May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existenceFrom Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851:[16] If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist?
He throws them into a form of sorites; but, as such, it is logically faulty and all he wishes to convey is this: Oblivious of the suffering to which life is subject, man begets children, and is thus the cause of old age and death.
[17]The issue of Buddhist antinatalism is also raised by Amy Paris Langenberg, she writes among other things: In the medieval Tantric traditions of India and Tibet documented by David Gray and Janet Gyatso, insertive but non-ejaculative sex is theorized as a fast path to liberating realizations, one deemed superior to celibacy for qualified practitioners (Gray 2007; Gyatso 1998).
These developments also support the idea that the sex problematic in ancient, classical, and medieval Buddhism had at least as much to do with female fertility and the production of children as with the dangers of errant desire.
[20]The Marcionites, led by the theologian Marcion of Sinope,[21] believed that the visible world is an evil creation of a crude, cruel, jealous, angry demiurge, Yahweh.
Would that all would this, only in "charity out of a pure heart, and good conscience, and faith unfeigned;" much more speedily would the City of God be filled, and the end of the world hastened.
(Ecclesiastes 4:2–3, New Revised Standard Version)Robbert Zandbergen[42] 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."
Zandbergen quotes John S. Major et al. 2010[43] to make the parallel between Taoism and antinatalism even clearer: 冰之凝，不若其釋也，又況不為冰乎 Ice is better once it melts; how much better if it had never been frozen.Water is a traditional representation of the Tao, as it flows without shape.
Human existence amounts to a tangled network of defense mechanisms, which can be observed both individually and socially in our everyday behavior patterns.
He describes procreation as an act of manipulation and harm — a unilateral and non-consensual sending of a human being into a painful, dangerous, and morally impeding situation.
Cabrera regards procreation as an ontological issue of total manipulation: one's very being is manufactured and used; in contrast to intra-worldly cases where someone is placed in a harmful situation.
He is of the opinion that a huge number of humans around the world cannot withstand this steep struggle against the terminal structure of their being, which leads to destructive consequences for them and others: suicides, major or minor mental illnesses, or aggressive behavior.
In his view, values included in the MEA are widely accepted by affirmative ethics, they are even their basics, and if approached radically, they should lead to the refusal of procreation.
For Cabrera, the worst thing in human life and by extension in procreation is what he calls "moral impediment": the structural impossibility of acting in the world without harming or manipulating someone at some given moment.
Cabrera also draws attention to the fact that life is associated with the constant risk of one experiencing strong physical pain, which is common in human life, for example as a result of a serious illness, and maintains that the mere existence of such possibility impedes us morally, as well as that because of it, we can at any time lose, as a result of its occurrence, the possibility of a dignified, moral functioning even to a minimal extent.
Heiko Puls argues that Kant's considerations regarding parental duties and human procreation, in general, imply arguments for an ethically justified antinatalism.
[54] Seana Shiffrin, Gerald Harrison, Julia Tanner and Asheel Singh argue that procreation is morally problematic because of the impossibility of obtaining consent from the human who will be brought into existence.
[60] Chip Smith and Max Freiheit argue that procreation is contrary to non-aggression principle of right-wing libertarians, according to which nonconsensual actions should not be taken toward other people.
So we have, instead of (3), the far-reaching consequence: (3') In any case, it is morally preferable not to produce a child.Karim Akerma argues that utilitarianism requires the least metaphysical assumptions and is, therefore, the most convincing ethical theory.
In this story, the existence of the utopian city of Omelas and the good fortune of its inhabitants depend on the suffering of one child who is tortured in an isolated place and who cannot be helped.
[71][72] The question of whether universal harmony is worth the tears of one child tormented to death has already appeared before in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Irina Uriupina writes about it in the context of antinatalism.
[78]David Benatar,[6]: 109 [76]: 93–99 Gunter Bleibohm,[79] Gerald Harrison, Julia Tanner,[80] and Patricia MacCormack[81] are attentive to the harm caused to other sentient beings by humans.
Some antinatalists are also vegetarians or vegans for moral reasons, and postulate that such views should complement each other as having a common denominator: not causing harm to other sentient beings.
"[90] Herman Vetter,[64] Théophile de Giraud,[92] Travis N. Rieder,[93] Tina Rulli,[94] Karim Akerma[1]: 74 and Julio Cabrera[51]: 181 argue that presently rather than engaging in the morally problematic act of procreation, one could do good by adopting already existing children.
Stuart Rachels[95] and David Benatar[96] argue that presently, in a situation where a huge number of people live in poverty, we should cease procreation and divert these resources, that would have been used to raise our own children, to the poor.
[46] Some studies seem to confirm this: it is said about the phenomenon of depressive realism, and both Colin Feltham[100][101][102] and John Pollard[103] write about antinatalism as one of its possible consequences.
Terror management theory argues that humans are equipped with unique cognitive abilities beyond what is necessary for survival, which includes symbolic thinking, extensive self-consciousness and perception of themselves as temporal beings aware of the finitude of their existence.
To escape it, humans build defensive structures around themselves to ensure their symbolic or literal immortality, to feel like valuable members of a meaningful universe, and to focus on protecting themselves from immediate external threats.
[109] Thomas Metzinger,[110][7] Sander Beckers,[111] and Bartłomiej Chomański[8] argue against trying to create artificial intelligence as this could significantly increase the amount of suffering in the universe.
For example, if people were to develop radical life-extension technologies that enable them to live as long as the human species itself could survive, procreation could cease entirely without the global population dwindling to zero.