The Gift of Life
Against Anti-natalism
Picture a playground on a sunny day, bustling with excited children. One falls and scratches her knee. Cries of distress draw the concern of a new friend. A few breaths later, she’s back on her feet with a big grin, ready for the next adventure.
How should we feel about this scene? Suppose it is representative of the children’s lives as a whole: there are occasions of distress, but overall they have happy lives. How should we assess these lives?
Antinatalists offer a shocking answer: these children ought not to exist. Their parents wronged them in creating them. Morally, we should prefer that the playground—and the rest of the planet—be a barren wasteland, devoid of all the harms that life entails.
Why would anyone think this? Antinatalist philosophers like David Benatar (author of Better Never to Have Been) appeal to a moral asymmetry between harm and benefit. One way to think of this is captured in the dictum, “First, do no harm.” Life inevitably contains sorrows. So if you were to give absolute priority to harm-prevention over benefit-bestowal, it makes sense that you would conclude that each new life is an occasion for moral regret.
Philosophers have a saying, “One person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens.” What this means is that any argument can be reversed. If giving absolute priority to harm-prevention entails that all life is regrettable, we aren’t forced to accept that conclusion. We may instead reject the premise, and deny that harm-prevention is the only thing that matters.
We can make the point vivid by revisiting our playground scene. A couple on a nearby bench deliberates about whether to have children of their own. Watching the events on the playground unfold, the man gasps in horror, “That settles it! Clearly we must not have children.” His partner may be baffled that this is what he took away from the scene.
Consider Tennyson’s aphorism: “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Pain and loss may mar our lives. But they aren’t all that matter. We should not lose sight of the positive value of love and happiness. Such goods can outweigh the bad in life. When they do, we should regard life as good. An overall good life merits celebration. Most of us recognize this, and smile to see a bustling playground. It takes a strange sort of nihilism to fail to see the good in life, or to deny (even in principle) that the greatest goods could ever outweigh the slightest bad.
Antinatalists often shift our attention away from existing children, and assess matters from an earlier perspective. If you’re deciding whether to have a child, they think it makes a crucial difference that this child need not exist at all. Maybe once they exist it’s important to pursue goods and not just avoid bads, but—antinatalists argue—that’s just because existing without those goods makes one comparatively worse off. But if one never existed at all, there would be no one there to be harmed by the deprivation. So where’s the harm?
This argument doubles down on the moral mistake of thinking that harms are all that matter. Consider a parody argument, starting from the opposite assumption that only benefits matter. Imagine claiming we have no moral reason to refrain from creating miserable lives. Of course, once someone exists, we have reason to alleviate their suffering, because such alleviation makes them comparatively better off. But if one (who would otherwise endure non-stop suffering) never existed at all, there would be no one there to benefit from the avoided suffering. “So where’s the moral gain?”
The truth is that harms and benefits both matter. For greater precision, let me introduce a little academic jargon. If someone’s life would be overall miserable, we can refer to the distinctive harm of bringing them into this miserable existence as an existential harm. Likewise, if someone’s life would be very good for them on the whole, we can speak of the existential benefit of being brought into such a happy life.
Existential harms and benefits can seem puzzling. They violate the comparativist principle that harms and benefits must make you worse or better off than you otherwise would have been. (If the alternative is non-existence, then you would not have been at all, and so would not have been either better or worse off.) But that just goes to show that comparativism isn’t always true. After all, the possibility of existential harms is absolutely undeniable. It’s bad for you to suffer a life of pure misery, and morally bad to deliberately create such a life, just considering the well-being of the potential person. So there is no principled reason to deny the analogous claims about existential benefits: It’s good for you to have a happy life, and morally good to create such a life, just considering the well-being of the potential person.
When considering procreative options, the existential harms and benefits only come into focus when we consider the possible future in which the person is created. If we instead suppose that they are not created, we cannot evaluate this intrinsically neutral outcome except by comparing it to what otherwise would have been. If non-creation prevents an existential harm, everyone agrees that’s morally for the better. This is true, even if there is nobody for whom the outcome is better. By parity of reasoning, if non-creation prevents an existential benefit, then that’s morally for the worse. This can be true even if there is nobody for whom the outcome is worse.
We should care about both harms and benefits. Caring about harms commits us to favoring the prevention of existential harms (even if no-one exists to claim this as a benefit). Caring about benefits commits us to disfavoring the prevention of existential benefits (even if no-one exists to claim this as a harm). This may be the most surprising and fundamental insight of ethical theory as applied to procreation.
Real life inevitably involves a mix of existential harms and benefits. Life can be both tragic and wonderful, and while their relative proportions are never guaranteed in advance, folk wisdom about the “gift of life” recognizes that we can reasonably expect the good to outweigh the bad in most cases. That’s the bet that any parent is making for their children, rightly or wrongly. And if we’re glad that our parents rolled the dice on our behalf, we can reasonably expect our own future children to feel similarly.1
Some antinatalists object to this gamble. Even if an overall good life would be worth living, they argue, it isn’t worth the risk. Especially since you can’t ask your future kids to consent to the risk in advance of creating them.
This argument takes respect for consent to an overzealous extreme.2 Seeking consent when possible is a good rule of thumb for protecting people against unwelcome interference. But there’s an important difference between violating consent and (reasonably) presuming it. If paramedics come across an unconscious person bleeding from a deep gash, they can’t get the patient’s consent before deciding whether to stitch them up. But unless there is some prominent indication that the patient refuses consent (e.g., a wallet card indicating their medical preferences), it makes sense to go ahead and save their life, on the presumption that the patient will subsequently thank them for this. Relying on retrospective consent is a moral gamble, but one any sensible person recognizes can be well worth taking.
The common strain running through all these antinatalist arguments is a kind of pathological risk-aversion: granting absolute priority to avoiding the bad, while implicitly devaluing all that is positively good. I think this is a very deep moral mistake, but one that has roots in familiar habits of thought. Loss aversion, risk aversion, and blame aversion all come very naturally to us, psychologically. We are morally fearful creatures. It can take a real effort to overcome these psychological biases and fully appreciate the moral significance of positive opportunities for value. But at its heart, the case against antinatalism is simple: life can be good, and it’s often worth bringing about good things.
I think this core insight applies more generally. Many people—including moral philosophers—conceive of ethics as fundamentally about avoiding wrongdoing. Reflecting on parenthood vs antinatalism can help to morally reorient us towards appreciating the good. Life is not just a tapestry of sorrow, and nor is moral agency just an opportunity to make (or, at best, avoid) mistakes. We can reasonably hope to positively do well, both personally and morally. Ethical opportunities warrant more attention than we usually give them.
Some philosophers worry: if creating happy lives is good, are women obliged to turn their bodies into baby-making factories? But that reasoning is silly. You could benefit a dialysis patient by donating a kidney. This would uncontroversially be good. But bodies aren’t public resources. No-one is obliged to put their internal organs at another’s service, merely because it would do some good. Such gifts must be bestowed gladly and voluntarily, we ordinarily insist. I see no reason to treat parenthood differently.
I’ve argued that it’s good for happy lives to exist. Life is a gift, despite its uncertainties. Accordingly, it’s good and generous of parents to bestow this gift upon their children. The value of this act should be more widely appreciated and encouraged. But it should never be coerced. In a free society, we impose guardrails to prevent clear harms, but otherwise trust people to determine their own moral path. There are so many different ways to live a good life and contribute to bringing about a better future. Procreation and parenting are options that appeal to many, but not to all. Common sense can recognize the value of procreation and parenting alongside other pro-social projects and life paths.
If you’re personally unhappy to exist, by contrast, perhaps you shouldn’t risk replicating that. Different people can easily be justified in making different procreative decisions, given the likelihood that their children will be relevantly similar to themselves. (Not to mention differences in circumstance, etc.)
See also my discussion, in Don’t Void Your Pets, of how rights should be beneficial in expectation. A right not to be brought into existence, by contrast, would have deprived you of everything you have or could ever hope for. It’s horrific.
I never bothered to read up on anti-natalism, and after reading this I’m only thinking one thing: are their arguments really this terrible? Knowing your writing, Richard, I wouldn’t accuse you of grossly misrepresenting their views but by golly, if this is all there is to them, why on earth would anyone take them seriously?
I'd argue that it's important to distinguish obligation from the question of what is a desierable outcome. But that may touch on deep differences we have in moral foundations.