Antinatalism or anti-natalism is the philosophical value judgment that procreation is unethical or unjustifiable. Antinatalists thus argue that people should abstain from making children. Some antinatalists consider coming into existence to always be a serious harm. Their views are not necessarily limited only to human beings but may encompass all sentient creatures, arguing that coming into existence is a serious harm for sentient beings in general.
There are various reasons why antinatalists believe human reproduction is problematic. The most common arguments for antinatalism include imposing a risk of serious harm onto someone else, causing instances of inevitable suffering (for example dying) without consent (because one cannot choose whether or not they come into existence), and the indirect harms caused by any human being to other people, animals and the environment. There is also an axiological asymmetry between good and bad things in life, such that coming into existence is always a harm, which is known as Benatar's asymmetry argument.
Antinatalism as a philosophical concept is to be distinguished from antinatalist policies employed by some countries (governmental population control measures). In antinatalist population policy, it is not always implied that coming into existence is a universal problem and is an ever-present harm to the one whose existence was started.
There exists a taxonomy that divides the so-called "antiprocreative" (at times called antinatalist) thought into four major branches: childfreeness, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), efilism (an ideology that advocates for extreme promortalism and forced extinction), and antinatalism itself. Only the latter one is philosophical antinatalism per se, meeting the definition of philosophical antinatalism and having no other features on top of that, whereas the first three items can only be deemed antinatalistic in the sense that they oppose the alleged duty to procreate.
Etymology The term antinatalism (in opposition to the term natalism, pronatalism or pro-natalism) was used probably for the first time by Théophile de Giraud in his book L'art de guillotiner les procréateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste (2006). Masahiro Morioka defines antinatalism as "the thought that all human beings or all sentient beings should not be born." In scholarly and literary writings, various ethical arguments have been put forth in defense of antinatalism, probably the most prominent of which is the asymmetry argument, put forward by South African philosopher David Benatar. Robbert Zandbergen makes a distinction between so-called reactionary (or activist) antinatalism and its more philosophical, originary counterpart. While the former seeks to limit human reproduction locally and/or temporarily, the latter seeks to end it conclusively.
History Early history Antinatalist sentiments have existed for thousands of years. Some of the earliest surviving formulations of the idea that it would be better not to have been born can be found in ancient Greece. One example is from Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus, written shortly before Sophocles's death in 406 BC:
The Arab philosopher al-Ma'arri expressed antinatalist sentiments throughout his life. In an elegy composed by him over the loss of a relative, he combines his grief with observations on the ephemerality of this life:
Al-Ma'arri's self-composed epitaph, on his tomb, states (in regard to life and being born): "This is my father's crime against me, which I myself committed against none."
From Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857, 1846:
From Arthur Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851:
Arguments In religion Buddhism The teaching of the Buddha, including the Four Noble Truths and the beginning of Mahāvagga, is interpreted by Hari Singh Gour as follows:
The issue of Buddhist antinatalism is also raised by Amy Paris Langenberg. She writes, among other things:
Buddhism was understood as antinatalist by Jack Kerouac. Masahiro Morioka argues that ancient Buddhism was both antinatalist and anti-antinatalist:
Christianity and Gnosticism Church Father John Chrysostom states that spiritual perfection implies virginity:
Augustine of Hippo wrote:
Gregory of Nyssa warns that no one should be lured by the argument that procreation is a mechanism that creates children and states that those who refrain from procreation by preserving their virginity "bring about a cancellation of death by preventing it from advancing further because of them, and, by setting themselves up as a kind of boundary stone between life and death, they keep death from going forward".Gregory of Nysssa, Ascetical Works (The Fathers of the Church, volume 58), Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010, p. 48 Søren Kierkegaard believed that man enters this world by means of a crime, that their existence is a crime, and procreation is the fall which is the culmination of human egoism.C. Léon, S. Walsh, Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010, p. 76. According to him, Christianity exists to block the path of procreation; it is "a salvation but at the same time it is a stopping" that "aims at stopping the whole continuation which leads to the permanence of this world."P. Sheil, Starting with Kierkegaard, London: A&C Black, 2011, p. 121.
The Marcionites, led by the theologian Marcion of Sinope, believed that the visible world is an evil creation of a crude, cruel, jealous, and angry demiurge, Yahweh. According to this teaching, people should oppose him, abandon his world, not create people, and trust in the good God of mercy, foreign and distant.
The Encratites observed that birth leads to death. In order to conquer death, people should desist from procreation: "not produce fresh fodder for death".P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 96.G. Quispel, Gnostica, Judaica, Catholica: Collected Essays of Gilles Quispel, Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2008, p. 228.Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, Books 1–3 (The Fathers of the Church, volume 85), Washington: CUA Press, 2010, pp. 263–271.
The Manichaeans, the Bogomils,D. Obolensky, The Bogomils: A Study in Balkan Neo-Manichaeism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 114, 130. and the CatharsJ. Duvernoy, La religion des cathares, Toulouse: Editions Privât, 1976. believed that procreation sentences the soul to imprisonment in evil matter. They saw procreation as an instrument of an evil god, demiurge, or of Satan that imprisons the divine element in the matter and thus causes the divine element to suffer.
Shakers believe that sex is the root of all sin.L.V. Powles, The Faith and Practice of Heretical Sects, Westminster: Mothers' Union, 1962, p. 73.D. Sasson, The Shaker Spiritual Narrative, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983, p. 198. Thus although not strictly antinatalist, they see procreation is a sign of the fallen state of humanity.
Taoism Robbert Zandbergen compares modern antinatalism to Taoism, stating that they both "view the development of consciousness as an aberration in an otherwise fluid and fluent universe marked by some sense of non-human harmony, stability and tranquility." According to Zandbergen, antinatalism and Taoism view human consciousness as something that cannot be fixed, for example, by returning to a more harmonious way of life, but rather it has to be undone. Humans are tasked with a project of a peaceful, non-violent dismantling of consciousness. From the Taoist perspective, consciousness is purpose-driven, which goes against the spontaneous and unconscious flow of the Tao. Hence, humans have an imperative to return to the Tao. Humans have to do it spontaneously, and it cannot be brought about from "the outside" (the Tao, the Heaven, or anything else). Zandbergen quotes John S. Major et al. 2010 to make the parallel between Taoism and antinatalism even clearer:
Water is a traditional representation of the Tao, as it flows without shape. Ice represents the arrest of the natural flow of the Tao in rigid human consciousness. Taoist sages return to the flow like ice melting to water. But it would have been better if human consciousness never had appeared.
Theodicy and anthropodicy
Julio Cabrera considers the issue of being a creator in relation to theodicy and argues that just as it is impossible to defend the idea of a good God as creator, it is also impossible to defend the idea of a good man as a creator. In parenthood, the human parent imitates the divine parent in the sense that education could be understood as a form of pursuit of "salvation," the "right path" for a child. However, a human being could decide that it is better not to suffer at all than to suffer and be offered the later possibility of salvation from suffering. In Cabrera's opinion, evil is associated not with the lack of being, but with the suffering and dying of those that are alive. So, on the contrary, evil is only and obviously associated with being.J. Cabrera, Projeto de Ética Negativa, São Paulo: Edicões Mandacaru, 1989. J. Cabrera, A Ética e Suas Negações, Não nascer, suicídio e pequenos assassinatos, Rio De Janeiro: Rocco, 2011 (second edition). J. Cabrera, Project of Negative Ethics, 2017 (English translation of the first chapter).
Karim Akerma, due to the moral problem of man as creator, introduces anthropodicy, a twin concept for theodicy. He is of the opinion that the less faith in the Almighty Creator–God there is, the more urgent the question of anthropodicy becomes. Akerma thinks that for those who want to lead ethical lives, the causation of suffering requires a justification. Man can no longer shed responsibility for the suffering that occurs by appealing to an imaginary entity that sets moral principles. For Akerma, antinatalism is a consequence of the collapse of theodicy endeavors and the failure of attempts to establish an anthropodicy. According to him, there is no metaphysics nor moral theory that can justify the production of new people, and therefore, anthropodicy is indefensible as well as theodicy.
Jason Marsh finds no good arguments for what he calls "evil asymmetry"; that the amount and kinds of suffering provide strong arguments that our world is not an act of creation made by a good God, but the same suffering does not affect the morality of the act of procreation.
Peter Wessel Zapffe
Peter Wessel Zapffe viewed humans as a biological paradox. According to him, consciousness has become over-evolved in humans, thereby making us incapable of functioning normally like other animals: cognition gives us more than we can carry. Our frailness and insignificance in the cosmos are visible to us. We want to live, and yet because of how we have evolved, we are the only species whose members are conscious that they are destined to die. We are able to analyze the past and the future, both our situation and that of others, as well as to imagine the suffering of billions of people (as well as of other living beings) and feel compassion for their suffering. We yearn for justice and meaning in a world that lacks both. This ensures that the lives of conscious individuals are tragic. We have desires: spiritual needs that reality is unable to satisfy, and our species still exists only because we limit our awareness of what that reality actually entails. Human existence amounts to a tangled network of defense mechanisms, which can be observed both individually and socially in our everyday behavior patterns. According to Zapffe, humanity should cease this self-deception, and the natural consequence would be its extinction by abstaining from procreation.P. W. Zapffe, Om det tragiske, Oslo: Pax Forlag, 1996.
Negative ethics