Ethics

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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!""

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

""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."

"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."

"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?"

""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."

"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"."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"[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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"If we can't genetically fix our nature I agree with Zapffe. To leave world to a deserted behind is better than to continue this grotesque carousel of procreation."

"Heaven and happiness do not exist. That's your parents' way to justify the crime of having brought you into this world. What exists is reality, the tough reality, this slaughterhouse we've come to die in, if not to kill and to eat the animals, our fellow creatures. Therefore, do not reproduce, do not repeat the crimes committed against you, do not give back the same, evil paid with evil, as imposing life is the ultimate crime. Do not disturb the unborn, let them be in the peace of nothingness, anyway we'll all eventually go back there, so why beat around the bush?"

"Those I've most loved are my grandma Raquel Pizano and my dog Bruja. I also loved my dad. But after all, he is guilty of imposing on me the burden of life. Life's a burden, it's a curse. Those who I loved, now dead, drag me to the grave. It's very hard to carry on without them. The only way I can live is by forgetting them."

"All this disgrace derive from being born, which therefore is the greatest of all catastrophes."

"Adoption could help if practised on a much larger scale than nowadays, such that any child not definitely wanted by its parents, or born in unfavourable social circumstances, could be adopted by people who want children but do not want to create them for that purpose."

"In any case, it is morally preferable not to produce a child. This requires that in any individual encounter, and by any institutional activity in education, mass media, economic and legal policy, people should be discouraged from having children. If such tendencies are successful enough, the number of men on earth may begin to decrease, and if such development continues long enough, the human race will disappear. This, however, would not at all be a deplorable consequence according to Narveson's and my own opinion: the existence of mankind is not a value in itself. On the contrary, if mankind ceases to exist, all suffering is extinguished perfectly, which no other human endeavour will be able to bring about. On the other hand, of course, all happy experiences of men will disappear. But this, according to Narveson's conclusion, would not be deplorable, because no human subject would exist which would be deprived of the happy experiences."

"All conditions and all circumstances seem equally unfortunate to me, from the angel to the oyster. The grievous thing is to be born."

"If humanity is to minimize suffering in the future, it must engage with the world, not opt out of it."

"We cannot allow ourselves to spuriously rationalize away the suffering that takes place in nature, and to forget the victims of the horrors of nature merely because that reality does not fit into our convenient moral theories, theories that ultimately just serve to make us feel consistent and good about ourselves in the face of an incomprehensibly bad reality."

"Life has so few charms! And yet we desire it. No more pleasure, no more power, in the horrors of death. A dead lion is not worth a midge that breathes. O unfortunate mortal! Whether your soul is enjoying the moment given to you, or whether death is ending it, both are torture. It is better not to have been born."

"Every form of fecundity is loathsome, and no one who is honest with himself feels bound to provide for the continuity of the human race. And what we do not realise to be a duty, is not a duty. On the contrary, it is immoral to procreate a human being for any secondary reason, to bring a being into the limitations of humanity, the conditions made for him by his parentage; the fundamental question why the possible freedom and spontaneity of a human being is limited is that he was begotten in such a limited fashion. That the human race should persist is of no interest whatsoever to reason; he who would perpetuate humanity would perpetuate the problem and the guilt; the only problem and the only guilt."

"Not being born is the first step to happiness. If someone by unhappy accident is here on Earth, one thing should comfort them; they will return to the original state."

"One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that."

"Simply put, upon a nihilistic basis, I deeply believe that making children is nothing but a hopeless action. This thought can not possibly be removed, and I no longer care to remove it. In terms of pleasure, humans are unpredictable when they will drown in it, and for this reason, one should not create children to avoid getting them entangled in the mess. Children are, horrifyingly, just thrown out into this world as a result of egoistical adults who craves pleasure, with the child's life having attributed meaning afterwards so arbitrarily."

"The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pinpricks? But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution. Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye."

"No future triumph or metamorphosis can justify the pitiful blighting of a human being against his will."