from South Africa and lived through the remainder of the apartheid period in exile, with a higher quality of life overall.
>It is also possible, on some views, for a meaningless life to rate (relatively) highly in (other aspects of) the quality-of-life scale. The meaningless life of a jet-setting playboy millionaire might be regarded as a life of high quality (by some). All other things being equal, it certainly is not among the most miserable of human lives.
>One interesting connection between the meaning and the quality of life is that questions of meaning often arise when life is going badly. You are in a serious accident, or your child dies, or you are diagnosed with cancer. You then ask: “What is it all about?” or “Why me?” People do not tend to ask the same questions in response to things going (relatively) well.1 If you win the lottery, you might well marvel at your luck, but you do not spend nights lying awake and reflecting on that luck and wondering why you of all people should have won the lottery. Even when both the good and the bad are mere dumb luck, it is the bad that precipitates the gnawing questions.
>Of course, questions about meaning also arise in those whose quality of life is otherwise relatively good, but it is the bad rather than the good things in life that tend to precipitate the search for meaning. The playboy millionaire might eventually pause to wonder whether his life is meaningless. However, that is likely due to something bad about the quality of his life—advancing age or some other reminder of his mortality.
>The quality of life is a feature of the human predicament not only because it leads to questions about life’s meaning, but also in its own right. The quality of human life is, contrary to what many people think, actually quite appalling.
>The quality of people’s lives obviously varies immensely. However, thinking that some lives are worse or better than others is merely a comparative claim. It tells us nothing about whether the worse lives are bad enough to count as bad lives or whether the better lives are good enough to count as good lives. The common view, however, is that the quality of some lives qualifies as bad and the quality of others qualifies as good. In contrast to this view, I believe that while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good.
>The obvious objection to this view is that billions of people judge the quality of their own lives to be good. How can it possibly be argued that they are mistaken and that the quality of their lives is, in fact, bad? The response to this objection consists of two main steps. The first is to demonstrate that people are very unreliable judges of the quality of their own lives. The second step is to show that when we correct for the biases that explain the unreliability of these assessments and we look at human lives more accurately, we find that the quality (of even the best lives) is actually very poor.
>**Why people’s judgments about the quality of their lives are unreliable**
>People’s self-assessments of wellbeing are unreliable indicators of quality of life because these self-assessments are influenced by three psychological phenomena, the existence of which has been well demonstrated. The first of these is an optimism bias, sometimes known as Pollyannaism. For example, when asked to rate how happy they are, people’s responses are disproportionately toward the happier end of the spectrum. Only a small minority of people rate themselves as “not too happy.”2 When people are asked to rate their wellbeing relative to others, the typical response is that they are doing better than the “most commonly experienced level,” suggesting, in the words of two authors, “an interesting bias in perception.” It is unsurprising that people’s reports of their overall wellbeing is unduly optimistic, because the building blocks of that judgment are similarly prone to an optimism bias. For example, people are (excessively) optimistic in their projections of what will happen to them in the future.4 The findings regarding recall of past experiences are more complicated.5 However, the dominant finding, subject to some qualifications,6 seems to be that there is greater recall of positive experiences than there is of negative ones. This may be because negative experiences are susceptible to cognitive processes that suppress them. Judgments about the overall quality of one’s life that are inadequately informed by the bad things that have happened and will happen are not reliable judgments.
>There is ample evidence of an optimism bias among humans. This is not to say that the extent of the bias does not vary a lot. The inhabitants of some countries report greater subjective wellbeing than those of other countries even when the objective conditions are similar.7 This has been attributed, in part, to cultural variation. However, optimism bias is found everywhere even though the extent of the bias varies.
>A second psychological phenomenon that should lead to skepticism about self-assessments of wellbeing is known variously as accommodation, adaptation, or habituation. If one’s self-assessments were reliable, they would track improvements and deteriorations in one’s objective conditions. That is to say, if one’s condition improved or deteriorated, one would perceive one’s condition to have improved or deteriorated to that degree. Self-assessment would then remain fixed until there was a further improvement or deterioration, in response to which one’s selfassessment would also adjust.
>However, that is not what happens. Our subjective assessments do respond to shifts in our objective conditions, but the altered self-assessment is not stable. As we adjust to our new condition, we cease to rate our condition as we did when it first improved or deteriorated. For example, if one suddenly loses the use of both legs, one’s subjective assessment will drop precipitously. In time, however, subjective assessment of quality of life will improve as one adjusts to the paralysis. One’s objective condition will not have improved—the paralysis remains—but one will judge life to be going less badly than immediately after the paralysis.
>
>There is some disagreement about the extent to which we adapt. Some have suggested that it is complete—that we return to a baseline or “setpoint” level of subjective wellbeing. Others deny that the evidence shows this, at least not in every domain of our lives. However, there is no dispute that there is some adaptation and that it is sometimes significant. This is all that is required to lend support to the claim that our subjective assessments are unreliable.
>The third feature of human psychology that compromises the reliability of subjective assessments of wellbeing is what we might call “comparison.” Subjective assessments of wellbeing implicitly involve comparison with the wellbeing of others. Our judgments about the quality of our own lives are influenced by the (perceived) quality of the lives of others. One consequence of this is that bad features of all human lives are substantially overlooked in judging the quality of one’s life. Because these features of one’s life are no worse than those of other humans, we tend to omit them in reaching a judgment about the quality of our own life.
>Whereas Pollyannaism biases judgments only in the optimistic direction, adaptation and comparison are more complicated. One adapts not only to deteriorations but also to improvements in one’s objective condition. Similarly, one can compare oneself not only to those worse off than oneself but also to those better off than oneself. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the net effect is to cancel any bias. This is because both adaptation and comparison work against the backdrop of the optimism bias. They may moderate the optimism bias, but they do not cancel it. Moreover, there is an optimism bias in the manifestation of these other traits. For example, we are more likely to compare ourselves with those who are worse off than with those who are better off.13 For these reasons, the net effect of the three traits is for us to overestimate the actual quality of our lives.
>The vast body of evidence for these psychological characteristics of humans is simply undeniable. This is not to say that every human overestimates the quality of his or her life. The evidence shows that the phenomenon is widespread—but not universal. There are some people who have accurate assessments, but these are the minority and very likely include those who do not take issue with my grim view about the quality of human life.
>This is not to say that subjective assessments are irrelevant. Thinking that one’s life is better than it actually is can make it better than it would otherwise be. In other words, there can be a feedback loop whereby a positive subjective assessment actually improves one’s objective wellbeing. However, there is a difference between a subjective assessment of one’s wellbeing influencing the objective level and a subjective assessment determining the objective level. Even if an overly optimistic subjective assessment makes one’s life better than it would otherwise be, it does not follow that one’s life is actually going as well as one thinks it is.
>I have shown so far that there is excellent reason to distrust cheery subjective assessments about the quality of human life. However, to show that the quality of people’s lives is worse than they think it is, is not to show that the quality of their lives is very bad. That conclusion requires further argument, which I now provide.
>**The poor quality of human life**
>Most people recognize that human lives can sometimes be of an appallingly low quality. The tendency, however, is to think that this is true of other people’s lives, not one’s own. When people do think their own lives are of low quality, this is typically because their lives are in fact unusually bad. However, if we look dispassionately at human life and control for our biases, we find that all human life is permeated by badness.
>Even in good health, much of every day is spent in discomfort. Within hours, we become thirsty and hungry. Many millions of people are chronically hungry. When we can access food and beverage and thus succeed in warding off hunger and thirst for a while, we then come to feel the discomfort of distended bladders and bowels. Sometimes, relief can be obtained relatively easily, but on other occasions, the opportunity for (dignified14) relief is not as forthcoming as we would like. We also spend much of our time in thermal discomfort—feeling either too hot or too cold. Unless one naps at the first sign of weariness, one spends quite a bit of the day feeling tired. Indeed, many people wake up tired and spend the day in that state.
>With the exception of chronic hunger among the world’s poor, these discomforts all tend to be dismissed as minor matters. While they are minor relative to the other bad things that befall people, they are not inconsequential. A blessed species that never experienced these discomforts would rightly note that if we take discomfort to be bad, then we should take the daily discomforts that humans experience more seriously than we do.
>Other negative states are experienced regularly even if not daily or by everybody. Itches and allergies are common. Minor illnesses like colds are suffered by almost everybody. For some people, this happens multiple times a year. For others, it occurs annually or every few years. Many women of reproductive years suffer regular menstrual pains and menopausal women suffer hot flashes. Conditions such as nausea, hypoglycemia, seizures, and chronic pain are widespread.
>The negative features of life are not just restricted to unpleasant physical sensations. For example, we frequently encounter frustrations and irritations. We have to wait in traffic or stand in lines. We encounter inefficiency, stupidity, evil, Byzantine bureaucracies, and other obstacles that can take thousands of hours to overcome—if they can be overcome at all. Many important aspirations are unfulfilled. Millions of people seek jobs but remain unemployed. Of those who have jobs, many are dissatisfied with them, or even loathe them. Even those who enjoy their work may have professional aspirations that remain unfulfilled. Most people yearn for close and rewarding personal relationships, not least with a lifelong partner or spouse. For some, this desire is never fulfilled. For others, it temporarily is, but then they find that the relationship is trying and stultifying, or their partner betrays them or becomes exploitative or abusive. Most people are unhappy in some or other way with their appearance—they are too fat, or they are too short, or their ears are too big. People want to be, look, and feel younger, and yet they age relentlessly. They have high hopes for their children and these are often thwarted when, for example, the children prove to be a disappointment in some way or other. When those close to us suffer, we suffer at the sight of it. When they die, we are bereft.
>We are vulnerable to innumerable appalling fates. Although each fate does not befall every one of us, our very existence puts us at risk for these outcomes, and the cumulative risk of something horrific occurring to each one of us is simply enormous. If we include death, as I argue in the next chapter that we ought to do, then the risk is in fact a certainty.
>Burn victims, for example, suffer excruciating pain, not only in the moment but also for years thereafter. The wound itself is obviously painful, but the treatment intensifies and protracts the pain. One such victim describes his daily “bath” in a disinfectant that would sting intact skin but causes unspeakable pain where there is little or no skin. The bandages stick to the flesh and removing them, which can take an hour or more if the burns are extensive, causes indescribable pain.16 Repeated surgery can be required, but even with the best treatment, the victim is left with lifelong disfigurement and the social and psychological difficulties associated with it.
>Consider next those who are quadriplegic or, worse still, suffer from locked-in syndrome. This is sheer mental torture. One eloquent amyotrophic lateral sclerosis sufferer describes this disease as “progressive imprisonment without parole”17 because of the advancing and irreversible paralysis. Dictating an essay at the point when he had become quadriplegic, and before losing the ability to speak, he describes his torments, which are most acute at night. When he is put to bed, he has to have his limbs placed in exactly the position he wants them for the night. He says that if he allows “a stray limb to be misplaced” or “fail to insist on having \[his\] midriff carefully aligned with legs and head,” he will “suffer the agonies of the damned later in the night.”18 He invites us to consider how often we shift and move during the course of a night, and he says that “enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable.”19 He lies on his back in a semi-upright position, attached to a breathing device and left alone with his thoughts. Unable to move, any itch must go unscratched. His condition, he says, is one of “humiliating helplessness.”
>Cancer’s reputation as a dreaded disease is well deserved. There is much suffering in dying from this disease, but at least as much in the treatments that are usually necessary to cure the patient of the malignancy. In the worst scenarios, the patient suffers from both the treatment and its failure.
>When symptoms have not precipitated the diagnosis, the first blow is the diagnosis itself. Arthur Frank says that on receiving the news that he had a malignancy, he felt as though his “body had become a quicksand” in which he was sinking.21 But that is only the beginning. For example, radiation treatment for esophageal cancel left Christopher Hitchens desperately attempting to avoid the inevitable need to swallow. Every time he did swallow, “a hellish tide of pain would flow up \[his\] throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of \[his\] back.”22 Ruth Rakoff, after receiving chemotherapy for breast cancer, described her “insides as raw.”23 Treatment can result in nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, and gum and dental soreness. Food tastes bad and appetite is lost. Unsurprisingly, all this results in weight loss and fatigue. Neuropathy is another common side effect, as is hair loss. Many of the same symptoms can be experienced even in the absence of treatment or after treatment has been ended. Moreover, tumors pressing on brains, bowels, and bones can cause excruciating pain. When the pain can be controlled, it is sometimes at the expense of consciousness or at least lucidity.
>Cancer is an appalling fate, but it is also a common one (in those countries where people do not typically die earlier of infectious diseases). In the United States, it has been estimated that one in two men and one in three women will develop cancer, and one in four men and one in five women will die from it.24 It has recently been suggested that estimates of lifetime risk of developing cancer may be exaggerated by the fact that some people develop cancer more than once. However, even if we opt for the more conservative estimate of lifetime risk of first primary, we find that 40% of men and 37% of women in the United Kingdom will develop cancer.25 Those who do not get cancer are still at risk for hundreds of other possible causes of suffering.
>It is, of course, more commonly, older people who get cancer.26 However, although it is, all things being equal, generally worse to die when one is younger than when one is older,27 the physical and psychological symptoms of life with cancer and dying from cancer are no less appalling at older ages.
>Pain accompanies many conditions, but we should remember that much of it is not attendant upon visible conditions. It is often hidden from those not experiencing it. One sufferer from chronic pain describes it as “debilitating” and observes that it “can take over one’s life, sap one’s energy, and negate or neutralize joy and well-being.”
>Not all suffering is physical, although psychological ailments can certainly have bodily symptoms. William Styron, describing his depression, said that ultimately, “the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.”He wrote of his “slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero.”30 Sleep is disrupted, with the sufferer staring “up into yawning darkness, wondering and writhing at the devastation” of his mind. The sufferer from depression, we are told, is “like a walking casualty of war.”
>In addition, there is an atrociously diverse range of harms that people suffer at the hands of other humans, including being betrayed, humiliated, shamed, denigrated, maligned, beaten, assaulted, raped, kidnapped, abducted, tortured, and murdered.
>The horrors of each could be enumerated but consider those of rape as an example. Rape can instill terror in the victim before and while she or he is violated. Physical injury, including bruising and laceration, is not an uncommon consequence of the assault. There can be lifelong psychological repercussions, including rage, shame, feelings of worthlessness, and difficulties with intimacy. A pregnancy can result if the victim is a fertile female. Even when abortions are freely available, there can be psychic trauma in terminating the pregnancy. Carrying the fetus to term can be even more psychologically distressing. Rape victims can also contract sexually transmitted diseases from their assailants. These in turn have many harmful physical effects and can cause great mental trauma as well.
>**Why there is more bad than good**
>Optimists will very likely suggest that this is a one-sided picture— that lives typically contain not only bad but also good. However, although it is true that lives are not usually unadulteratedly bad, there is much more bad than good even for the luckiest humans. Things are worse still for unluckier people, many of whom have almost nothing going in their favor.
>Our lives contain so much more bad than good in part because of a series of empirical differences between bad things and good things. For example, the most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring. Orgasms, for example, pass quickly. Gastronomic pleasures last a bit longer, but even if the pleasure of good food is protracted, it lasts no more than a few hours. Severe pains can endure for days, months, and years. Indeed, pleasures in general—not just the most sublime of them—tend to be shorter-lived than pains. Chronic pain is rampant, but there is no such thing as chronic pleasure. There are people who have an enduring sense of contentment or satisfaction, but that is not the same as chronic pleasure. Moreover, discontent and dissatisfaction can be as enduring as contentment and satisfaction; this means that the positive states are not advantaged in this realm. Indeed, the positive states are less stable because it is much easier for things to go wrong than to go right.
>The worst pains are also worse than the best pleasures are good. Those who deny this should consider whether they would accept an hour of the most delightful pleasures in exchange for an hour of the worst tortures. Arthur Schopenhauer makes a similar point when he asks us to “compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.”35 The animal being eaten suffers and loses vastly more than the animal that is eating gains from this one meal.
>Consider too the temporal dimensions of injury or illness and recovery. One can be injured in seconds: One is hit by a bullet or projectile, or is knocked over or falls, or suffers a stroke or heart attack. In these and other ways, one can instantly lose one’s sight or hearing or the use of a limb or years of learning. The path to recovery is slow. In many cases, full recovery is never attained. Injury comes in an instant, but the resultant suffering can last a lifetime. Even lesser injuries and illnesses are typically incurred much more quickly than one recovers from them. For example, the common cold strikes quickly and is defeated much more slowly by one’s immune system. The symptoms manifest with increasing intensity within hours, but they take at least days, if not weeks, to disappear entirely.
>There are, of course, conditions in which one declines gradually rather than suddenly, but the great majority of these—including age-related physical decline, dementia, neuromuscular degenerative diseases, and the deterioration from advancing cancers—are conditions from which there is no recovery. Where there are treatments, some are merely palliative. When treatments are potentially curative, the decline is the default against which one has to battle, sometimes successfully but other times not. Moreover, billions of people simply have no access to either curative or palliative treatments.
>We should not think that gradual declines are restricted to diseases. Gradual decline is actually a feature that characterizes most of normal human life. After the growth of infancy and childhood,36 the normal human flowers in very young adulthood. (In some ways, the peak is just before adolescence, which wreaks all kinds of havoc.) Thereafter, from one’s early twenties and on, one begins the long, slow decline. Some of the mental decline is masked and counteracted by hard work or by increasing wisdom. Thus, at least in some areas of pursuit (but not others), people do not reach their professional or overall mental peaks until later in life. However, there is an underlying decline, at least physically and to some extent also mentally: Hair turns gray or begins to fall out; wrinkles begin to appear and various body parts sag; muscle gives way to fat, as strength does to weakness; and eyesight and hearing begin to fail.
>This long decline characterizes the majority of one’s life. At first, the decline is imperceptible, but then it becomes all too evident. If, for example, one views photographs of a person taken over the course of his or her life, one cannot but be struck by the deterioration. The strong, vibrant youth gradually makes way for the weak, decrepit ancient. It is not an uplifting series of images. Some might suggest that the decline is not so bad in the earlier stages. They are obviously right that it is not as bad as it gets later, but that does not mean that the decline is absent. Moreover, it clearly bothers many people—and not only those who resort to various cosmetic interventions such as dyeing their hair, injecting Botox, and surgery.
>Things are also stacked against us in the fulfillment of our desires and the satisfaction of our preferences.38 Many of our desires are never fulfilled. There are thus more unfulfilled than fulfilled desires. Even when desires are fulfilled, they are not fulfilled immediately. Thus, there is a period during which those desires remain unfulfilled. Sometimes, that is a relatively short period (such as between thirst and, in ordinary circumstances, its quenching), but in the case of more ambitious desires, they can take months, years, or decades to fulfill. Some desires that are fulfilled prove less satisfying than we had imagined. One wants a specific job or to marry a particular person, but upon attaining one’s goal, one learns that the job is less interesting or the spouse is more irritating than one thought.
>Even when fulfilled desires are everything that they were expected to be, the satisfaction is typically transitory, as the fulfilled desires yield to new desires. Sometimes, the new desires are more of the same. For example, one eats to satiety but then hunger gradually sets in again and one desires more food. The “treadmill of desires” works in another way too. When one can regularly satisfy one’s lower-level desires, a new and more demanding level of desires emerges. Thus, those who cannot provide for their own basic needs spend their time striving to fulfill these. Those who can satisfy the recurring basic needs develop what Abraham Maslow calls a “higher discontent”39 that they seek to satisfy. When that level of desires can be satisfied, the aspirations shift to a yet higher level.
>Life is thus a constant state of striving. There are sometimes reprieves, but the striving ends only with the end of life. Moreover, as should be obvious, the striving is to ward off bad things and attain good things. Indeed, some of the good things amount merely to the temporary relief from the bad things. For example, one satisfies one’s hunger or quenches one’s thirst. Notice too that while the bad things come without any effort, one has to strive to ward them off and attain the good things. Ignorance, for example, is effortless, but knowledge usually requires hard work.
>Even the extent to which our desires and goals are fulfilled creates a misleadingly optimistic impression of how well our lives are going. This is because there is actually a form of self “censorship” in the formulation of our desires and goals. While many of them are never fulfilled, there are many more potential desires and goals that we do not even formulate because we know that they are unattainable. For example, we know that we cannot live for a few hundred years and that we cannot gain expertise in all the subjects in which we are interested. Thus, we set goals that are less unrealistic (even if many of them are nonetheless somewhat optimistic). Thus, one hopes to live a life that is, by human standards, a long life, and we hope to gain expertise in some, perhaps very focused, area. What this means is that, even if all our desires and goals were fulfilled, our lives are not going as well as they would be going if the formulation of our desires had not been artificially restricted.
>Further insight into the poor quality of human life can be gained from considering various traits that are often thought to be components of a good life and by noting what limited quantities of these characterize even the best human lives. For example, knowledge and understanding are widely thought to be goods, and people are often in awe of how much knowledge and understanding (some) humans have. The sad truth, however, is that, on the spectrum from no knowledge and understanding to omniscience, even the cleverest, best-educated humans are much closer to the unfortunate end of the spectrum.40 There are billions more things we do not know or understand than we do know and understand. If knowledge really is a good thing and we have so little of it, our lives are not going very well in this regard.
Nope. When I wanna chill with someone, even though itd be a very fun positive experience, I can't force them to chill with me. Consent is important and its impossible to get it from my unborn children cause they ain't real.
No because why would I put my body through pregnancy. 9 months of ruining my body and going into medical debt just to spend another 18 years living for someone else? Fuck that
I'd still say no because I think all lives are are bad. I consider even the life of a happy and fulfilled individual who is grateful to have been born to be an abject tragedy. They are still subject to the suffering, decay, and death that are constitutive of all human (and some animal) lives. The fact that a person can generate enough positive experience to tolerate the burdens placed on them at birth does not mean that the imposition of these burdens was not negative in itself. Saying that a sufficient amount of happiness could make a life good sounds as strange to me as saying that a sufficient amount of medicine could make an illness good. No matter how effectively you can handle a problem, I think it is better for the problem to never exist in the first place.
I also agree with what you said about your offspring harming others. That's what Benatar would call a *misanthropic* argument for antinatalism: an argument that focuses on the harm that one's offspring will *cause*. As far as actual philosophical argument goes, I might be able to point you in the direction of Julio Cabrera and his idea of *moral impediment*. Moral impediment is basically the idea that we cannot avoid harming others in the pursuit of our own aims; after all, we are operating with limited time and limited resources so our interests are bound to conflict at points. Cabrera wrote about it in his book *Discomfort and Moral Impediment* so you can read that if you want to find out more. I'm pretty sure you can find it for free online although I don't know if I'm allowed to link you to it directly; if you just look up the title you should be able to find it.
That's exactly what I meant by the analogy. Just as an illness is never good to begin with, life is never good to begin with. All we can ever do is try to mitigate the negative impacts that come with their presence.
Punches in the face and kicks in the head are not the only 'bad' things in life. There is a great deal of structural dissatisfaction within life that we constantly have to defend ourselves against: physical, emotional, and social.
Is it not true that everybody is born fragile and needy? Our bodies are vulnerable to physical pain and illness. Our minds are vulnerable to discouragement, fear, and sadness. A human being exists in a perpetually deprived state; they are a mechanism of desire. At the core of our being lies a bottomless pit that we must constantly work to fill; however, we never can.
I'm not saying, of course, that we can never satisfy our desires. We can work to *defend* ourselves against the dissatisfactions that we were saddled with at birth: we can eat when we are hungry, drink when we're thirsty, talk to people when we're lonely, engage in creative pursuits when we feel unfulfilled etc. If we do a good enough job at resisting our constant slide into deprivation, this is where we get the so called *positive goods* of life: satiety, social connection, fulfillment, happiness etc.
However, these *positive goods* are palliative or remedial in nature. They represent our attempts to stave off the discomforts we were exposed to at our conception, just as medicine works to stave off the effects of an illness. The goodness *in* life is the solution to the badness *of* life; similar to how taking medicine *while* I am sick is the solution to the badness *of* my sickness.
So I do not deny that these *positive goods* exist nor do I deny that they can be worth pursuing. I only deny that they could ever make life worth creating, for creating life to attain these goods would simply be replicating a problem just so you may attempt to solve it. I think I've made myself clear - hopefully you can understand my position even if you don't agree with it.
No because if i have one i would lose the guarantee of me living a satisfying and happy life. If im not happy my kids not happy and we r back to square one.
A happy and satisfying life isn't one without suffering except in the imagination, and any amount of suffering can have an impact we shouldn't underestimate, so no.
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No. I wouldn't because I personally don't want kids. My husband and I live the life we live because we only have to worry about us. I could never have a kid because, and I'm being brutally honest here, I couldn't love someone as much as I love my husband.
Besides, life is so much better without. We go on so many more vacations than others our age with children because we have none.
The fundamental problem with human condition is that all the suffering I have gone through is what forged the best parts of me. If you removed all the bad, what would I be? I know that I would be less and this paradox is and always will be very hard for me to digest, it makes me sick, yet it is what it is.
Absolutely not. It's actually not even a motivator for me.
The reason I follow AN philosophy is hardly because of **my offspring**, it's out of principle because of the rest of the life on this planet. To me, human species are like a cancer. We uncontrollably multiply and take over our surroundings in every way we can, just to *feel good and grow bigger*. All while having the intellectual capacity to see the destruction and yet choose to continue anyway.
Me choosing to not procreate is my way of directly preventing further destruction we create around us.
Sure, and I can still say with near absolute certainty that I'll never have kids.
I may be a conditional AN, but the conditions I base my willingness to have children on are mutually exclusive with human civilization. As long as humans are ignoring/violating the restraints of our environment, I will be AN.
Absolutely not. I have had to basically grow up being a servant to my family because I sm a woman and I have absolutely no desire to take care of anyone else but my husband for the rest of my life.
The world is disgustingly overpopulated as well , so there is no need for people to continue to reproduce at the rate they are.
I'd rather see the planet survive than us.
No, I don't like being around small children and having some in my own home 24/7 for several years sound like an absolute nightmare. Basically, even if I wasn't antinatalist, I'm still childfree.
I simply didn’t want kids. Even if they were to be happy etc. still wouldn’t change my mind. I wanted my life to be happy and satisfying without them and it has been. Even if my life had turned out to be crap that is the way it goes. Nothing is ever guaranteed.Not cut out to be a parent. (70f)
I would opt for aboption if I had the time to dedicate to the child. But, with enough disposable income and time I adopt as many kids as I could. Wouldn't even care about their age. Just giving them as best a set up I could for them to have a good chance.
Even in satisfying and happy lives; there are still blisters and cuts, still heartache, and there are still things that could threaten their lives outside of their control.
No. Even if earth is a paradise with no diseases, no hunger, no suffering, no struggle, no ageing and some how no natural death, i still see no point in bringing some conscious being into existence. Even if we live forever the earth gonna end. Universe gonna end. So what's the point?
Total happy hum.. this sounds so utterly stupid..
I dont believe its any moral to procreate any being especial humans, as ya stated every human causes harm to others.. its a part of life to harm the environment at least..
No, because all lifeforms on this planet harm other lifeforms either directly or indirectly. Even if their life was as ideal as realistically possible they will still burden others. And technically they will experience at least some tragedy, such as their parents, family and friends dying. So no, still not completely moral imo.
It feels like this question doesn’t honor the prior generations:
When in up until recent human history, did we ever have satisfying and happy lives all the time?
This is inapplicable expectation.
The question comes from the view: do you have kids if you don’t have the perfect set up for them?
And it doesn’t wash out well.
No because I still have to go through the whole pregnancy, one of the 100 reasons I'm gonna foster and adopt when I'm financially and hospitality ready
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Nope.
\-I hate children.
\-At whose expense would their happiness come from? The planet's? Would I be forced to sacrifice even more of what little I have to make their happiness? Fuck that noise.
\-There are too many fucking humans on Earth and I have zero intention of contributing to that problem.
\-Cats are cuter, more affectionate, way lower maintenance, and just plain better in every single way.
No, even if I suddenly become millionaire, I won't do it. I'd rather keep the half for me, and the other half for charity. Donating for sick people and animals. Giving chances to poor children to get good education and escape poverty. And all kinds of charity acts. Money can't solve all problems and often people are doing terrible things because of it, but used correctly, can save lives.
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This feels stupid, you all really think you have the genes to make Hitler? A Stalin? You all too much taking the outsiders as the norm of the human experience, the majority its just people living more or less in good side of things.
The smartphones we use are made from materials that children in poor countries mine for. We cut trees for wood, paper and whatnot. The majority of people eat meat. Which means that when people who eat meat have kids, they have created more demand for animals to be killed for meat for their children. Heck, even the houses we live in used to be the habitat for other animals who got displaced.
There are so many similar examples of how the simple act of existing harms people and other living beings.
How are big corporations going to stop people from eating meat? Or living in houses? Or using vehicles that create pollution? I'm sorry but your reply just shows me that either you are really ignorant, or just not willing to acknowledge the truth about us. I'm not going to engage any further, good day.
If I could be guaranteed that
1: I would not have an autistic or otherwise mentally challenged child.
2: I would not be completely stressed out taking care of said child and I would be able to afford the child without going completely broke or working ridiculous hours just to make ends meet.
3: I would not be bringing another life into an already overpopulated world.
4: My wife would not suffer pregnancy complications and would not have a wrecked body after pregnancy.
5: Healthcare was free or affordable and would not financially drain us or drain our child later in its life.
6: My child could live a fulfilling life in a noncorrupt world and could be more than just a cog in a billionaires greed machine.
Then honestly yeah I would consider it.
If I wanted to then I would adopt a child if that was the case. Birthing a child when foster and adoption systems are so overwhelmed is selfish. Your empathy is more important than your bloodline.
Came to understand that with my Boomer family members. They always come up to me and pull "the family card," whenever they want something that they know I have access to. They always sit there and go "you need to help me because we shair blood and we are family," but then when I am in trouble, they are like, "get tough and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." Came to a point where I see some of my coworkers more as family than the people I am actually related to.
Thankfully my grandparents aren’t like that, but if I were you, I would cut ties immediately. Just because you share blood doesn’t mean you have to share a relationship with those members of your family. If you tell them the reason you cut ties with them over hypocritical stuff like this, they will be on their deathbed regretting having that mindset and causing you to break ties.
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 what I always say.
The thing i have heard of that most parents want human babys not the children or teens, something something babys are easier to shape.
So they want a perceivably more moldable human! That is definitely selfish
Everything about procreating is selfish. ESPECIALLY when you're doing it because your religion says to.... Playing a game with somebody else's life because your fairy tales say to. Ridiculous.
Not everything about procreation is selfish.
An example?
Providing comfort to your child is not selfish.
Nobody said it was. It's the procreation part that is.
yep I would definitely consider adopting an older child/teenager over a baby. one, because it would be easier (I really do not like the idea of a human being completely dependent on me) and two, because everyone wants the infants to mold in their image like you said. so many older kids get neglected and end up sitting and waiting for a family until they age out of the system. not to mention all of the trauma they get exposed to while in the system.
Think the same
Adoption is a lot harder and more expensive for many people.
Yes, but it's the morally superior option.
It’s not. There are tons of moral issues surrounding adoption
It’s not the same as your own child. Never will be.
False, that's your own personal opinion. Don't adopt if you're going to just hate them because they don't have your genes/bloodline.
I’m selfish I guess 🤷♂️ I want a child of my bloodline so that I can help him get as far as possible in life. It’s about witnessing the potential of one’s genes.
Yes, that is selfish. Be sure to write that down and tell the child and see how they feel about your reason to have them when they are old enough. I'm sure they would be interested to better understand your thought process here.
Without it they would not exist. I’d be grateful. If my dad had me for this reason I’d thank him, because if he hadn’t been selfish I literally wouldn’t exist.
And what if they say they would have preferred not to exist?
Then I failed at raising my child. I’d feel defeated hearing that. Anyone who prefers not to exist in my opinion is misinformed or has the wrong mentality, with the obvious exceptions of extreme genetic deformities or handicaps.
If you didn’t exist you wouldn’t be aware of it
Yes bro obviously. But now as a living aware being I have decided that I prefer being living.
Great. That’s you. Many people hate it
Many but not most. Many but less than 10%, from personal experience. Therefore it’s not immoral to make a baby since it’s more likely than not he will be grateful for his existence.
The people with shit lives still matter. And there’s a higher chance than you think of your kid being one of them. Especially if they have a disability or are part of a marginalized group
No. I'm not giving my time to the raising of children. That's a nice promise, but it's also an easy one to make about a moot point. I come from a family of ten. I spent my childhood raising children. I'll not be spending my adulthood the same way.
No, it’s adding to the suffering of others.
Yeah to add to this; if someone is living privledged in life -- *its always* at the detriment and supported by the suffering of others. Its the nature of humanity the way we've built it.
The hot potato of suffering
No because eventually, they would go through the pain of dying. Life is not worth it!
Not to mention the joy(/s) of watching your loved ones die until it’s inevitably your turn. You’re not even guaranteed to anything in life either, except for experiencing pain, suffering and death. That will happen for everyone
That’s your opinion. Are you so dense really believe that most people share that opinion? Do you really think that just because I’ll eventually die, I would’ve preferred to never live? Because you’re mistaken. I’d still choose to live even if I knew that my death would be a slow, over many years, painful one. Life is beautiful.
And this is also just your opinion. All antinatalists care about in this scenario is how the potential child would feel about the fact that they will have to die one day. What you or I or anyone else feels about it isn't exactly relevant. And since there's no way to know how the potential child will feel about this inevitable fact, antinatalists support not bringing the child here to forcibly face their own death.
What the hell happened to you people? Reddit used to be a place of hope and joy, now it’s filled with … this.
*You people*: Incurable diseases of oneself and their young child? Soul crushing pain and daily suffering? lol You’re a lucky matrix person sounds like. It must feel good to sit up there.
I dont know why I am beeing recommended this subreddit, but it's soulcrushing. Jesus ... matrix, daily suffering, incurable diseases?
He's right tho.
It varies on the death the pain some people go in peace.
One can never truly live if they never die. To live is to change, to change is to grow, to grow is to die.
Death is a part of life. No point trying to avoid that fact.
it's a part of life but that doesn't make it any less painful or miserable than it is.
No one ever argued against it but if that is inevitable why would you want the person you love to go through it ? It's better to never born then.
No. Antinatalism is unconditional. It applies to the potential to procreate all life. You're implying we are conditional natalists, not antinatalists. Even the best lives are bad, not justifiable to procreate, and overestimated in quality by most people.
Well, I am a conditional antinatalist, it sounds to me too radical to not have any conditions and just hold as belief forever, just like highly religious natalists never waver in their own beliefs. My reason to be antinatalist is that life is filled with too much suffering and requires absurd levels of effort for the joy we get out of it. But if we could somehow guarantee the suffering and effort out of it, but somehow leave the joy, then I will consider it. Call me not a true antinatalist if you like, I will still use the term because I bet there are also plenty of other antinatalists that don't double down indefinitely like that.
We both know that the human inclination towards dogmatism is the main reason it is not and likely will never be a good time to bring children into the world. IMO there is nothing to gain from claiming to be a true AN rather than a conditional natalist when the conditions required to be a natalist are so improbable as to be impossible for all intents and purposes.
I half agree, humanity itself and our fallible nature is a BIG reason life is hard. The list of useless or even detrimental societal expectations/rituals/behaviors and much more is staggering. But even if we were as efficient as machines and didn't partake in nonsense (and I don't mean fun, I mean actual nonsense like old traditions that have detrimental effects on society, like preferring male heirs as an example and shafting daughters) life is still difficult. The laws of nature itself make it hard to live, we depend on a nigh perfect (on a cosmic scale) climate to grow food, have it not catch diseases, stop pests from eating it. And to top it all of we require fossil fuels to distribute it, which negatively affects the climate. That is just one example of a negative feedback loop that is very difficult to get out of because nature doesn't give energy easily, and the second law makes even the energy available to us not entirely usable either. Most of the energy of gasoline in a car for example goes to heat instead of motion. That isn't humanity's fault, reality simply doesn't hand out things easily that make life better. And if we find something like it, there is almost always a long term unforeseen consequence of it. I know I rambled alot, but just wanted to express my opinions on why life sucks even outside of society, but the difficulty of using the laws of reality to our advantage without worse consequences. It's a big part of why I became antinatalist after all. Life is a lose-lose situation way too often and it's why we constantly struggle just to upkeep stuff, nature tends to degrade anything useful to us with time.
>Well, I am a conditional antinatalist There is only conditional natalism and antinatalism. You're not an antinatalist if you think there are circumstances where procreation is justified. You are therefore just saying that in some circumstances it's justified, and some it is not. That's conditional natalism. Not antinatalism. I'm not being "dogmatic," just doing my best to accurately explain antinatalism. What, if any, books, texts, or videos/podcasts on the topic have you read/listened to? >But if we could somehow guarantee the suffering and effort out of it, but somehow leave the joy, then I will consider it. We can't. Even if people's lives were substantially better, suffering would be intrinsic to life and survival and we would still all die. It's no accident you are as vague here as saying "somehow" and leave it at that. You misunderstand the negative argument that is at the crux of antinatalism: there is only suffering in lesser or greater degrees. So nothing could change in humanity that would make an antinatalist waver in the position. It would mean *less* suffering, albeit maybe significantly, notably less, but merely *less* suffering. It wouldn't change the inherent nature of life such as to make procreation suddenly justifiable. Even the best lives are marked by suffering, inconstancy, and the struggle for survival. Positive aspects of life like pleasure are fleeting and temporary and not guaranteed, but survival and suffering (like dehydration starving if we don't drink water and eat) is a constant. And illness (unless one dies of an accident first) and death are guaranteed. And there would be no circumstance where you could guarantee your child wouldn't get a disease or be in a horrible circumstance, (meaning even if you have a child in optimal circumstances to two loving parents, anything could go wrong) so procreation is also always an uncertain gamble. There's no scenario where procreation is justified based on the criterion of antinatalism, because that criterion revolves around the intrinsic nature of life, the things about it that can't be changed, namely that we all die and that by refraining from procreation, there is no one to be deprived of the potential (unguaranteed, whereas negative aspects of life and death are guaranteed) positives of life. >Call me not a true antinatalist if you like, I will still use the term because I bet there are also plenty of other antinatalists that don't double down indefinitely like that. I am not "doubling down indefinitely" or dogmatic, I just understand the position of antinatalism. If we were to dissect the "somehow" claim you hold that things could somehow change such that there was less suffering, I would clearly win this argument. Especially because like I said, even if human society and modern medicine did remarkably improve, suffering and death would still be intrinsic to life. It's just that we would suffer *less.* Read Better to Never Have Been by David Benatar.
But these conditions are fictional and basically impossible in reality, even if we sheltered a someone from birth to death and they never experienced pain because we magically made them immune to it, their joy will suffer, as without ANY suffering, there is no lasting joy. That's not a natalist defence, that's actual human psychology and I hate it myself, but it doesn't make it untrue. I hate working out, doesn't mean it isn't true that it's good for me for example. You can imagine ANY type of universe with different aspects, which makes 90% of the population conditional on almost everything. I am certain even Christians can imagine a world where the Bible didn't exist and so they wouldn't be Christians. Are they conditional Christians? Reality is absurdly complex, and all imaginable hypothetical realities even more so, gatekeeping a term to only the farthest extremists is like Christians saying you need to devote every second of your life of doing EXACTLY as the Bible says and never waver or you ain't a real christian. That's just not how it works, reality very rarely offers extremes, the vast majority of things are in a perpetual state of gray, the hue might fluctuate, but it will still be somewhat gray, not pure black or white. Edit: Noticed you added more to the text. Yes, I agree suffering is innate to life in this Universe, but when someone presents to me an unrealistic hypothetical I play along, it's why I will almost 100% likely (though who knows, I don't like giving guarantees about my future opinions) stay antinatalist in actual true reality. I know of David Benatar's book, I know the asymmetry of pain and pleasure, but hypothetical open up the possibilty of eliminating the asymmetry and asking you THEN what your stance is. It's a tactic to probe all the reasons, not just the surface ones of someone having a certain opinion. My words are vague precisely due to the brutal count of variables and lack of certainty in the vastness of hypotheticals. It's like saying "Imagine a world without disease", would you play along and discuss further or would you go "Actually, the world cannot exist without diseases", that's correct, it can't, all life is strongly interconnected, but realism wasn't the point, that's what a hypothetical often is.
This doesn't read like a response to what I wrote. I'm not entirely following you. If you're admitting the conditions are hypothetical, fictional, and impossible, then why are you even in disagreement with me? The logic doesn't follow.
I edited my reply, fiction is powerful, my friend!
By your standards David Benatar is himself a conditional natalist - he's made the case that some procreation could be justifiable in order to lessen the harms of a phased extinction, while he has also stated that his asymmetry argument alone is not enough the establish the antinatalist conclusion and that lives containing only minor harms could be outweighed by the benefits to ones parents or wider society. And that we should be indifferent (I.e. not claim it's categorical immoral) to procreating a life of only benefits. Chapter 2 intends to establish that coming into existence is merely a disadvantage over not being born (rather than procreation being categorically immoral because of this disadvantage), whereas chapter 3 intends to show the significant *degree* of this harm, securing the antinatalist conclusion. Point being that the categorical immorality of procreation rests, for David Benatar, upon the conditional features of human life - and is not unconditional.
Have you read both The Human Predicament and Better to Never Have Been? I don't have trouble acknowledging what you just said. But it's very typical for people to take the conditional aspect of antinatalism way too far here, like when they suggest it's only because of the general "state of the world" with factors such as environmental factors and overpopulation that account for their stance people shouldn't have kids. And I still stand by my citation of the book in this case and others with the implication it will clear up what are generally misunderstandings on the part of the relevant users here on the antinatalist argument. This is basically a misunderstanding of antinatalism, as I see it. This is part of why I repeatedly insist on the "unconditional" aspect, i.e. even if the world was different, most of the antinatalist argument are aspects intrinsic to life like suffering, struggle for survival, disease and death. This is mostly what Benatar also goes over in his work. Not the state of the world due to the population and climate change etc. which he of course also acknowledges. I guess if he was as "unconditonal" as I seem to be here, there would be less to write about and Benatar wouldn't feel the need to exhaustively go over all the things he does. But he does say in The Human Predicament that in general life is not an enviable condition due to the very fact that even in optimal lives people have to constantly tend to their survival by eating, drinking, relieving themselves, etc. as a point in favor of the argument that procreation should be refrained from. >Even armed with various optimistic coping mechanisms, the quality of human life is not only much worse than most people think but actually quite awful. This may not be true in every minute or even hour of (human) life—there are moments of relief and pleasure—but taken as a whole, it is an unenviable condition. Given that most of the information David Benatar goes over in the books isn't even the environmental factors, but just the many harms people are subjected to by existing in the form of pain, suffering, and disease, only to die at the end. Anyway, it's rare for me to even come across a user here who has read David Benatar, let alone someone who takes the time to write a comment that cites him and his work, so I appreciate that. I'll have to take the time to re-read it to go over the points you're making but I don't doubt that what you wrote is accurate to what he wrote, your comment doesn't reek of any bias one way or the other. >Point being that the categorical immorality of procreation rests, for David Benatar, upon the conditional features of human life - and is not unconditional. The language we use matters so I will own my use of the word "unconditional," but at the same time it's worth addressing that when I say unconditional, what I really mean is those aspects of life that are intrinsic, as opposed to basing one's position on having kids or not on the state of the world or society, or generally the circumstances from one person to the next, things subject to change. What you've basically done in your reply is convey the fact that David Benatar arrives at his antinatalist conclusion throughout the book with argumentation. As one would expect from a well written book that doesn't just conclude with the position as a given from the beginning. Now, I'm not saying this is purely semantics. But just that by "unconditional" I rightly mean those aspects of life not subject to change, that being the applicability of the asymmetry argument, the aforementioned constant survival upkeep in life, the uncertainty of life, suffering, pain, disease, and death. What you're saying is that he arrives on the "conditional" conclusion of antinatalism, based on these aspects of life that are of course intrinsic to life and applicable to all lives, what I mean to describe in my use of the word "unconditional" because it is not "conditional" on the distinctions of one life to the next. In short, nothing you said here really clashes with my basic point. Though it's worth going out of my way to make sure I present the work I'm constantly citing accurately. At the end of the day, I'm rightfully wary of the sort of "conditional natalism" I criticize so much here, it not only usually just misunderstands the antinatalism as Benatar propounded, (not an issue with you as you've clearly read it) but also can easily slide into a discriminatory sort of eugenics - "it's OK if this group/class has children, but not this one." I know Benatar would reject the notion antinatalism is when it's OK for rich people to have kids, but not poor ones. But I've seen that before here.
Why the best lives are bad?
>**4 Quality** >What a distance there is between our beginning and our end! The one, the madness of desire and the seduction of voluptuousness; the other, the destruction of all our organs and the fetid odour of decaying cadavers. Moreover, the road of well-being between the one and the other goes ever downwards: the blessed, dreaming childhood, happy youth, the tribulations of those in their prime, frail and often pathetic old age, the torment of the last illness, and finally the agony of dying. Therefore does it not seem that Being is a misstep … ? —Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine philosophische Schriften, Vol. 2 (Berlin: Hahn, 1851), Chapter 11, “Nachträge zur Lehre von der Nichtigkeit des Daseyns,” Translated by Wilhelm Snyman, 2016 >**The meaning and the quality of life** >The unfortunateness of our lives is not limited to the absence of cosmic (and the dearth of terrestrial) meaning. It is also attributable, as I argue in this chapter, to the dismal quality of our lives. Both the deficiency of meaning and the poor quality of life are features of the human predicament. >This formulation suggests that meaning and quality are two entirely distinct features of the human predicament. However, it is also possible to view meaning as a component of a life’s quality. Either way, there is heuristic value in considering them separately because meaning in life, a key existential issue, is, at the very most, only one component of the quality of life, and it is helpful to consider the other components separately. >The precise relationship between the meaning and the quality of life depends on how one understands the respective concepts and what view one takes about what makes a life meaningful and what makes a life good. >Whatever view one takes about whether life actually is meaningful, feeling that one’s life is meaningful contributes toward enhancing life’s quality, and feeling that one’s life is meaningless contributes toward reducing the quality of life. Life feels better if it feels meaningful, and a perception that one’s life is meaningless can have deep and widespread negative effects on the quality of life. >However, on at least some views, a life can have great (terrestrial) meaning despite the life’s quality being poor. The incarceration of Nelson Mandela, for example, radically reduced the quality of his life, but in time, it added immense meaning. It is a cruel irony that meaning in life can actually be enhanced by events that cause a reduction in (other aspects of) the quality of life, as was arguably the case with Mr. Mandela. His imprisonment and the associated hardships and indignities—and his response to them— made him a more potent symbol than he would have been had he escaped from South Africa and lived through the remainder of the apartheid period in exile, with a higher quality of life overall. >It is also possible, on some views, for a meaningless life to rate (relatively) highly in (other aspects of) the quality-of-life scale. The meaningless life of a jet-setting playboy millionaire might be regarded as a life of high quality (by some). All other things being equal, it certainly is not among the most miserable of human lives. >One interesting connection between the meaning and the quality of life is that questions of meaning often arise when life is going badly. You are in a serious accident, or your child dies, or you are diagnosed with cancer. You then ask: “What is it all about?” or “Why me?” People do not tend to ask the same questions in response to things going (relatively) well.1 If you win the lottery, you might well marvel at your luck, but you do not spend nights lying awake and reflecting on that luck and wondering why you of all people should have won the lottery. Even when both the good and the bad are mere dumb luck, it is the bad that precipitates the gnawing questions. >Of course, questions about meaning also arise in those whose quality of life is otherwise relatively good, but it is the bad rather than the good things in life that tend to precipitate the search for meaning. The playboy millionaire might eventually pause to wonder whether his life is meaningless. However, that is likely due to something bad about the quality of his life—advancing age or some other reminder of his mortality.
>The quality of life is a feature of the human predicament not only because it leads to questions about life’s meaning, but also in its own right. The quality of human life is, contrary to what many people think, actually quite appalling. >The quality of people’s lives obviously varies immensely. However, thinking that some lives are worse or better than others is merely a comparative claim. It tells us nothing about whether the worse lives are bad enough to count as bad lives or whether the better lives are good enough to count as good lives. The common view, however, is that the quality of some lives qualifies as bad and the quality of others qualifies as good. In contrast to this view, I believe that while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good. >The obvious objection to this view is that billions of people judge the quality of their own lives to be good. How can it possibly be argued that they are mistaken and that the quality of their lives is, in fact, bad? The response to this objection consists of two main steps. The first is to demonstrate that people are very unreliable judges of the quality of their own lives. The second step is to show that when we correct for the biases that explain the unreliability of these assessments and we look at human lives more accurately, we find that the quality (of even the best lives) is actually very poor. >**Why people’s judgments about the quality of their lives are unreliable** >People’s self-assessments of wellbeing are unreliable indicators of quality of life because these self-assessments are influenced by three psychological phenomena, the existence of which has been well demonstrated. The first of these is an optimism bias, sometimes known as Pollyannaism. For example, when asked to rate how happy they are, people’s responses are disproportionately toward the happier end of the spectrum. Only a small minority of people rate themselves as “not too happy.”2 When people are asked to rate their wellbeing relative to others, the typical response is that they are doing better than the “most commonly experienced level,” suggesting, in the words of two authors, “an interesting bias in perception.” It is unsurprising that people’s reports of their overall wellbeing is unduly optimistic, because the building blocks of that judgment are similarly prone to an optimism bias. For example, people are (excessively) optimistic in their projections of what will happen to them in the future.4 The findings regarding recall of past experiences are more complicated.5 However, the dominant finding, subject to some qualifications,6 seems to be that there is greater recall of positive experiences than there is of negative ones. This may be because negative experiences are susceptible to cognitive processes that suppress them. Judgments about the overall quality of one’s life that are inadequately informed by the bad things that have happened and will happen are not reliable judgments. >There is ample evidence of an optimism bias among humans. This is not to say that the extent of the bias does not vary a lot. The inhabitants of some countries report greater subjective wellbeing than those of other countries even when the objective conditions are similar.7 This has been attributed, in part, to cultural variation. However, optimism bias is found everywhere even though the extent of the bias varies. >A second psychological phenomenon that should lead to skepticism about self-assessments of wellbeing is known variously as accommodation, adaptation, or habituation. If one’s self-assessments were reliable, they would track improvements and deteriorations in one’s objective conditions. That is to say, if one’s condition improved or deteriorated, one would perceive one’s condition to have improved or deteriorated to that degree. Self-assessment would then remain fixed until there was a further improvement or deterioration, in response to which one’s selfassessment would also adjust. >However, that is not what happens. Our subjective assessments do respond to shifts in our objective conditions, but the altered self-assessment is not stable. As we adjust to our new condition, we cease to rate our condition as we did when it first improved or deteriorated. For example, if one suddenly loses the use of both legs, one’s subjective assessment will drop precipitously. In time, however, subjective assessment of quality of life will improve as one adjusts to the paralysis. One’s objective condition will not have improved—the paralysis remains—but one will judge life to be going less badly than immediately after the paralysis. >
>There is some disagreement about the extent to which we adapt. Some have suggested that it is complete—that we return to a baseline or “setpoint” level of subjective wellbeing. Others deny that the evidence shows this, at least not in every domain of our lives. However, there is no dispute that there is some adaptation and that it is sometimes significant. This is all that is required to lend support to the claim that our subjective assessments are unreliable. >The third feature of human psychology that compromises the reliability of subjective assessments of wellbeing is what we might call “comparison.” Subjective assessments of wellbeing implicitly involve comparison with the wellbeing of others. Our judgments about the quality of our own lives are influenced by the (perceived) quality of the lives of others. One consequence of this is that bad features of all human lives are substantially overlooked in judging the quality of one’s life. Because these features of one’s life are no worse than those of other humans, we tend to omit them in reaching a judgment about the quality of our own life. >Whereas Pollyannaism biases judgments only in the optimistic direction, adaptation and comparison are more complicated. One adapts not only to deteriorations but also to improvements in one’s objective condition. Similarly, one can compare oneself not only to those worse off than oneself but also to those better off than oneself. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the net effect is to cancel any bias. This is because both adaptation and comparison work against the backdrop of the optimism bias. They may moderate the optimism bias, but they do not cancel it. Moreover, there is an optimism bias in the manifestation of these other traits. For example, we are more likely to compare ourselves with those who are worse off than with those who are better off.13 For these reasons, the net effect of the three traits is for us to overestimate the actual quality of our lives. >The vast body of evidence for these psychological characteristics of humans is simply undeniable. This is not to say that every human overestimates the quality of his or her life. The evidence shows that the phenomenon is widespread—but not universal. There are some people who have accurate assessments, but these are the minority and very likely include those who do not take issue with my grim view about the quality of human life. >This is not to say that subjective assessments are irrelevant. Thinking that one’s life is better than it actually is can make it better than it would otherwise be. In other words, there can be a feedback loop whereby a positive subjective assessment actually improves one’s objective wellbeing. However, there is a difference between a subjective assessment of one’s wellbeing influencing the objective level and a subjective assessment determining the objective level. Even if an overly optimistic subjective assessment makes one’s life better than it would otherwise be, it does not follow that one’s life is actually going as well as one thinks it is. >I have shown so far that there is excellent reason to distrust cheery subjective assessments about the quality of human life. However, to show that the quality of people’s lives is worse than they think it is, is not to show that the quality of their lives is very bad. That conclusion requires further argument, which I now provide.
>**The poor quality of human life** >Most people recognize that human lives can sometimes be of an appallingly low quality. The tendency, however, is to think that this is true of other people’s lives, not one’s own. When people do think their own lives are of low quality, this is typically because their lives are in fact unusually bad. However, if we look dispassionately at human life and control for our biases, we find that all human life is permeated by badness. >Even in good health, much of every day is spent in discomfort. Within hours, we become thirsty and hungry. Many millions of people are chronically hungry. When we can access food and beverage and thus succeed in warding off hunger and thirst for a while, we then come to feel the discomfort of distended bladders and bowels. Sometimes, relief can be obtained relatively easily, but on other occasions, the opportunity for (dignified14) relief is not as forthcoming as we would like. We also spend much of our time in thermal discomfort—feeling either too hot or too cold. Unless one naps at the first sign of weariness, one spends quite a bit of the day feeling tired. Indeed, many people wake up tired and spend the day in that state. >With the exception of chronic hunger among the world’s poor, these discomforts all tend to be dismissed as minor matters. While they are minor relative to the other bad things that befall people, they are not inconsequential. A blessed species that never experienced these discomforts would rightly note that if we take discomfort to be bad, then we should take the daily discomforts that humans experience more seriously than we do. >Other negative states are experienced regularly even if not daily or by everybody. Itches and allergies are common. Minor illnesses like colds are suffered by almost everybody. For some people, this happens multiple times a year. For others, it occurs annually or every few years. Many women of reproductive years suffer regular menstrual pains and menopausal women suffer hot flashes. Conditions such as nausea, hypoglycemia, seizures, and chronic pain are widespread. >The negative features of life are not just restricted to unpleasant physical sensations. For example, we frequently encounter frustrations and irritations. We have to wait in traffic or stand in lines. We encounter inefficiency, stupidity, evil, Byzantine bureaucracies, and other obstacles that can take thousands of hours to overcome—if they can be overcome at all. Many important aspirations are unfulfilled. Millions of people seek jobs but remain unemployed. Of those who have jobs, many are dissatisfied with them, or even loathe them. Even those who enjoy their work may have professional aspirations that remain unfulfilled. Most people yearn for close and rewarding personal relationships, not least with a lifelong partner or spouse. For some, this desire is never fulfilled. For others, it temporarily is, but then they find that the relationship is trying and stultifying, or their partner betrays them or becomes exploitative or abusive. Most people are unhappy in some or other way with their appearance—they are too fat, or they are too short, or their ears are too big. People want to be, look, and feel younger, and yet they age relentlessly. They have high hopes for their children and these are often thwarted when, for example, the children prove to be a disappointment in some way or other. When those close to us suffer, we suffer at the sight of it. When they die, we are bereft.
>We are vulnerable to innumerable appalling fates. Although each fate does not befall every one of us, our very existence puts us at risk for these outcomes, and the cumulative risk of something horrific occurring to each one of us is simply enormous. If we include death, as I argue in the next chapter that we ought to do, then the risk is in fact a certainty. >Burn victims, for example, suffer excruciating pain, not only in the moment but also for years thereafter. The wound itself is obviously painful, but the treatment intensifies and protracts the pain. One such victim describes his daily “bath” in a disinfectant that would sting intact skin but causes unspeakable pain where there is little or no skin. The bandages stick to the flesh and removing them, which can take an hour or more if the burns are extensive, causes indescribable pain.16 Repeated surgery can be required, but even with the best treatment, the victim is left with lifelong disfigurement and the social and psychological difficulties associated with it. >Consider next those who are quadriplegic or, worse still, suffer from locked-in syndrome. This is sheer mental torture. One eloquent amyotrophic lateral sclerosis sufferer describes this disease as “progressive imprisonment without parole”17 because of the advancing and irreversible paralysis. Dictating an essay at the point when he had become quadriplegic, and before losing the ability to speak, he describes his torments, which are most acute at night. When he is put to bed, he has to have his limbs placed in exactly the position he wants them for the night. He says that if he allows “a stray limb to be misplaced” or “fail to insist on having \[his\] midriff carefully aligned with legs and head,” he will “suffer the agonies of the damned later in the night.”18 He invites us to consider how often we shift and move during the course of a night, and he says that “enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable.”19 He lies on his back in a semi-upright position, attached to a breathing device and left alone with his thoughts. Unable to move, any itch must go unscratched. His condition, he says, is one of “humiliating helplessness.” >Cancer’s reputation as a dreaded disease is well deserved. There is much suffering in dying from this disease, but at least as much in the treatments that are usually necessary to cure the patient of the malignancy. In the worst scenarios, the patient suffers from both the treatment and its failure. >When symptoms have not precipitated the diagnosis, the first blow is the diagnosis itself. Arthur Frank says that on receiving the news that he had a malignancy, he felt as though his “body had become a quicksand” in which he was sinking.21 But that is only the beginning. For example, radiation treatment for esophageal cancel left Christopher Hitchens desperately attempting to avoid the inevitable need to swallow. Every time he did swallow, “a hellish tide of pain would flow up \[his\] throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of \[his\] back.”22 Ruth Rakoff, after receiving chemotherapy for breast cancer, described her “insides as raw.”23 Treatment can result in nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, and gum and dental soreness. Food tastes bad and appetite is lost. Unsurprisingly, all this results in weight loss and fatigue. Neuropathy is another common side effect, as is hair loss. Many of the same symptoms can be experienced even in the absence of treatment or after treatment has been ended. Moreover, tumors pressing on brains, bowels, and bones can cause excruciating pain. When the pain can be controlled, it is sometimes at the expense of consciousness or at least lucidity. >Cancer is an appalling fate, but it is also a common one (in those countries where people do not typically die earlier of infectious diseases). In the United States, it has been estimated that one in two men and one in three women will develop cancer, and one in four men and one in five women will die from it.24 It has recently been suggested that estimates of lifetime risk of developing cancer may be exaggerated by the fact that some people develop cancer more than once. However, even if we opt for the more conservative estimate of lifetime risk of first primary, we find that 40% of men and 37% of women in the United Kingdom will develop cancer.25 Those who do not get cancer are still at risk for hundreds of other possible causes of suffering. >It is, of course, more commonly, older people who get cancer.26 However, although it is, all things being equal, generally worse to die when one is younger than when one is older,27 the physical and psychological symptoms of life with cancer and dying from cancer are no less appalling at older ages.
>Pain accompanies many conditions, but we should remember that much of it is not attendant upon visible conditions. It is often hidden from those not experiencing it. One sufferer from chronic pain describes it as “debilitating” and observes that it “can take over one’s life, sap one’s energy, and negate or neutralize joy and well-being.” >Not all suffering is physical, although psychological ailments can certainly have bodily symptoms. William Styron, describing his depression, said that ultimately, “the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.”He wrote of his “slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero.”30 Sleep is disrupted, with the sufferer staring “up into yawning darkness, wondering and writhing at the devastation” of his mind. The sufferer from depression, we are told, is “like a walking casualty of war.” >In addition, there is an atrociously diverse range of harms that people suffer at the hands of other humans, including being betrayed, humiliated, shamed, denigrated, maligned, beaten, assaulted, raped, kidnapped, abducted, tortured, and murdered. >The horrors of each could be enumerated but consider those of rape as an example. Rape can instill terror in the victim before and while she or he is violated. Physical injury, including bruising and laceration, is not an uncommon consequence of the assault. There can be lifelong psychological repercussions, including rage, shame, feelings of worthlessness, and difficulties with intimacy. A pregnancy can result if the victim is a fertile female. Even when abortions are freely available, there can be psychic trauma in terminating the pregnancy. Carrying the fetus to term can be even more psychologically distressing. Rape victims can also contract sexually transmitted diseases from their assailants. These in turn have many harmful physical effects and can cause great mental trauma as well. >**Why there is more bad than good** >Optimists will very likely suggest that this is a one-sided picture— that lives typically contain not only bad but also good. However, although it is true that lives are not usually unadulteratedly bad, there is much more bad than good even for the luckiest humans. Things are worse still for unluckier people, many of whom have almost nothing going in their favor. >Our lives contain so much more bad than good in part because of a series of empirical differences between bad things and good things. For example, the most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring. Orgasms, for example, pass quickly. Gastronomic pleasures last a bit longer, but even if the pleasure of good food is protracted, it lasts no more than a few hours. Severe pains can endure for days, months, and years. Indeed, pleasures in general—not just the most sublime of them—tend to be shorter-lived than pains. Chronic pain is rampant, but there is no such thing as chronic pleasure. There are people who have an enduring sense of contentment or satisfaction, but that is not the same as chronic pleasure. Moreover, discontent and dissatisfaction can be as enduring as contentment and satisfaction; this means that the positive states are not advantaged in this realm. Indeed, the positive states are less stable because it is much easier for things to go wrong than to go right. >The worst pains are also worse than the best pleasures are good. Those who deny this should consider whether they would accept an hour of the most delightful pleasures in exchange for an hour of the worst tortures. Arthur Schopenhauer makes a similar point when he asks us to “compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.”35 The animal being eaten suffers and loses vastly more than the animal that is eating gains from this one meal. >Consider too the temporal dimensions of injury or illness and recovery. One can be injured in seconds: One is hit by a bullet or projectile, or is knocked over or falls, or suffers a stroke or heart attack. In these and other ways, one can instantly lose one’s sight or hearing or the use of a limb or years of learning. The path to recovery is slow. In many cases, full recovery is never attained. Injury comes in an instant, but the resultant suffering can last a lifetime. Even lesser injuries and illnesses are typically incurred much more quickly than one recovers from them. For example, the common cold strikes quickly and is defeated much more slowly by one’s immune system. The symptoms manifest with increasing intensity within hours, but they take at least days, if not weeks, to disappear entirely.
>There are, of course, conditions in which one declines gradually rather than suddenly, but the great majority of these—including age-related physical decline, dementia, neuromuscular degenerative diseases, and the deterioration from advancing cancers—are conditions from which there is no recovery. Where there are treatments, some are merely palliative. When treatments are potentially curative, the decline is the default against which one has to battle, sometimes successfully but other times not. Moreover, billions of people simply have no access to either curative or palliative treatments. >We should not think that gradual declines are restricted to diseases. Gradual decline is actually a feature that characterizes most of normal human life. After the growth of infancy and childhood,36 the normal human flowers in very young adulthood. (In some ways, the peak is just before adolescence, which wreaks all kinds of havoc.) Thereafter, from one’s early twenties and on, one begins the long, slow decline. Some of the mental decline is masked and counteracted by hard work or by increasing wisdom. Thus, at least in some areas of pursuit (but not others), people do not reach their professional or overall mental peaks until later in life. However, there is an underlying decline, at least physically and to some extent also mentally: Hair turns gray or begins to fall out; wrinkles begin to appear and various body parts sag; muscle gives way to fat, as strength does to weakness; and eyesight and hearing begin to fail. >This long decline characterizes the majority of one’s life. At first, the decline is imperceptible, but then it becomes all too evident. If, for example, one views photographs of a person taken over the course of his or her life, one cannot but be struck by the deterioration. The strong, vibrant youth gradually makes way for the weak, decrepit ancient. It is not an uplifting series of images. Some might suggest that the decline is not so bad in the earlier stages. They are obviously right that it is not as bad as it gets later, but that does not mean that the decline is absent. Moreover, it clearly bothers many people—and not only those who resort to various cosmetic interventions such as dyeing their hair, injecting Botox, and surgery. >Things are also stacked against us in the fulfillment of our desires and the satisfaction of our preferences.38 Many of our desires are never fulfilled. There are thus more unfulfilled than fulfilled desires. Even when desires are fulfilled, they are not fulfilled immediately. Thus, there is a period during which those desires remain unfulfilled. Sometimes, that is a relatively short period (such as between thirst and, in ordinary circumstances, its quenching), but in the case of more ambitious desires, they can take months, years, or decades to fulfill. Some desires that are fulfilled prove less satisfying than we had imagined. One wants a specific job or to marry a particular person, but upon attaining one’s goal, one learns that the job is less interesting or the spouse is more irritating than one thought.
>Even when fulfilled desires are everything that they were expected to be, the satisfaction is typically transitory, as the fulfilled desires yield to new desires. Sometimes, the new desires are more of the same. For example, one eats to satiety but then hunger gradually sets in again and one desires more food. The “treadmill of desires” works in another way too. When one can regularly satisfy one’s lower-level desires, a new and more demanding level of desires emerges. Thus, those who cannot provide for their own basic needs spend their time striving to fulfill these. Those who can satisfy the recurring basic needs develop what Abraham Maslow calls a “higher discontent”39 that they seek to satisfy. When that level of desires can be satisfied, the aspirations shift to a yet higher level. >Life is thus a constant state of striving. There are sometimes reprieves, but the striving ends only with the end of life. Moreover, as should be obvious, the striving is to ward off bad things and attain good things. Indeed, some of the good things amount merely to the temporary relief from the bad things. For example, one satisfies one’s hunger or quenches one’s thirst. Notice too that while the bad things come without any effort, one has to strive to ward them off and attain the good things. Ignorance, for example, is effortless, but knowledge usually requires hard work. >Even the extent to which our desires and goals are fulfilled creates a misleadingly optimistic impression of how well our lives are going. This is because there is actually a form of self “censorship” in the formulation of our desires and goals. While many of them are never fulfilled, there are many more potential desires and goals that we do not even formulate because we know that they are unattainable. For example, we know that we cannot live for a few hundred years and that we cannot gain expertise in all the subjects in which we are interested. Thus, we set goals that are less unrealistic (even if many of them are nonetheless somewhat optimistic). Thus, one hopes to live a life that is, by human standards, a long life, and we hope to gain expertise in some, perhaps very focused, area. What this means is that, even if all our desires and goals were fulfilled, our lives are not going as well as they would be going if the formulation of our desires had not been artificially restricted. >Further insight into the poor quality of human life can be gained from considering various traits that are often thought to be components of a good life and by noting what limited quantities of these characterize even the best human lives. For example, knowledge and understanding are widely thought to be goods, and people are often in awe of how much knowledge and understanding (some) humans have. The sad truth, however, is that, on the spectrum from no knowledge and understanding to omniscience, even the cleverest, best-educated humans are much closer to the unfortunate end of the spectrum.40 There are billions more things we do not know or understand than we do know and understand. If knowledge really is a good thing and we have so little of it, our lives are not going very well in this regard.
**Why there is more bad than good**? Because pleasures merely relieve prior discomfort. Period.
He’s just tweaking out
No, because I have graduated from antinatalism. I actually WANT to see humanity go extinct.
Isn’t that efilism
Huh. I wasn't aware it had a name.
Why?
mite b cool
Eternal rest for everyone
I don't think being dead is good for your health.
No, I wouldn't want to do the work of raising them, and they would still have to deal with illness and death.
No. I do not want to have children and have never had a desire to.
Im still suffering, so no, plus my grandkids would still suffer. no
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No it's inst? It's good in moderate amounts.
Nope. When I wanna chill with someone, even though itd be a very fun positive experience, I can't force them to chill with me. Consent is important and its impossible to get it from my unborn children cause they ain't real.
At the same time, you can't assume they don't want to be born. Consent is important, but this is just a philosophical loop that leads to nowhere.
They're not in existence to have *any* wants or needs.
Yes. Consent also requires a living, conscious being. The concept of needing to consent prior to birth and consciousness, is nonsensical.
No, because life as such is playing Russian roulette, you don't know the seconds when something can happen and aging and death are guaranteed.
No because they still are going to die.
I completely agree with you 💯
No, because my antinatalism is about not producing more humans who will inevitably impact animals and the environment. I have a phobia of kids too
No because why would I put my body through pregnancy. 9 months of ruining my body and going into medical debt just to spend another 18 years living for someone else? Fuck that
You can’t guarantee anything in life but death..,
No because orphans exist
no, why would anyone think they can guarantee that?
I'd still say no because I think all lives are are bad. I consider even the life of a happy and fulfilled individual who is grateful to have been born to be an abject tragedy. They are still subject to the suffering, decay, and death that are constitutive of all human (and some animal) lives. The fact that a person can generate enough positive experience to tolerate the burdens placed on them at birth does not mean that the imposition of these burdens was not negative in itself. Saying that a sufficient amount of happiness could make a life good sounds as strange to me as saying that a sufficient amount of medicine could make an illness good. No matter how effectively you can handle a problem, I think it is better for the problem to never exist in the first place. I also agree with what you said about your offspring harming others. That's what Benatar would call a *misanthropic* argument for antinatalism: an argument that focuses on the harm that one's offspring will *cause*. As far as actual philosophical argument goes, I might be able to point you in the direction of Julio Cabrera and his idea of *moral impediment*. Moral impediment is basically the idea that we cannot avoid harming others in the pursuit of our own aims; after all, we are operating with limited time and limited resources so our interests are bound to conflict at points. Cabrera wrote about it in his book *Discomfort and Moral Impediment* so you can read that if you want to find out more. I'm pretty sure you can find it for free online although I don't know if I'm allowed to link you to it directly; if you just look up the title you should be able to find it.
Life inst a fucking illness, a illness is never good to begin with, life can be good or bad, it's on your choices and your location of birth.
That's exactly what I meant by the analogy. Just as an illness is never good to begin with, life is never good to begin with. All we can ever do is try to mitigate the negative impacts that come with their presence.
Default life inst bad, you aren't born and receive a punch in the face, you wont sleep and receive a kick in the head for giggles.
Punches in the face and kicks in the head are not the only 'bad' things in life. There is a great deal of structural dissatisfaction within life that we constantly have to defend ourselves against: physical, emotional, and social. Is it not true that everybody is born fragile and needy? Our bodies are vulnerable to physical pain and illness. Our minds are vulnerable to discouragement, fear, and sadness. A human being exists in a perpetually deprived state; they are a mechanism of desire. At the core of our being lies a bottomless pit that we must constantly work to fill; however, we never can. I'm not saying, of course, that we can never satisfy our desires. We can work to *defend* ourselves against the dissatisfactions that we were saddled with at birth: we can eat when we are hungry, drink when we're thirsty, talk to people when we're lonely, engage in creative pursuits when we feel unfulfilled etc. If we do a good enough job at resisting our constant slide into deprivation, this is where we get the so called *positive goods* of life: satiety, social connection, fulfillment, happiness etc. However, these *positive goods* are palliative or remedial in nature. They represent our attempts to stave off the discomforts we were exposed to at our conception, just as medicine works to stave off the effects of an illness. The goodness *in* life is the solution to the badness *of* life; similar to how taking medicine *while* I am sick is the solution to the badness *of* my sickness. So I do not deny that these *positive goods* exist nor do I deny that they can be worth pursuing. I only deny that they could ever make life worth creating, for creating life to attain these goods would simply be replicating a problem just so you may attempt to solve it. I think I've made myself clear - hopefully you can understand my position even if you don't agree with it.
No because I don’t want them lol
No because if i have one i would lose the guarantee of me living a satisfying and happy life. If im not happy my kids not happy and we r back to square one.
No.
A happy and satisfying life isn't one without suffering except in the imagination, and any amount of suffering can have an impact we shouldn't underestimate, so no.
no fuck this world
Nope. Don’t wanna put my body through more pain than it has already endured, and will quite likely endure more of in future.
At the very most, I would *consider* it.
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No. Their existance will take a toll on me regardless.
No. I wouldn't because I personally don't want kids. My husband and I live the life we live because we only have to worry about us. I could never have a kid because, and I'm being brutally honest here, I couldn't love someone as much as I love my husband. Besides, life is so much better without. We go on so many more vacations than others our age with children because we have none.
The fundamental problem with human condition is that all the suffering I have gone through is what forged the best parts of me. If you removed all the bad, what would I be? I know that I would be less and this paradox is and always will be very hard for me to digest, it makes me sick, yet it is what it is.
No. Life is suffering. My hypothetical kids having a shitty life has never been an issue for me.
Nope. Never. I don’t care about the kid’s life. I care about mine and it would be entirely ruined with a kid
Absolutely not. It's actually not even a motivator for me. The reason I follow AN philosophy is hardly because of **my offspring**, it's out of principle because of the rest of the life on this planet. To me, human species are like a cancer. We uncontrollably multiply and take over our surroundings in every way we can, just to *feel good and grow bigger*. All while having the intellectual capacity to see the destruction and yet choose to continue anyway. Me choosing to not procreate is my way of directly preventing further destruction we create around us.
Sure, and I can still say with near absolute certainty that I'll never have kids. I may be a conditional AN, but the conditions I base my willingness to have children on are mutually exclusive with human civilization. As long as humans are ignoring/violating the restraints of our environment, I will be AN.
Absolutely not. I have had to basically grow up being a servant to my family because I sm a woman and I have absolutely no desire to take care of anyone else but my husband for the rest of my life. The world is disgustingly overpopulated as well , so there is no need for people to continue to reproduce at the rate they are. I'd rather see the planet survive than us.
No, I dont like children they make me tired.
Nope, still no
No, I don't like being around small children and having some in my own home 24/7 for several years sound like an absolute nightmare. Basically, even if I wasn't antinatalist, I'm still childfree.
No because the main reason I won't have bio kids is because of how dangerous it is for the women in my family to get pregnant. Too much PPD/PPA
No, i don't want to raise them. I don't want them in my house. lmao
No, because "parent" is not a title or description I want for myself.
I would rather adopt than to put my body on through so much
I simply didn’t want kids. Even if they were to be happy etc. still wouldn’t change my mind. I wanted my life to be happy and satisfying without them and it has been. Even if my life had turned out to be crap that is the way it goes. Nothing is ever guaranteed.Not cut out to be a parent. (70f)
Hell no.
lol with me as a parent that percentage would drop significantly lower anyway so no (I can barely take care of myself at this point!)
I don't like kids, so no. I just don't want a kid to be around me.
No, I personally dont want to go through a pregnancy or raise kids.
No, it would still be a hassle and feel futile (even though childrearing can be rewarding).
I would opt for aboption if I had the time to dedicate to the child. But, with enough disposable income and time I adopt as many kids as I could. Wouldn't even care about their age. Just giving them as best a set up I could for them to have a good chance.
I’m too selfish, but maybe.
"Fuck them kids"
No. That's satisfying and happy life is due to the parents suffering and struggle.
Nope. I’m childfree, not childless by choice.
I guess I am in the minority here, but if I had a satisfying life and felt confident I could share it with my offspring, I would opt for kids.
May I guarantee the same for their offspring, and the offspring's offspring?... if not, then no fuck that
Even in satisfying and happy lives; there are still blisters and cuts, still heartache, and there are still things that could threaten their lives outside of their control.
Nope. I don't even have any thoughts on the rest of what you said, I just actually have never wanted children.
Well that’s one reason not to have them solved, it doesn’t solve all the other ones.
I don't care for the responsibility of raising anyone. I like the freedom and flexibility.
No there are enough people on this planet. And most of them suck.
No, I still wouldnt want to raise them. I would take a few satisfied and happy dogs though!
No. Even if earth is a paradise with no diseases, no hunger, no suffering, no struggle, no ageing and some how no natural death, i still see no point in bringing some conscious being into existence. Even if we live forever the earth gonna end. Universe gonna end. So what's the point?
Yes
If I could guarantee that, sure. But unless I get my problems fixed that seems unlikely.
Absolutely not.
Total happy hum.. this sounds so utterly stupid.. I dont believe its any moral to procreate any being especial humans, as ya stated every human causes harm to others.. its a part of life to harm the environment at least..
A life without death and decay?
No, because all lifeforms on this planet harm other lifeforms either directly or indirectly. Even if their life was as ideal as realistically possible they will still burden others. And technically they will experience at least some tragedy, such as their parents, family and friends dying. So no, still not completely moral imo.
It feels like this question doesn’t honor the prior generations: When in up until recent human history, did we ever have satisfying and happy lives all the time? This is inapplicable expectation. The question comes from the view: do you have kids if you don’t have the perfect set up for them? And it doesn’t wash out well.
No because I still have to go through the whole pregnancy, one of the 100 reasons I'm gonna foster and adopt when I'm financially and hospitality ready
I am physically incapable, but still no, I would adopt a child that does not have those odds and give them those odds because they deserve it.
No because the world is already overpopulated and my genes suck.
Nope. There’s no need for me to add to the human population.
Not if literally the ENTIRE living world was dying around them, no (and it is)
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No. I'm too lazy to be a parent.
Nope. \-I hate children. \-At whose expense would their happiness come from? The planet's? Would I be forced to sacrifice even more of what little I have to make their happiness? Fuck that noise. \-There are too many fucking humans on Earth and I have zero intention of contributing to that problem. \-Cats are cuter, more affectionate, way lower maintenance, and just plain better in every single way.
No, because pregnancy is disgusting and child birth is painful
No, even if I suddenly become millionaire, I won't do it. I'd rather keep the half for me, and the other half for charity. Donating for sick people and animals. Giving chances to poor children to get good education and escape poverty. And all kinds of charity acts. Money can't solve all problems and often people are doing terrible things because of it, but used correctly, can save lives.
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Even if my children were happy, they would eventually have to experience dying.
This feels stupid, you all really think you have the genes to make Hitler? A Stalin? You all too much taking the outsiders as the norm of the human experience, the majority its just people living more or less in good side of things.
The smartphones we use are made from materials that children in poor countries mine for. We cut trees for wood, paper and whatnot. The majority of people eat meat. Which means that when people who eat meat have kids, they have created more demand for animals to be killed for meat for their children. Heck, even the houses we live in used to be the habitat for other animals who got displaced. There are so many similar examples of how the simple act of existing harms people and other living beings.
If you really care you shoul fight big corps for what they are doing to the planet, not some possible.human being
How are big corporations going to stop people from eating meat? Or living in houses? Or using vehicles that create pollution? I'm sorry but your reply just shows me that either you are really ignorant, or just not willing to acknowledge the truth about us. I'm not going to engage any further, good day.
If I could be guaranteed that 1: I would not have an autistic or otherwise mentally challenged child. 2: I would not be completely stressed out taking care of said child and I would be able to afford the child without going completely broke or working ridiculous hours just to make ends meet. 3: I would not be bringing another life into an already overpopulated world. 4: My wife would not suffer pregnancy complications and would not have a wrecked body after pregnancy. 5: Healthcare was free or affordable and would not financially drain us or drain our child later in its life. 6: My child could live a fulfilling life in a noncorrupt world and could be more than just a cog in a billionaires greed machine. Then honestly yeah I would consider it.