A Comprehensive Takedown of Anti-Natalism

Having kids is good

1 Introduction

Anti-natalists are those who believe it is morally wrong to have children. There are various reasons why they think this, sometimes having to do with rights, sometimes relying on the alleged fact that most people live unhappy lives, and sometimes relying on humans’ supposedly negative impacts on animals.

Lots of people crassly dismiss anti-natalists without seriously engaging their arguments. They treat anti-natalism as obviously ludicrous, and attempt to psychoanalyze anti-natalists rather than argue against them. But while I’m against unserious dismissal of anti-natalists, I am not an anti-natalist. In fact, I think anti-natalism is extremely implausible. I thought, therefore, that I’d write a detailed post explaining where anti-natalist arguments go wrong—especially because I’m not aware of any existing post rebutting anti-natalist arguments in detail.

This article will have several sections. In the second section, I’ll argue that anti-natalists claims about population ethics, according to which it’s bad to create people with bad lives but not good to create people with good lives, are wrong. In the third section, I’ll argue against anti-natalists who think it’s wrong to have kids because of our impact on animals. In fact, I’ll argue that counterintuitively this makes it especially good to have kids. In section four, I’ll address empirical arguments, according to which most children live bad lives. Then in section five, I’ll address deontological arguments against having kids—arguing that the fact that kids don’t consent to be born doesn’t render child bearing impermissible.

But first let me provide one enthymematic argument against anti-natalism.

2 Population ethics

Probably the most popular anti-natalist argument—made famous by anti-natalist extraordinaire David Benatar—claims that while bringing people into existence to suffer is bad, bringing people into existence to be happy isn’t good. This view is called the procreation asymmetry. While we would be sad if we discovered that there was a massive torture chamber on Mars, we’re not sad that there aren’t happy Martians. Similarly, it is claimed that failing to bring a person into existence can’t be bad, because there is no one for whom it is bad—the person in question wouldn’t have otherwise existed.

I think every step of this is doubtful.

The Martian example seems wildly unpersuasive on its face. While we don’t generally spend time lamenting the absence of happy Martians, this is just because we don’t generally spend time lamenting the absence of random good things. It would be good if people could fly, but no one spends much time getting upset about the fact that we can’t. But if there were happy Martians, that would seem like a very good thing. So I don’t think that the Martian intuition, by itself, tells us much about anti-natalism.

Furthermore, I think there are a great many reasons to think it is good for a person with a good life to come into existence. Let me give three such arguments. There’s one other really powerful argument that I won’t mention because it’s pretty complicated, but I think it pretty much dooms this asymmetry too!

The first argument is original to me, and has been published in a philosophy journal. The core idea: imagine that there are two buttons. The first button would create one happy person who would live 70 years, and it would also raise the welfare of an existing person. Seems like you should press it (stipulate that the created person won’t suffer, so even if you should never create someone who suffers, the button is worth pressing. It benefits one person and harms no one).

The second button would eliminate the benefit to the existing person while allowing the newly created person to live to 90 rather than 70. If we assume this benefit is larger than the benefit to the existing person would have been, clearly this second button is worth pressing. But together, these buttons just create a person who lives to be 90! So therefore one should press two buttons which together create a happy person. But if one should do that, then it seems one should create a happy person. If you should press two buttons that together bring about X, then bringing about X must be good.

(Note: I’m just providing a brief overview of the argument—I defend the premises in more detail in the paper).

The argument becomes especially hard to get out of when framed to be about the goodness of states of affairs, rather than about reasons for action. Clearly the world where just the first button is pressed is better than the one where neither button is pressed. And the world where both buttons are pressed is better than one where just the first is pressed. So then from these it follows (assuming that if A>B, and B>C, then A>C) that a world with an extra happy person is better than one without.

A second argument against the procreation asymmetry comes from the non-identity problem. Suppose that you are planning on having a child. This child will have a good life. However, if you wait a month, you’ll have a child with a vastly better life. Perhaps the first child will have some birth defect that will lower its well-being. Question: should you wait a month?

The obvious answer is yes. But the procreation asymmetry struggles to accommodate this intuition. If we assume that both children will have good lives, then both actions are morally neutral—neither brings about anything good or bad. But neutral actions are all equally worthwhile. So then if the procreation asymmetry is correct, it’s hard to see why one should wait and have a better-off child.

Now, anti-natalists have an obvious reply to this. Usually they say that creating a person is bad—and how bad it is depends on the amount that they suffer. This is so even if the person has an overall positive life. Therefore, if waiting to conceive will involve bringing into existence someone who suffers less, it’s better!

But this implies that if you’re deciding when to bring a child into existence—whether now or later—assuming they’ll suffer equal amounts, it doesn’t matter if you wait. If you can either bring one child into existence with 100 trillion units of well-being and 50 units of suffering, or one with no units of well-being and 50 units of suffering, anti-natalism of this variety would imply that it doesn’t matter which one you choose. Nuts! And it would imply that if you were choosing between creating someone with 100 trillion units of well-being and 60 units of suffering, or one with 50 units of suffering and no well-being, it would be better to choose the latter. This is completely insane!

Now, some people in response to this challenge claim that though having a child is morally neutral, if you are going to have a child, you ought to make their life go as well as possible. Thus, it’s worth waiting and having the different happier child, because that would make their life go better.

This view is problematic. There are some technical problems that Thornley points out, but let me just note three intuitive worries.

First of all, it just seems quite hard to make sense of on its face. If having a child who only has happiness really is neutral, then why should it matter which child you have? It doesn’t matter which of two morally neutral acts you pick. It’s not as if it would be better for the child, because waiting results in a totally different child coming into existence.

Second, this can’t solve other versions of the non-identity problem. Suppose that humans can, by engaging in temporary sacrifice, make the far future go better—e.g. by stopping the depletion of certain resources. Doing so will, however, change who comes into existence by changing when people have sex. It seems that such an action would be worth doing (assume it just raises people’s well-being while not affecting their suffering). Assume additionally that everyone in the future will have a net positive life whether or not you stop the depletion of resources.

On this view, because the people in the far future aren’t your child, you’d have no reason to direct the far future to contain more happiness. But this is quite counterintuitive. If conserving resources vastly bettered the quality of life of future people, while changing who ultimately came into existence, it would clearly be worthwhile.

Third, this view implies that whether you can pick A over B sometimes depends on some third option, C, that you are not going to take. Consider three actions:

1. Having a child with 100 units of well-being.

2. Having a child with 50 units of well-being.

3. Having no child.

Assume the child will not suffer.

Those who affirm the asymmetry think that one can justifiably pick 1 or 3 but not 2. But this is odd. Because if there was just 2 and 3, then one could justifiably pick 2. But if one can justifiably pick 2 over 3, and 3 over 1, why can’t they justifiably pick 2 over 1? This is odd!

My last argument against the asymmetry: suppose that there are 3 buttons 1, 2, and 3. Button 1 creates some person A, button 2 creates some person B, and button 3 creates some person C. Each has a good life with 50 units of well-being. Those who affirm the asymmetry would think that pressing each button was neutral. Pressing some other button—button 4—that simply had the effect of pressing the other 3 buttons would be neutral.

But now let’s imagine some other set of buttons.

Button 5 creates person A with a slightly good life (10 units of well-being) and provides a benefit to an existing person (person D) of 10 units of well-being).

Button 6 creates person B with a slightly good life (10 units of well-being) and boosts As well-being by 40. It also makes it so that if person C gets created, their well-being would be boosted by 40 units).

Button 7 creates person C with a slightly good life (10 units of well-being). It gets rid of the benefit to the existing person (person D). It also boosts person B’s well-being by 40 units.

So together buttons 5-7 simply create A, B, and C, with 50 units of well-being! Each one is worth pressing! If there was some other button, button 8, that simply had the effect of pressing buttons 5-7, it would be worth pressing.

But this is very odd. If buttons 5-7 collectively do the same things as buttons 1-3, how could pressing buttons 1-3 be neutral but pressing buttons 5-7 be very good? The asymmetry, therefore, commits one to various bizarre judgments according to which the worthwhileness of a sequence of actions depends not on what it brings about but on how the individual actions are counted.

Now, the main argument for the asymmetry is roughly the following:

1. If failing to create a happy person is bad, it must be bad for someone.

2. For something to be bad for you, it must leave you worse off than you’d have otherwise been.

3. Failing to create a happy person doesn’t leave anyone worse off than they’d have otherwise been.

4. So therefore failing to create a happy person isn’t bad.

The problem is that 2 is ambiguous. The phrase “worse off than you’d have otherwise been,” has two distinct possible meanings.

The first meaning of “worst off than you’d have otherwise been is,” as follow. Something leaves you worse off than you’d have otherwise been if and only if:

1. You’d have existed if the action hadn’t happened.

2. You’d exist if it did happen.

3. Your well-being level would be higher if it happened than if not.

If used this way, then we should reject 2. 2, on this reading, amounts to little more than the assertion that something can’t benefit you by making you come into existence. Those who deny the asymmetry should simply hold that coming into being is good for a person. Something can be bad for you by preventing you from existing.

The other possible meaning of “worse off than you’d have otherwise been,” is the following. Something makes you worse off than you’d have otherwise been if it diminishes the total amount that things that are good for you occurs. But then we should simply reject 3—failing to create a happy person is bad for that person. It makes nothing go well for them, rather than something.

The term “worse off than you’d have otherwise been,” is ambiguous. It either assumes that you would have otherwise been. In either case, the argument amounts to question-begging.

Now, this may all sound a bit sketchy. But I think we can see that the argument can’t possibly be right, because it would prove too much. Consider the following parallel arguments. The first one is against bringing someone back from the dead.

1. For something to be good it must benefit someone.

2. For something to benefit someone, they must be better off because of it than they would otherwise have been.

3. If a person would not have existed absent having been revived from the dead, then reviving them does not make them better off than they would have otherwise been.

4. If a person is revived from the dead then they would not have existed absent being revived from the dead.

The second is in favor of the conclusion that creating someone with a miserable life is never bad:

1. For something to be bad it must harm someone.

2. For something to harm someone, they must be worse off because of it than they would otherwise have been.

3. If a person would not have existed absent being created, then creating them does not make them better off than they would have otherwise been no matter how miserable they are,

So creating someone is not bad, no matter how miserable they are, all else equal.

The third one is in favor of the conclusion that saving a person’s life isn’t good for them.

1. For something to be good it must benefit someone at some time.

2. For something to benefit someone at some time, they must be better off because of it than they would otherwise have been.

3. If a person’s life is saved then there is no time during which this action makes them better off because they wouldn’t have otherwise continued to exist during those times.

So saving someone’s life is not good, all else equal.

I think these ridiculous arguments are all analogous. They all show that we can sometimes perform evaluative moral comparisons—even in scenarios where a person wouldn’t have otherwise existed. It’s not unreasonable to think similar things could happen concerning procreation. It’s better for a person to exist than not to.

One final very flat-footed argument against anti-natalist population ethics: it just seems to get ridiculous results. If my life is good, it seems good my parents had me. It seems fine to have a child if they have a 99.9% chance of having a great life and a .1% chance of having a slightly bad life.

In this section, I’ve given three arguments against the procreation asymmetry and tackled the main arguments for it. In short, I think it’s very clear: creating a person who lives a good life is very valuable.

3 Animals

Lots of people are anti-natalists because of humans’ impacts on animals. Most humans eat factory-farmed meat, resulting in lots of animals being locked in horrendous, torturous conditions for their entire lives. This means that the typical child, assuming they eat meat, will contribute to hundreds of years of animal torture.

I’m not unsympathetic to these concerns. I’m a vegan, and for a while I found anti-natalism somewhat plausible for exactly this reason. But I no longer hold this view. I now think that counterintuitively humans have extremely positive effects on animals—especially from the perspective of an anti-natalist.

While humans have dramatically negative impacts on farm animals, these are more than offset by our positive impacts on wild animals. Most wild animals are insects. Most of them live bad lives. Nearly all animals are R-strategists, meaning they give birth to enormous numbers of offspring, very few of whom live very long. The life of the typical animal consists of being born, living a few days, and then dying painfully. Such a life is not worth living.

While I’m not an anti-natalist about people, I am an anti-natalist about animals—especially small animals like fish and insects. I think they mostly have bad lives. In an ideal world, we would provide condoms for grasshoppers—or teach them the pullout method.

But the good news is that humans prevent staggeringly large numbers of animals from coming into existence. The average human prevents about 14 million insect life years per year. Now, I think probably most of these are microscopic insects that aren’t sentient, but even if we round the actual number down to 1% of this, it’s still a staggering 14,000 conscious insect life years prevented per year. Given that insects live very short lives, this means the average human prevents hundreds of thousands of insect deaths per year.

This utterly swamps the first-order effect of meat consumption. Insects can plausibly suffer fairly intensely. We prevent far more suffering through our daily reductions in insect populations than we cause through meat-eating.

Even if you don’t care about insects—which I think would be wrong—humans have prevented many trillions of fish from coming into existence. Those clearly swamp the first-order effects of meat consumption on factory farmed animals. Thus, if you’re an anti-natalist because you worry about humans causing unnecessary animal suffering, you should be especially supportive of humans having offspring.

I also think there’s a decent chance of the far future being very good. So even if you think that humans probably have net negative impacts on animals right now, this will likely change in the future.

4 Do most people have good lives?

Some anti-natalists grant that having children who live good lives is good, but that most people have bad lives. Most people’s lives, they claim, contain more misery than joy. Thus, given the world is as it is, having children is wrong.

Now, lots of anti-natalists rely on their experience of life when justifying this claim. This is not my experience. I find life to be awesome! I’m happy most of the time, and find periods of misery to be brief and mild. Most people I talk to think this way. And while I do not in general think it’s productive to psychoanalyze people, I will simply note: a lot of anti-natalists are depressed. I think this may be skewing their judgments.

The data bears out my impression that most people have good lives.

When asked to rank one’s positive and negative emotions on a scale of 1-100, most people rank their positive emotions at 71 and their negative emotions at 31. Most people, therefore, seem to think they have more positive than negative emotions. Around 70% of people describe themselves as happy or very happy, and these numbers have been improving over time. These studies provide fairly reliable gauges of how happy people actually are—as Our World In Data notes:

Self-reports about happiness and life satisfaction are known to correlate with things that people typically associate with contentment, such as cheerfulness and smiling.

…

Experimental psychologists have also shown that self-reports of well-being from surveys turn out to correlate with activity in the parts of the brain associated with pleasure and satisfaction. Various surveys have confirmed that people who say they are happy also tend to sleep better and express positive emotions verbally more frequently.

Most convincingly, in my view, are studies that ask people whether the current moment is net positive at random points throughout the day. In other words, they ask whether people would skip through the present moment if they could. Most people say no for most people most of the time. On average, where 50 was the midpoint for a neutral experience, people rated the present moment 65. People find most moments of their lives good.¹

Now, none of these studies are perfect. It could be that people have an optimism bias. But presumably people are decent at ranking the quality of the present moment. So the studies on the quality of randomly selected moments by e.g. Killingsworth (nominative determinism moment!!) seem pretty reliable.

(If you want a more thorough review of the evidence see here from Our World In Data and here from the wonderful Paul Bloom).

In addition, given dramatic technological improvements over time—combined with the possibility of utterly staggering boosts to global well-being via future technology—even if you think humans live bad lives now, they are likely to have better lives in the future. So having kids is still likely good.

One final point in favor of most lives being good: hedonism isn’t the only theory of well-being. A more common view among philosophers is objective list theory, according to which there are a great many things that positively contribute to one’s life. These include: relationships, pleasure, achievements, knowledge, and so on. So even if anti-natalists were right that most lives are hedonically negative, they might be good nonetheless.

Now, a common reply is that even if most moments of life are mildly positive, some moments are so bad that they outweigh the many mildly positive moments. But there are also some really positive moments—getting married, being wildly in love, and attending EA global! Really good life is amazing, just as really bad life is bad. So I don’t think this is decisive—and it’s probably just swamped by the enormous value of constant mildly positive existence. Most people don’t generally think that the few very painful moments sizably affect the aggregate value of their lives.

(There are some views on which extreme suffering categorically outweighs everything else, but I don’t think these views are right, for reasons I’ve given here, and will write about again soon probably—pardon the bad writing, I wrote that post in high school).

5 Does having kids violate rights?

A final popular argument for anti-natalism is deontological: people can’t consent to be born. Birthing a child involves creating a whole entire person—inflicting on them profound suffering and inevitable death. Sure, it might provide even greater benefits, but normally you can’t just egregiously violate rights for the promise of greater benefits. It would be wrong to break people’s arms even if for some reason people with broken arms were happier.

I find this line of reasoning to be pretty odd. Suppose that almost everyone lives good lives, is glad to be alive, and so on. It seems weird to think that we can’t bring about this awesome state of affairs—because doing so would violate the rights of the beneficiaries. Screw rights then! If following a person’s rights isn’t in their interest, why follow them?

There are lots of cases where you can’t ask a person’s actual permission before doing something. If you save someone’s life when they’re unconscious, you can’t ask their actual permission. But it seems you get to save their life because:

1. Doing it is in their interests.

2. They’re likely to approve of it later.

3. It’s very likely that they’d be glad you did it if you could ask them—under ideal conditions.

But all these conditions are met when you have a child. They mostly, as the last section argued, have good lives. They mostly are happy to exist. So therefore, if it’s fine to affect people’s lives if the above conditions are met, it’s fine to have kids.

(I also think there are devastating arguments against deontology, so even if it violated rights, I wouldn’t care much. But I won’t go into those as that view is downstream of larger and controversial commitments).

In addition, I think the rights argument likely proves too much. Suppose that having children really is an egregious and deeply evil rights violation. Presumably it would be fine to snap your fingers and prevent people from egregiously violating rights. So then those who affirm deontological anti-natalism should probably think that it would be fine to release a gas that renders everyone infertile—even in a world where nearly everyone has awesome lives. This is very hard to believe!

Lastly, even deontologists generally think rights aren’t absolute. You get to violate rights for sufficient benefit. But if, as I’ve argued, having a kid is a really great thing, then even if it’s a rights violation, it’s still permissible!

Thus, I think deontological arguments for anti-natalism are unmoving.

6 Conclusion

As I mentioned at the start of this article, I think anti-natalism is a serious viewpoint that deserves serious engagement. It shouldn’t just be brushed off. That said, however, I find the arguments for it really really unpersuasive. I think overall the case against anti-natalism is quite decisive.

Not only this, I think having children is much better than most people think. It’s a good way to reduce animal suffering and bring lots of extra joy and goodness into the world. I think having kids is way more valuable than most other things people do with their time. Declining fertility rates are quite alarming because it means many fewer people get to come into existence and live awesome lives.

So if you’ve been convinced by this argument, I’d encourage you—have some kids! Kids are adorable, awesome bundles of cuteness and goodness. They represent what is good in the world and what is worth preserving. To have them is almost inevitably to love them, to inculcate in yourself the most virtuous dispositions you can have towards another person. You get to watch them grow up, take on a personality of their own, and become their own person. All of your joys, loves, hopes, and dreams were downstream of having been created—you get to provide that gift of inestimable value for someone else.

The common-sense view on child-bearing is basically right. It’s good to have kids. We should have more of them. They are cute and wonderful and good.

1. What We Owe The Future references another study saying this by Matt Killingsworth, Lisa Stewart, and Joshua Greene that isn’t yet published.