Philosophy

"The principle of caution, respecting the gravity of human suffering, weighs against procreating to the extent that it is unpredictable whether the person created will have a good life."

"The perpetuation of suffering by producing children is the greatest crime."

"Because of the present crisis, I think it is good for a man to remain as he is. Are you committed to a wife? Do not seek to be released. Are you free of commitment? Do not look for a wife."

"Why make children? In the name of what? To achieve what? What legitimizes pulling a being out of nothingness, disturbing its peace, only so that it would have to take a short walk on this planet, leading back to the nothingness from which it was pulled out?"

"Those childless by choice love children as much, if not more, than their fertile breeders. When asked why he does not have children, Thales replied, "because of my concern for children.""

"Only someone who loves children the most can see them beyond the tip of their own nose and wonder about the consequences of signing death sentences on not yet existing beings."

"Is not the cruel will of adults, by causing birth, condemning children to work, discipline, obedience, submission, frustration in a nursery, primary school, middle school, high school, university or army, and then in a factory, in a workshop, in a company or in an office? Should we call love transmitting this vileness to the body from our own body?"

"By hedonistic logic, we ought to avoid imposing anything, existence included, onto anyone who hasn't asked for it."

"Should we feed this farce even more? Enrich this cruel theater, as if we were blind to the events unfolding on it? To want to be blind, to say it is innocent, to not think and obey the power of libido, all this to give us, in this way, the illusion of an effective fight against the constantly triumphant death?"

"Not having children derives not from dislike, but from love too great to bring them into this world, too limited, too vain, too cruel."

"We may ask ourselves whether we have a moral right to create people and thus condemn them to life and death without their consent."

"There is no place to go, there is no reason to pass the baton forward and hope that a future new generation will achieve some shred of happiness that should have been the right of all who have lived. Repeating the famous phrase of Julius Caesar: I came, I saw, I conquered; there is nothing noteworthy for me in this universe, except its vast indifference, and the desire I have to struggle against its aims. I have some hope in myself, and in non-existence (if it is still possible to speak of hope!) Besides that, I do not wish to have anything to do with this despicable existence."

"Parents generally cannot cope with the emptiness of existence; they cannot embrace the fact that life is a series of motivations related to survival, avoiding boredom, avoiding discomfort, etc. This basically involves reaching goals, and then becoming dissatisfied, pursuing other goals, and becoming dissatisfied again, and so on. Working, entertaining oneself, seeking things to kill time, dealing with the future, with illnesses, accumulating possessions and trifling occupations. And all this for what purpose? To become rich, to become someone important? Of course, people kill and die for these things, but then what? What does one do with these things in this brief time? Our intention here is not only to demotivate, but to truly inquire about why people all try to accumulate things, to be better than others, even committing crimes, eliminating the lives of others, if in a certain sense they are all united, they are all part of the same game, they are distant cousins, evolutionarily, and in the end, everyone is condemned to the same outcome, that is, pure and simple dissolution."

"Procreation imposes existence on beings who have not chosen to be born. It amounts to a form of enslavement or conscription which is an immoral act on two counts: violating the autonomy of a potential being, and exposing them to pain and suffering."

"Programmed by nature and socialized by the collective, which demands conformity, we are required to play the "game" of life. But as one of Beckett's characters puts it, "why this farce day after day?" Where is all this leading to?"

"The two Taoists reminded Saihung that the critical thing in life was to die a spiritual death, to merge with the Void. In order to do so, one had to be free of the cycle of reincarnation. This meant absolutely no earthly ties. The important point was that having children automatically tied one to the circle of reincarnation. How could it be otherwise? By passing on one's metaphysical and physical genetics, one perpetuated one's earthly karma. This was why the sages had no biological children."

"I tell myself: reluctance to think to the end Is lifesaving for the living. Could lucid consciousness Bear everything that in every minute, Simultaneously, occurs on the earth? Not to harm. Stop eating fish and meat. Let oneself be castrated, like Tiny, a cat innocent Of the drownings of kittens every day in our city. The Cathari were right: Avoid the sin of conception (For either you kill your seed and will be tormented by conscience Or you will be responsible for a life of pain)."

"To not be, to not suffer To not inflict pain. Undo it all One existence, That neither tidings Nor souvenir Would stay after me."

"Death is humiliation, because it tears us away from words, the sounds of music, configurations of line and colour, so from all that of which our anti-natural freedom manifests, and it gives us to the yoke of necessity, it sends us back to the realm of inertia, not culpable decay and not culpable birth."

"But what if, as the first truly compassionate philosophical ethicist, it would then attempt to convince us that it was high time to peacefully terminate the ugly biological bootstrap-phase on this planet?"

"What a hell! All her youth, all her beauty, every hope of success, every poetical ideal of a brilliant life sacrificed to that abominable law of reproduction which turns the normal woman into a mere machine for bringing children into the world."

"God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude. He seems to have made them only in order that they may reproduce their species in an ignoble manner and then die like ephemeral insects. I said reproduce their species in an ignoble manner and I adhere to that expression. What is there as a matter of fact more ignoble and more repugnant than that act of reproduction of living beings, against which all delicate minds always have revolted and always will revolt?"

"In Marcion's view, all procreation only prolonged suffering as the new souls thus created were captured in a material prison."

"Especially clear is the purpose of obstructing in the prohibition of sexual intercourse and marriage: "Not wishing to help replenish the world made by the Demiurge, the Marcionites decreed abstention from matrimony, defying their creator and hastening to the Good One who has called them and who, they say, is God in a different sense: wherefore, wishing to leave nothing of their own down here, they turn abstemious not from a moral principle but from hostility to their maker and unwillingness to use his creation" (Clem. Alex. he. cit.). Here the pollution by the flesh and its lust, so widespread a theme in this age, is not even mentioned; instead (though not to its exclusion: cf. Tertullian, op. cit. I. 19, where marriage is called a "filthiness" or "obscenity" [spurcitiae]) it is the aspect of reproduction which disqualifies sexuality that very aspect which in the eyes of the Church alone justifies it as its purpose under nature's dispensation. Marcion here voices a genuine and typical gnostic argument, whose fullest elaboration we shall meet in Mani: that the reproductive scheme is an ingenious archontic device for the indefinite retention of souls in the world. Thus Marcion's asceticism, unlike that of the Essenes or later of Christian monasticism, was not conceived to further the sanctification of human existence, but was essentially negative in conception and part of the gnostic revolt against the cosmos."

"None were admitted to baptism, or the Eucharist, unless they had taken an oath against having any children."

"The Manichean attitude to marriage was entirely negative as the act of procreation prolongs the imprisonment of Soul, which would now be further diversified into matter."

"The practical conclusions from this cosmo-soteriologicalsystem are extremely clear-cut, all of them amounting to a rigorous asceticism. "Since the ruin of the Hyle is decreed by God, one should abstain from all ensouled things and eat only vegetables and whatever else is non-sentient, and abstain from marriage, the delights of love and the begetting of children, so that the divine Power may not through the succession of generations remain longer in the Hyle." However, one must not, in order to help effect the purification of things, commit suicide."

"If anyone condemns human marriage and has a horror of the procreation of living bodies, as Manichaeus and Priscillian have said, let him be anathema."

"What is the ideal state? It will be the historical form that encompasses all mankind. However, we will not define this form in more detail, because it is quite a minor matter: the main thing is the citizen of the ideal state. He will be what individuals have been since the beginning of history: a thoroughly free man. He has completely outgrown the taskmaster of historical laws and forms and stands above the law, free from all political, economic and spiritual fetters. All external forms are fragmented: man is completely emancipated. All driving forces have gradually disappeared from the life of mankind: Power, property, fame, marriage; all emotional ties have gradually been torn: man is weary. His spirit now judges life correctly and his will is kindled by this judgment. Now the heart is filled with only one longing: to be blotted out forever from the great book of life. And the will reaches its goal: absolute death."

"The man who has known clearly and distinctly that all life is suffering; that, whatever the way in which it may appear is essentially unhappy and full of pain (even in the ideal state), so that he, like the Christ Child on the arms of Sistine Madonna, can only look into the world with eyes filled with horror, and who then contemplates the deep tranquility, the inexpressible happiness in aesthetic contemplation and, in contrast to the waking state, the happiness of dreamless sleep, whose elevation into eternity is only absolute death, - such a man has to be kindled by the advantage offered, - he cannot do otherwise. The thought of resuscitating in his unhappy children, that is, having to follow his way through the streets of existence, full of thorns and hard stones, without rest or repose, is, on the one hand, the most shocking and exasperating he can have; and, on the other hand, it must be the sweetest and most refreshing thought to be able to break the long course of the process, in which he was forced to walk by, with bloody feet, beaten, tormented and martyred, languishing in search of quietude. And once he is on the right track, the sexual instinct worries him less with every step, little by little becoming easier for his heart, until at last his inner being stands in the same joyfulness, blessed serenity and complete immobility as the true Christian saint. He feels in harmony with the movement of humanity from being into non-being, out of the agony of life into absolute death; he gladly enters into this movement of the whole, he acts eminently morally, and his reward is the undisturbed peace of heart, the "calmness of the sea of the mind," the peace that is higher than all reason. And all this can take place without the belief in a unity in, above or beyond the world, without fear of a hell or hope for a kingdom of heaven after death, without any mystical intellectual view, without incomprehensible effect of grace, without contradiction with nature and our awareness of our own self: the only sources from which we can draw with certainty, - merely as a result of an unprejudiced, pure, cold realization of our reason, "man's supreme power"."

"The will must not only despise death, it must love it; for chastity is the love of death."

"And who is and should be a pessimist? He who is mature for death and is in no condition to love life, just as the optimist cannot turn away from it. If he does not realize that he will live on in his children, his procreation loses its horrible character; but if he does realize it, he will recoil in horror from it, just like Humboldt when he noticed that the torments that another being must endure for perhaps eighty years are too high a price to pay for a few minutes of pleasure, and will consider the procreation of children, and rightly so, as a crime."

"I had no children. I haven't transmitted the legacy of our misery to any creature."

"Not only does having a child really increase your carbon footprint, but we are living on an earth where there are a lot of organisms — human, non-human — that are in desperate need of care. And so, for me, if people want to care for children, for animals, whatever, there are cries for care everywhere. I'm asking us to reflect on this idea that we need to reproduce."

"What loss were ours, if we had know not birth? Let living me to longer life aspire, While fond affection binds their hearts to earth But who never hath tasted life's desire, Unborn, impersonal, can feel no dearth."

"He teaches that people should refrain from marriage to oppose the prospering of the demiurge and creator through human procreation "because matrimony," he says, "is a source of prosperity for the demiurge, through human procreation.""

"It is good to be a cynic – it is better to be a contented cat – and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world – we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death – the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed."

"Personally, I'm afraid of suffering and afraid of dying. I'm also afraid of witnessing the suffering and death of those who are close to me. And no doubt I project these fears on those around me and those to come, which makes it impossible for me to understand why everyone isn't an antinatalist, just as I have to assume pronatalists can't understand why everyone isn't like them."

"Despite the fact that neither anti- nor pronatalists can prove their positions, pro-natalists have to live with the possibility that they might be wrong. That is a heavy burden to carry, and a heavier burden to pass on to subsequent generations. Antinatalists don't have a similar burden. When the action is taken on their side and a child is not born, no harm is done. No one has to suffer and die."

"Opinion: There are no praiseworthy incentives to reproduce. For pro-natalists, children are only a means to an end, and none of those ends is praiseworthy. They are the ends of people who already exist, a condition that automatically makes them prejudiced in favor of existence. Yet even though these people think that being alive is all right, they are not at a loss to think of reasons why in some cases it would be better not to have been. They can only hope that their children will not be one of those cases, for their sake as well as for the sake of their offspring. To have a praiseworthy incentive for bearing a child, one would first have to prove that child to be an end in itself, which no one can prove about anything, least of all about something that does not yet exist. You could argue, of course, that a child is an end in itself and is a good in itself. And you could go on arguing until the child ages to death or sickens to death or has a fatal vehicular misadventure. But you cannot argue that anyone comes to an end that is a good in itself. You can only accept that someday he or she will come to an end that is an end in itself, which, as people sometimes say, may be for the best."

"As their numbers tapered off, these dead-enders of our species could be the most privileged individuals in history and share with one another material comforts once held in trust only for the well-born or moneygetting classes of the world. Since personal economic gain would be passé as a motive for the new humanity, there would be only one defensible incitement to work: to see one another through to the finish, a project that would keep everyone busy and not just staring into space while they waited for the end. There might even be bright smiles exchanged among these selfless benefactors of those who would never be forced to exist."

"Perhaps the greatest strike against philosophical pessimism is that its only theme is human suffering. This is the last item on the list of our species' obsessions and detracts from everything that matters to us, such as the Good, the Beautiful, and a Sparkling Clean Toilet Bowl. For the pessimist, everything considered in isolation from human suffering or any cognition that does not have as its motive the origins, nature, and elimination of human suffering is at base recreational, whether it takes the form of conceptual probing or physical action in the world—for example, delving into game theory or traveling in outer space, respectively. And by "human suffering," the pessimist is not thinking of particular sufferings and their relief, but of suffering itself. Remedies may be discovered for certain diseases and sociopolitical barbarities may be amended. But these are only stopgaps. Human suffering will remain insoluble as long as human beings exist. The one truly effective solution for suffering is that spoken of in Zapffe’s "Last Messiah." It may not be a welcome solution for a stopgaps world, but it would forever put an end to suffering, should we ever care to do so. The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real."

"As soon as the child is born, the mother who has just brought him into the world must console him, quiet his crying, and lighten the burden of the existence she has given him. And one of the principal duties of good parents in the childhood and early youth of their children is to comfort them, to encourage them to live, because sorrows and ills and passions are at that age much heavier than they are to those who through long experience, or simply because they have lived longer, are used to suffering. And in truth it is only fitting that the good father and the good mother, in trying to console their children, correct as best they can, and ease, the damage they have done by procreating them. Good God! Why then is man born? And why does he procreate? To console those he has given birth to for having been born?"

"Thus I reply to you [Nature]. I am well aware you did not make the world for the service of men. It were easier to believe that you made it expressly as a place of torment for them. But tell me: why am I here at all? Did I ask to come into the world? Or am I here unnaturally, contrary to your will? If however, you yourself have placed me here, without giving me the power of acceptance or refusal of this gift of life, ought you not as far as possible to try and make me happy, or at least preserve me from the evils and dangers, which render my sojourn a painful one? And what I say of myself, I say of the whole human race, and of every living creature."

"It were more reasonable that you [Nature] made happiness a necessity; or this being impossible, it were better not to bring men into the world."

"Perhaps in every state beneath the sun, Or high, or low, in cradle or in stall, The day of birth is fatal to us all."

"In travail man is born; His birth too oft the cause of death, And with his earliest breath He pain and torment feels: e'en from the first, His parents fondly strive To comfort him in his distress; And if he lives and grows, They struggle hard, as best they may, With pleasant words and deeds to cheer him up, And seek with kindly care, To strengthen him his cruel lot to bear. This is the best that they can do For the poor child, however fond and true. But wherefore give him life? Why bring him up at all, If be all? If life is nought but pain and care, Why, why should we the burden bear?"

"Being asked for what purpose he thought men were born, he laughingly replied: To realize how much better it were not to be born."

"If we procreate, we put the child in a situation of innumerable risks and without guarantees for their well-being. If we do not procreate, we do not put them at risk and at the same time we do not deprive them of anything, because they never came into being, they never came to exist, and thus they will never miss anything."

"Certainly there are innumerable risks in procreation. But the real problem is not simply that there are risks, but that these risks extend to the child, not being limited only to the father and mother. The decision, when taken in favor of procreation, exceeds the parties who have taken the decision, and thus brings implications to a necessarily innocent being, who did not actively participate in this process that would affect them. A parent who is truly committed to their child's well-being would not create these possibilities, nor put them in risky situations, nor bring about something that could be devastating to the child."