Tradition

Antinatalism

Overview

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.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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All objects of the inclinations have only a conditional worth, for if the inclinations and the wants founded on them did not exist, then their object would be without value. But the inclinations, themselves being sources of want, are so far from having an absolute worth for which they should be desired that on the contrary it must be the universal wish of every rational being to be wholly free from them. Thus the…
Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
States what Antinatalism is; the author is tied to Antinatalism in the knowledge graph.
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It was from this source that the ethical systems, both the philosophical and those which are supported by systems of religion, took their rise. Both seek constantly in some way or other to connect happiness with virtue, the former either by means of the principle of contradiction or that of sufficient reason, and thus to make happiness either identical with or…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
States what Antinatalism is; the author is tied to Antinatalism in the knowledge graph.
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[The theory of] _Pre-established Harmony_ may proceed in two different ways. It regards every organised being as generated by one of like kind, either as an _educt_ or a _product_. The system which regards generations as mere educts is called the theory of _individual preformation_ or the theory of _evolution_: that which regards them as products is entitled the system of _epigenesis_. This latter may also be…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Antinatalism is; the author is tied to Antinatalism in the knowledge graph.
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Antinatalism

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