Philosophy

"But even if we suppose the Christian ideal of perfect chastity realized, what then? We should merely find ourselves face to face on the one hand with the familiar teaching of religion, one of whose dogmas is that the world will have an end; and on the other of so-called science, which informs us that the sun is gradually losing its heat, the result of which will in time be the extinction of the human race."

"The Bible is about how to live our fall (and how to avoid its after-life extended consequences, by seeking salvation of the soul), not how to undo the fall. To a higher realization, but limited reception and embracing, it is too about how to avoid propagating the fall; however, even though the majority of people would understand that, as few who wouldn’t understand or couldn’t stick to that understanding would keep the fall going (thus requiring, in the end, God’s intervention, the second and final coming of the Christ to undo the fall; and the Bible provides an unusual apocalyptic vision toward such a conclusion). Then, it becomes obvious why the directly received teachings (recorded in the Bible) have been mostly about salvation (not including clear, sharp re-enlightenment in regards to sexuality; which, at that time, merely the apostles could properly receive): because the need for salvation we can readily understand and accept, while sexual desire (with its related procreation into our fallen image) has been man’s flesh-ingrained consequence in Separation."

"As for the times when God worked directly through people, it was not thanks to us being many and righteous, but precisely because of us being many and wicked. Then, it was not the millennia of dutiful procreation that brought us Jesus (who didn’t come to celebrate man for being obedient and worthy, for that matter), but God’s merciful, self-sacrificial determination to bleed for our reckless perpetration of wrongs. Mortals and the sinful are pitiable. Mortals and the sinful are in need of salvation. In the fallen history, being many has never been the plan; turning as many to God (compassionately and un-coerced; starting with the self) is the only true plan for the living, as the Bible reveals and Jesus strongly underlines throughout the gospel."

"[Nature] turns us out into the world without giving us any choice in the matter; though all other suffrages and freedoms are perfectly insignificant in comparison with that of which we are thus deprived, an effective and enlightened vote on the question: Shall I, or shall I not, be born?"

"Best of all for mortal beings is never to have been born at all. Nor ever to have set eyes on the bright light of the sun."

"A certain person inveighs against generation, calling it corruptible and destructive; and some one does violence [to Scripture], applying to procreation the Saviour's words, "Lay not up treasure on earth, where moth and rust corrupt"; and he is not ashamed to add to these the words of the prophet: "You all shall grow old as garment, and the moth shall devour you.""

"Procreators arguably cannot rely on subjective hypothetical consent when deciding on the permissibility of bringing people into existence. Non-existers cannot be said to have preferences—let alone unique, individual preferences! Shiffrin consistently maintains that the unique features of the individual being created cannot be taken into account by parents. It therefore appears as though she thinks parents consider their unborn children generically—which is to say, as things of the same sort. But the pro-natal paternalist could argue that matters are not this simple. He could say that, insofar as they can, parents often, and always ought to, consider the unique circumstances of the lives into which they will bring their children. This line of reasoning appeals to the view that parents often have a pretty good idea of what kinds of lives their children can expect to enjoy. Prospective parents can construct a relatively reliable picture of sorts from their shared genetic history, their socio-economic situation, etc., and can be reasonably sure regarding what their children would prefer. On this line of reasoning, therefore, it is not quite accurate to say that prospective parents consider their potential offspring generically; rather, they consider their offspring, insofar as they can, as unique products of their (the parents’) unique circumstances. But I am not convinced that this objection holds much weight. Consider the fact that siblings often have very different preferences. Further, also consider that children very often fail to live up to their parents’expectations. Finally, though Shiffrin (so far as I can tell) thinks this is rare, children might not have a subjective preference for existence—and it may be begging the question against the anti-natalist to assert that children ought to have this as an objective preference. (Consider here the problem of suicide.) And so, it does not look as though procreation can be justified via appeals to subjective hypothetical consent."

"Creating new persons exposes them to non-trivial harms. While in other cases harming in this non-trivial fashion might be justified if it is in the service of saving persons from even greater harms, procreators cannot appeal to this possibility. Procreation cannot sensibly be viewed as the act of saving non-existing persons from (greater) harm. Rather, on Shiffrin’s account, procreation can be viewed, at best, as the morally problematic exposure to non-trivial harms in order to offer uninvited and non-essential benefits (that is, "pure benefits") to the person created; at worst, it can be viewed as the morally impermissible imposition of serious, protracted harms upon a patient that are not toward the alleviation of greater harms. Further, and most crucially, children do not have the opportunity to offer their consent to encounter the harms of existence in order to receive the benefits, which entails that it is wrong to procreate."

"I am thirty-six years old. What am I waiting for? Probably for death. My past is as intense as my future empty and orphaned. And I will soon be a corpse – I am a madman; I have been working on it since I was dragged out of my mother. I know about it for a long time and I want this, unfortunately, I think so. Because I already have enough. I say – you know. The earth will deliver those who had doubts about the existence who never gave birth and never killed."

"An ancient legend recounts how King Midas hunted long in the forest for the wise Silenus, companion of Dionysos, but failed to catch him. When Silenus has finally fallen into his hands, the King asks what the best and most excellent thing for human beings. Stiff and unmoving, the daemon remains silent until, forced by the King to speak, he finally breaks out in shrill laughter and says: "wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon"."

""Life is beautiful. I love it. So what if it comes with harms? Learn to live life to the fullest and don't wallow in the bad parts. The best parts of life outweigh the bad." Allow me to draw a parallel. "Smoking cigarettes is enjoyable. I love it. So what if it comes with harms? Win some, lose some. The pleasure far outweighs the harm it causes." Though one is entitled to hold such views, it does nothing to alter the truth: smoking is injurious to health; all in all, a harmful habit best avoided. You may enjoy smoking, and think it worth all the risks that accompany it, but do you have a right to force such a habit on another? In creating a child, one is doing just that – forcing life on another, without their consent, unmindful of the harms they are subjecting them to. And let the reader not forget – the risks that accompany smoking are a picnic compared to the countless harms life exposes us to."

"Pain, harm, suffering, uncertainty, and death are inseparable from human life. May one impose such evils upon an innocent, who has not consented to be placed in a situation that carries any kind of risk? Is procreation really as "straightforward" and "morally innocent" an activity as custom typically makes it out to be?"

"Creation is an act far more authoritarian than killing; and just as one should not take someone else's life, one should also not impose life on someone else."

""Be fruitful and multiply" is a recommendation that fits more into the God of rabbits than to God of humans. No offense to rabbits, of course."

"Not to be born at all Is best, far best that can befall, Next best, when born, with least delay To trace the backward way. For when youth passes with its giddy train, Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils, Pain, pain for ever pain; And none escapes life's coils. Envy, sedition, strife, Carnage and war, make up the tale of life. Last comes the worst and most abhorred stage Of unregarded age, Joyless, companionless and slow, Of woes the crowning woe."

"I've never regretted not having children. My mindset in that regard has been constant. I objected to being born, and I refuse to impose life on someone else."

"If you hold eternal damnation, then having children is a very grave business indeed. You are gambling with infinite stakes."

"By creating a life we subject that person to the harms of life. People will be hurt, some very badly. It seems to me that the only reason for creating lives is to fulfil psychological (and sometimes material) needs of the parents (and to some degree other relatives). It would take libraries to list the gamut of possible harms, ranging from genetic recombination errors at conception, to the last gasp of the dying. We deploy an array of mental gymnastics to avoid the implications of this truth, yet deep down we all know it at some level. Contrary to the norms of our society the arrival of a child should be a time for sober reflection not cause for celebration. I will not congratulate people on gambling someone else's welfare in the hopes of improving their own lives. I suspect most people reading this will hold that their own needs are a good enough reason to have children. If that is you, then I ask you at least acknowledge the self centred nature of the choice, and perhaps when your children are old enough you can explain why you took a flutter on life's roulette wheel."

"If you are having difficulty making the connection between real world outcomes and your desire to have children, try looking at the world in a new way. When there are job losses at work, imagine that happening to the child you are so set on having. The ugly divorce is someone's child, both of them. The newscaster announcing a rape, that's someone's baby, both the perpetrator and the victim. The car accident you just drove past, the toilet cleaner on minimum wage, the man in the hospital ward dying of cancer, the casket being lowered into the ground. If I were to provide an exhaustive list it would fill the whole book, but I would rather you made your own - play this game for a week and it will break your rose tinted spectacles – it's not happy but it is honest."

""Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins." (Zechariah Chafee)"

"However one need not believe that coming into existence is always an overall harm in order to favour an anti-natal perspective; one need only believe that it is morally problematic to inflict serious, preventable harms upon others without their consent."

"Thus, four factors make the appeal to hypothetical consent problematic: (1) the fact that great harm is not at stake if no action is taken; (2) but if action is taken, the harms suffered may be very severe; (3) the imposed condition cannot be escaped without high costs; and (4) the hypothetical consent procedure is not based on features of the individual who will bear the imposed condition."

"That nature, being sick of man’s unkindness, Should yet be hungry! Common mother, thou, ... Ensear thy fertile and conceptious womb, Let it no more bring out ingrateful man. Go great with tigers, dragons, wolves, and bears; Teem with new monsters."

"When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools."

"Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me."

"Nothing is so deceptive, nothing is so treacherous as human life; by Hercules, were it not given to men before they could form an opinion, no one would take it. Not to be born, therefore, is the happiest lot of all."

"Do you want to know how it is not a great benefit to give life like this? You could have exposed me; clearly it was an injustice to have begat me!"

"Unfortunately, in our real world, large numbers of children grow up to be victims, perpetrators, or bystanders. Very few children actually grow up to make the world a better place. Personally, I don't feel that creating new victims, perpetrators, and bystanders is the great social ooh-and-aah that it is made out to be. I do understand that people want to have children for reasons personal to their own needs, not necessarily for the child or for the world, and perhaps that's reason enough, but I don't know why."

"I have no conscience, none, but I would not like to bring a soul into this world. When it sinned and when it suffered something like a dead hand would fall on me – "You did it, you, for your own pleasure you created this thing! See your work!""

"The End of the World, here's salvation. Preparing the end, here's the work of the sage and the supreme purpose of ascetic existences. The apostle of charity, with effort, alms, consolations and miracles, succeeds with great difficulty to save a family from death, now vowed to a long agony thanks to his benefits. The ascetic on the other hand, saves entire generations not from death, but from life."

"If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much compassion with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?"

"The woman's share in procreation is more guiltless than the man's; for he bestows upon the child its will, which is the first sin, and therefore the root of all evil; the woman, on the contrary, bestows its intellect, which is the pathway to redemption."

"Quid tuperbit homo? cujus conceptio culpa, Nasci pœna, labor vita, necesse mori!"

"How shall a man be proud, when his conception is a crime, his birth a penalty, his life a labour, and death a necessity!"

"Some of the church fathers have taught that even marital cohabitation should only be allowed when it occurs merely for the sake of the procreation of children. ... Clemens (Strom, iii. c. 3) attributes this view to the Pythagoreans. This is, however, strictly speaking, incorrect. For if the coitus be no longer desired for its own sake, the negation of the Will-to-Live has already appeared, and the propagation of the human race is then superfluous and senseless, inasmuch as its purpose is already attained. Besides, without any subjective passion, without lust and physical pressure, with sheer deliberation, and the cold blooded purpose to place a human being in the world merely in order that he should be there this would be such a very questionable moral action that few would take it upon themselves; one might even say of it indeed that it stood in the same relation to generation from the mere sexual impulse as a cold-blooded deliberate murder does to a death-stroke given in anger."

"Life is then given out as a gift, whereas it is evident that anyone would have declined it with thanks, had he looked at it and tested it beforehand; just as Lessing admired the understanding of his son. Because this son had absolutely declined to come into the world, he had to be dragged forcibly into life by means of forceps; but hardly was he in it, when he again hurried away from it. On the other hand, it is well said that life should be, from one end to the other, only a lesson, to which, however, anyone could reply: “For this reason, I wish I had been left in the peace of the all-sufficient nothing, where I should have had no need either of lessons or of anything else.” But if it were added that one day he was to give an account of every hour of his life, he would rather be justified in first himself asking for an account as to why he was taken away from that peace and quiet and put into a position so precarious, obscure, anxious, and painful. To this, then, false fundamental views lead. Far from bearing the character of a gift, human existence has entirely the character of a contracted debt. The calling in of this debt appears in the shape of the urgent needs, tormenting desires, and endless misery brought about through that existence. As a rule, the whole lifetime is used for paying off this debt, yet in this way only the interest is cleared off. Repayment of the capital takes place through death. And when was this debt contracted? At the begetting."

"If ... we now contemplate the bustle and turmoil of life, we see everyone concerned with its cares and troubles, exerting all his strength to satisfy infinite needs and to ward off suffering in many forms, yet without daring to hope for anything else in place of it except just the preservation of this tormented existence for a short span of time. In between, however, we see in the midst of the tumult the glances of two lovers meet longingly: yet why so secretly, nervously, and furtively? Because these lovers are the traitors who secretly strive to perpetuate the whole trouble and toil that would otherwise rapidly come to an end. Such an end they try to frustrate, as others like them have frustrated it previously."

"Adoption offers an important moral alternative to procreation, which has been widely ignored or quickly dismissed in the procreation literature. It should be considered by reasonable and moral people who desire to experience the goods of a parent-child relationship while being concerned about the potential harms of procreation."

"Antinatalism is the most common response to pessimistic malaise, but relies upon a naïve hope in humanity’s ability to transform itself through reason and self-control. Such hope smarts of the same utopian optimism that was rejected by pessimistic philosophy in the first place."

"Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting. I (and that slenderest word is too gross for the rare thing I was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion, in the mood of one smelling night-blooming flowers, and suddenly—My ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months I rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me. But this I have in common with all my kind. By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. So they seal the door against our returning."

"Propagating life is propagating terror."

"Pus is constantly leaking from the rotting brain The worms reproduce in thick streams along the body They enter the heart and lower parts of the body They suck the blood and fat covering the bones Terrible merciless worms bite genitals They run to a tightened throat and eyes They want to destroy you Crush the eyeballs and close the breath So that you will wheeze and splutter in convulsion So that you will not have time for anger and hatred So that you will not be able to defend yourself You will only whine quieter and quieter Until there is total asphyxiation Then they will be able to leave Tear another body Feed on pus from another brain You gave them life It is your rotting brain that has fathered them"

"A woman Parts of the body held together by joints Guts reinforced with hips Heart breathing through nipples A woman shreds of meat formed into sculptures Smooth and moist at the ends Sculptures that are soft and smelly A woman Belly and thighs separated by crotch Crotch with a breath of agony A woman is death Long and painful"

"From the moment an infant is tossed into this chamber of horrors, we can see, if we look closely, his horror and despair. The child cries incessantly, and is brutally trained to shut up and face its horrible fate. As the child grows into teenhood and reaches the age of reason, awareness (and anger) of his situation grows. It is usually countered by the criminal parents' inevitable distancing from the child, now declaring, "I owe you nothing. I cannot field your anger." The anger, of course, is a perfectly natural and healthy response to the awareness that one has been tricked in the most monstrous way. The rest of its life is spent maintaining as much distance as possible from the terror of life, through meaningless activity and numbing addictive substances. "From the time a person leaves its mother's womb, its every effort is directed toward building, maintaining and withdrawing into artificial wombs, various sorts of substitute protective devices or shells". Absurdity stacked upon absurdity, this creature, hiding from his own shadow, wanting more than anything to crawl back into the oblivion of the mother, is successfully duped into declaring that he loves life!"

"The human body, as all other flesh, according to the Priscillianistic doctrine, came from the devil. . . . The same principles led them to disapprove of marriage, and of the procreation of children; and to forbid the eating of flesh."

"The hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence, into this, meat. And to force a life into this, thresher."

"I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal."

"The most notorious of the groups that Epiphanius attacks were known by a variety of names, including the "Phibionites". According to Epiphanius our sole source of information about the group these Gnostic believers engaged in nocturnal sex rituals that involved indiscriminate sex, coitus interruptus, and the consumption of semen and menstrual blood, all in a bizarre act of Christian worship (a sacred eucharist). Moreover, they allegedly possessed apostolic books that supported their outrageous rituals, including one known as the :Greater Questions of Mary: (Panarion 26.8). Epiphanius claims to have had access to this and the other Phibionite books. But this one he actually quotes. If the quotation does indeed go back to an actual document, as opposed to Epiphanius's fertile imagination, it is no wonder that the book never survived, as it recounts an episode in which Jesus himself engages in a sex act before a very bewildered Mary Magdalene. For the Gnostic Phibionites, this text, and their corresponding rituals, related to their doctrinal views that humans represent divine sparks entrapped in human bodies, which need to escape. Human procreation perpetuates this state of entrapment, by providing an endless supply of bodies."

"Whatever the case, it would have been better not to be born."

"Most people think it's morally acceptable to have babies. Most people think this despite the fact that the babies will certainly suffer a great deal during their lifetimes and may suffer an exceptional amount. Pronatalists generally want to point out the good things in life—the pleasant effects of puppies and sunsets—and to balance them against life's harms. But bringing a child into the world necessarily entails harming a stranger (for one doesn't know the values of one's child prior to procreation). It is no different from dosing a stranger with ecstasy for no reason, except that the harms of life massively exceed the harms of ecstasy, and the pleasure of life, for many, is much less."