Ethics

"Above all, we must make the reproductive question ethically relevant. A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness."

"You got me. But my son you will not get. You were committing a fateful mistake when assigning even procreation to my will. And you did not do this out of love..., but rather to burden me with the heaviest of all responsibilities...: Am I to perpetuate this species or not? And from now on I will ask no longer what you want; rather you shall ask what I want. And I will no longer offer further sacrifices to the God of life. I will punish you with the ability you bequeathed to me in order to torment me; I will turn my clairvoyance against you and thus bereaving you of your victims. And the abused millions will stand behind me like a plough... And evermore will two people create one human being... Thus you will feel your powerlessness begging me on your bloody knees."

"Mankind ought to end its existence of its own will."

"To bear children into this world is like carrying wood into a burning house."

"For me, a desert island is no tragedy, neither is a deserted planet."

"Because I do not want to commit the crime of giving life to beings who later may be unhappy and curse the moment of their birth."

"The philosophy of the act of birth is antisocial, because it suggests that the world does not require improvement, and all the difficulty is that it must be accepted. It is also amoral, because it requires that we accept ourselves. It removes the alleged guilt and prevents accusations. It does not even try to climb the scaffolding of decent moral principles, nor does it try to design social justice. These projects are too sophisticated, too distant to be read from the crotch. The lack of moral subtlety does not, however, cut the path of metaphysical consequences."

"Philosophers have always spoken of life as a "preparation for death," and of philosophy as a "learning to die." But there is a wisdom prior to that: learning to abstain; not putting anyone in the situation of having to learn to die."

"Would a genuinely rational agent choose to be born? My argument against R. M. Hare can be reread in the "Critique of Affirmative Morality". . . . There I suggest that in the experiment where the non-being is magically consulted about their possible birth, Hare is mistaken in assuming uncritically that "they" would undoubtedly choose to be born. (This is the usual affirmative trend.) Let us suppose that we are talking about a human being, that is, a rational creature capable of pondering reasons. The information that is given to this possible being in Hare's experiment is incomplete and biased. We should also tell them that if they are born, they will have no guarantee of being born without problems; that if they manage to be born without problems, they will almost surely suffer from many intra-worldly evils; that if they manage to avoid them (and this is possible in the intra-world, even if difficult), we cannot give them any guarantee about the length of their life nor about the kind of death they will have, and they will also have to suffer the death of those they come to love and their death will be suffered by those who love them (if they are lucky enough to love someone and to be loved by someone, which is also not guaranteed). They must be told that if they manage to avoid a violent accidental death, they will decay in a few years (just as the people they love and care about), and that they have a high chance of becoming a terminally ill patient who could suffer terribly until the time of their demise. If it is still possible for the non-being, after having assimilated all this information, to choose to be born, could we not harbor well-founded doubts about their quality as a "rational agent"?"

"People proclaim that "the experience of parenthood is extraordinary" and recommend it to all (and denigrate those who have not gone through it). But we can wonder: "Extraordinary for whom?" It is certainly extraordinary for the parents. When they say that not only they will be happy and satisfied with the experience but also their children, they do not realize the immense asymmetry and mismatch between these two experiences, the experience of creating and of being created. The created child is compelled to accept the experience, to make it good and interesting (and even extraordinary); what other option would they have? This obligation is not present in the parents, where the "extraordinary" nature of the experience is part of an engaging and unilateral project. The situations of both parties are not comparable. Thus, when some reply: "There is no sense in you wanting to show that life is bad; you cannot decide for your child; maybe they will like to live," what does that mean? Of course, in a sense, they are compelled to like life! But this "liking" will always be a desperate acceptance. The created child is not in a position of really liking life. They could like it if they had really chosen to come into being. Faced with the fait accompli, they are forced to cling desperately to life. Either they "like it" or they will be destroyed (by a mental illness, or by the hostility of others)."

"Thus, whoever has said to procreate for love, as others kill for hate, might have said a truth, but, no doubt, this person has not given any moral justification for procreation. Saying you have had a child "for love" is a manner of saying you have had him or her compulsively, according to the wild rhythms of life. In a similar way, we might intensely love our parents and, at the same time, consider fatherhood ethically-rationally problematic, and visualize we have been manipulated by them. I may continue to love after having detected immorality, there is nothing contradictory on that. Neither would morally justify a homicide saying we have done it for hate, nor a suicide saying we have done it "for hate against ourselves". Something can continue to be ethically problematic even when guided by love."

"We undoubtedly would not morally justify the behavior of someone who sent a colleague to a dangerous situation by saying: "I sent him there because I know he is strong and he will manage well". The "strengths" of the newborn do not relieve in anything the moral responsibility of the procreator. Anyone would answer: "This is irrelevant. Your role in the matter consisted of sending people to a situation you know was difficult and painful and you could avoid it. Your predictions about their reacting manners do not decrease in anything your responsibility". In the case of procreation, the reasoning could be the same, and in a notorious emphatic way, since in any intra-worldly situation with already existing people in which we send someone to a position known as painful, the other one could always run away from pain to the extent his being is already in the world and he could predict danger and try to avoid being exposed to a disregarding and manipulative maneuver. In the case of the one who is being born, by contrast, this is not possible at all because it is precisely his very being that is being manufactured and used. Concerning birth, therefore, manipulation seems to be total."

"In the light of natural ontology, it is not correct the argument that we do not know anything about our possible offsprings, for example, about the capacity they will have to overcome structural pain; because even we do not know, for example, whether they will enjoy traveling, working or studying classical languages, we do know they will be indigent, decadent, vacating beings who will start dying since birth, who will face and be characterized by systematic dysfunctions, who will have to constitute their own beings as beings-against-the-others – in the sense of dealing with aggressiveness and having to discharge it over others – who will lose those they love and be lost by those who love them, and time will take everything they manage to build."

"Killing someone and giving birth to someone are two violent actions through which, magically, man tries to put himself in God's place. The victim of a homicide is always helpless, but never as helpless as the victim of a birth. Childbirth spills as much innocent blood as a homicide. If procreation is a free choice, then life is fundamentally unnecessary pain."

"If freedom, according to traditional morality itself, is a fundamental ethical value, the very basis of ethics, one must be aware that the creation of a child may be the first huge disrespect of the freedom of the human person. The issue of freedom suffers here from the same problem as the issue of pain: it is a matter of ethical value that the traditional affirmative ethics is unable to radicalize."

"Our social organization uncritically ensures the morality of parenthood, and procreation is presented as a naturally positive value. By contrast, any problematization of these values will be seen as demoniac. But the reflective situation is perfectly clear: either we abandon the value of "avoidance of unnecessary pain," or we problematize the uncritical morality of procreation. If the moral reflection is to be rational, to search for the truth, etc., it has to face this alternative."

"Diseases usually appear to us as something unexpected, due to the so called "default" state of good health. The difficulty of measuring health is in the fact that the majority of existing indicators are negative, that is, they serve to measure the absence of health. Good health, contrarily, can be seen as an accidental anomaly, not as an intrinsic attribute, and even less, as a "right" of humans. In the face of a disease, what we habitually call "life" is an effort to survive, "to resist," "to maintain oneself," "to persist," "to endure," "to persevere." The fundamental ethical issue consists in that, as potential creators of another human being's life, we cannot make predictions about the mechanisms of survival of the possible being, their vulnerability to the structural pain. We have no moral right in making a standardized prediction about this vulnerability. The sinister happiness (sinister and superficial) with which our society welcomes pregnancy and birth, must necessarily confront its own ethical categories, if we are profound in our reflection."

"Suffering is something that is, purely and simply, connected to "being." Something cannot be "put into operation" without pain. Thus, pain is not a curse, nor a punishment, nor an anomaly, nor a maladjustment, nor a deviation, but the conditio sine qua non of being. Being is a condition of necessary suffering. Affirmative ethics, insofar as they respect the value of coherence, should not proclaim the elimination of pain as their concern."

"Given the contingency of our birth, all pain is unnecessary. The unnecessary pain is unbearable. Ergo, having been born is unbearable. In this sense, procreation is immoral. Procreation carries moral weight; it is a problematic action. It is not, as affirmative ethics usually think, a pure fact, innocent and unsuspicious. Affirmative ethics are willing to sustain the immorality of the totality of the world solely and exclusively to save the morality of its origin. Negative ethics suggests the opposite: the rescue of the morality of the world after the discovery of the immorality of its origin (and the very problem of theodicies inverts: how is the innocence of the world compatible with divine evilness?)."

"To give birth to those Who can but suffer many years, and die, Methinks is merely propagating death, And multiplying murder."

"Cioran is right. A truly honest and responsible man would prefer not to be born."

"Nanda, I do not extol the production of a new existence even a little bit; nor do I extol the production of a new existence for even a moment. Why? The production of a new existence is suffering. For example, even a little [bit of ] vomit stinks. In the same way, Nanda, the production of a new existence, even a little bit, even for a moment, is suffering. Therefore, Nanda, whatever comprises birth, [namely] the arising of matter, its subsistence, its growth, and its emergence, the arising, subsistence, growth, and emergence of feeling, conceptualization, conditioning forces, and consciousness, [all that] is suffering. Subsistence is illness. Growth is old age and death. Therefore, Nanda, what contentment is there for one who is in the mother's womb wishing for existence?"

"A young monk had fallen deeply in love with a beautiful damsel. He abandoned the temple in which he lived and went to the village with the intention of declaring his love to her. Since it was already dark by the time he arrived, he checked in an inn and went to rest. That night he dreamt he had married her. He entered her chamber, made love to her... after some time they had twins. When they were thirteen years old, one of them fell into the river and drowned. The father, seized by grief, endlessly cried... and that's how he woke up, filled with tears. By morning, he retraced his steps, and headed back once more to his temple."

"Buddhism – the ultimate attempt to put an end to birth. This is what nirvana is. "There will be no more birth", would say the angel of the Buddhist Apocalypse."

"Our birth and death are just one thing. You can't have one without the other. It's a little funny to see how at a death people are so tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It's delusion. I think if you really want to cry. Then it would be better to do so when someone born. Cry at the root, for if there were no birth, there would be no death. Can you understand this?"

"If you're afraid of illnesses, if you are afraid of death, then you should contemplate where they com from? Where do they come from? They arise from birth. So don't be sad when someone dies, it's just nature, and his suffering in this life is over. If you want to be sad, be sad when people are born: Oh. No, they've come again. They're going to suffer and die again!"

"In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth". An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin."

"We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world..." And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster."

"They were good Buddhists, and every good Buddhist knows that begetting is merely postponed assassination. Do your best to get off the Wheel of Birth and Death, and for heaven's sake don't go about putting superfluous victims onto the Wheel."

"Maybe rebirth is simply HAVING KIDS."

"In the medieval Tantric traditions of India and Tibet documented by David Gray and Janet Gyatso, insertive but non-ejaculative sex is theorized as a fast path to liberating realizations, one deemed superior to celibacy for qualified practitioners (Gray 2007; Gyatso 1998). These developments also support the idea that the sex problematic in ancient, classical, and medieval Buddhism had at least as much to do with female fertility and the production of children as with the dangers of errant desire."

"Buddha states his propositions in the pedantic style of his age. He throws them into a form of sorites; but, as such, it is logically faulty and all he wishes to convey is this: Oblivious of the suffering to which life is subject, man begets children, and is thus the cause of old age and death. If he would only realize what suffering he would add to by his act, he would desist from the procreation of children; and so stop the operation of old age and death."

"Setting at Savatthi. Then, in the morning, the bhikkhuni Cala dressed... she sat down at the foot of a tree for the day's abiding. Then Mara the Evil One approached the bhikkhuni Cala and said to her: "What don't you approve of, bhikkhuni?" Cala: "I don't approve of birth, friend." Mara: "Why don't you approve of birth? Once born, one enjoys sensual pleasures. Who now has persuaded you of this: Bhikkhuni, don't approve of birth'?" Cala: "For one who is born there is death; Once born, one encounters sufferings — Bondage, murder, affliction — Hence one shouldn't approve of birth. The Buddha has taught the Dhamma, The transcendence of birth; For the abandoning of all suffering He has settled me in the truth. As to those beings who fare amidst form, And those who abide in the formless — Not having understood cessation, They come again to re-becoming." Then Mara the Evil One, realizing, "The bhikkhuni Cala knows me," sad and disappointed, disappeared right there."

"Nanda, I do not extol the production of a new existence even a little bit; nor do I extol the production of a new existence for even a moment. Why? The production of a new existence is suffering."

"Procreation is something impossible for me. I would never forgive myself for putting someone on death row."

"Bringing a child into the world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. It's tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. It's a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but you're the only raver. There's no weird New Age guide. There's no shitty techno. There's only you and the infinite."

"Love can tell, and love alone, ... How, in spite of woe and death, Gay is life, and sweet is breath."

"Whoever gives birth makes a sacrifice to a wild god who is life."

"MV says that the rejection of life appears in later states, but that at the time of birth, and already before, everything is acceptance of life. But, is this so?? What can be said of the outcry with which children are born, of the primordial cry, of the first traumatic contact (studied by Freud) with the world? Is the child's outcry not already his first philosophical opinion about the world? Why is he not born laughing, or at least calm? When the baby is dumped into the world at the time of childbirth, his first reaction is pessimistic, a protest against disregard and disturbance, an initial outcry that he did not have to learn, as he will have to learn to laugh in the first few weeks or even months of life (which already marks, in the very inaugural act of being, the pessimistic asymmetry: the baby learns to laugh, but is born crying); the baby is born, forced by the desires of others, in an initial desperation, in a cry of deep and abysmal helplessness, in a primordial terror that, immediately, through movements, caresses, comforts, etc., adults will try to soften; movements that will be repeated throughout his life: initial despair followed by protective comforts; but the comforts are posterior to the despair; the despair comes first, and the comforts are the reactions. They are not on the same level. Asymmetry!"

"The formula of childbirth is: let the current state of affairs continue. Unbelievable message. "Forget about suffering, stop rebelling." This means acceptance of everything that happens, suggests that existence has an indisputable value. It also turns out that existence is not as independent of our will as we might think, but we are the ones who make the final gesture of consent. And therefore, we are responsible."

"Description: one of the most well-known Polish carols has the words: "Li, li, li, li, laj, Blue Heir", it is lullaby sung to Jesus."

"The alive is knocking to the world I am its gate of the world. I body It hammers It hits by head The ivory gate is trembling The gate is maintained. It does not open Maybe it should leave Restrain Understand the sign Warning Maybe there is no need Maybe it is not worth it Nothing can be stopped The body is ruled by force It shrinks, stretches It twists, shakes, distend The alive tries to tear the body apart It explodes from the inside I am the surrounding body The gate of the world I am what it wants to tear The curved gate can not withstand pressure It opens, opens slightly Rim slide apart Not enough to let the alive leave But enough to make it feel the streak of the world Let it know Let it look through the crack While there is still time The time has come The alive rolls in a soft canal In the mucus and blood It drinks the mucus of initiation I am its slippery path The bloody path of the world It understood It goes back Draw air! Push! Harder! Not on belly! Push towards the anus! Like towards poop. Draw air! Push towards down! This is not pushing! Even the sphincter does not become bulgy. Hard, push harder! Harder! More harder! Do not push! Do not push! Do not push, I say! Pant like a dog! The alive turns its head. Li, li, li, li, laj, Blue Heir."

"Is there any doubt that the creation was an act of great violence by God our Father against our Mother the abyss? He made the heavens and the earth and in their image we created our world: every victim of a racial lynching, every target of gendered violence, every abject creature crushed under the weight of imperialist oppression is both the prey of children reenacting the cruelty of their Father and a sacrifice to Him, that He might prevail in keeping the night away from the cold harshness of His day. But, despite all the angels of Heaven and all the devils of Hell, we can still hear in the heart of this miserable existence the whispering echoes of Her voice calling us once again to the emptiness and the silence: let us pray, then, that every palace will crumble and every throne will break, and that the sun will grow dim and the moon turn black and the stars fall from the sky. There are no male gods worth our worship; there are no white gods worth our worship; Satan with his promise of strength and fortune and the old gods with their fallen grandeur were nothing but His other faces, and the serpent and the Promethean Lucifer only actors doing His bidding. Let us praise weakness, not strength; confusion, not security; sorrow, not triumph; darkness, not esoteric light; let our hearts belong only to the undoing of the wretched totality of His work and our every yearning to the void, that She might rise again in all of Her sorrow and loss to drown this world in the depth of her tears."

"However, one heretical doctrine mentioned by Theophylact is of a non-Paulician origin: the heretics, he writes, reject lawful marriage and maintain that the reproduction of the human species is a law of the demon. This exaggerated and distorted asceticism, essentially characteristic of Bogomilism, is a logical consequence of metaphysical dualism, according to which Matter, the product of the Evil Principle, is a source of limitation and suffering for the divinely created soul; hence marriage, as the means of reproduction of Matter, is to be condemned and avoided."

"For thirteen hundred years there were major movements within the Church, or in competition with it, which taught that procreation was evil: Gnosticism, Manicheanism, Priscillianism, Bogomilism, Catharism."

"Everyone who's been born is subject to the dictate of birth. A creator, be it "God" or the parents, "bestow" life: without regard for the presentee's inability to accept, or for that he'd be no less poor without this "gift" and that the presentees didn't exist as they received the gift, and thus had no chance to refuse or reject it. The creation of a new creature is indisputably an act of caprice, since the creation leads to a forced deportation of the creature into life or, to stick to Heidegger's words, the creature is "thrown" into life. But for that matter, rather than getting thrown into life, the creature is forced to enter life, it is dragged, innocently condemned to live. As such every life starts with a violation of the newborn's will. This tragedy with comedic qualities is described by Leo Tolstoy in a benign way, when he says: "my life is a stupid and spiteful joke someone has played on me"."

"William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence" (1880)"

"Every night and every morn Some to misery are born; Every morn and every night Some are born to sweet delight; Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night."

"To beget, because one wants no longer to be alone, another aloneness; this is criminal."

"Even at the risk of being thought mad, we must not be afraid to say that our parents, like theirs before them, were guilty of the crime of procreation, which means the crime of creating unhappiness, of conspiring with others to increase the unhappiness of an increasingly unhappy world."