Ethics

"That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we were separated."

"If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?"

"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 situation we have is basically the following: an individual deliberately inflicts great physical, emotional and psychological suffering on someone else in the hope of diminishing his own, and the victim will never be able to defend himself from such aggression, except through suicide. Logically, the pain will not be caused directly by us, but by the circumstances in which we place the individual. However, this could have been avoided with any cheap condom. To cause great pain to an innocent person, just to achieve a small reduction of our own, is a vile and revolting act. We could, without a doubt, feel entitled to demand reparation for such injustice, for having been placed in this unworthy and degrading situation. It would make sense to receive compensation for the inconvenience of being born, but this is something that, as was said, nature has already wisely provided in the form of an instinct to protect the offspring. Parental love is the indemnity that children receive from their parents for having placed them in the world."

"If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable of all."

"Obviously, we have the freedom to be as evil and selfish as we want, but we cannot deny that we are guilty of being so; there is no way to be innocent of this accusation. Originally, that life did not exist, never existed, and would have remained non-existent, if only we did not have the admirable idea of ​​ejaculating in a womb and making it appear out of nothingness to then claim that their suffering "is not our problem", that we are not responsible because it is “natural”. Now, even a theologian could not take such a lame excuse seriously. The objection that procreation does not necessarily make us evil because suffering occurs in life in a natural and inevitable way is not justified because, although we cannot change life's intimate constitution, we have the choice to reproduce or not. He who is born, on the contrary, cannot choose whether to come into the world or not, just as we had no choice regarding our own birth. We may or may not have children. However, when we decide to have them, this choice makes us positively evil, gratuitously cruel. We, as an insomnia of matter, harm that which sleeps deeply only to share our lack of sleep, to feel less bored with our embarrassingly futile existences."

"In this perspective, reproduction makes us the only ones responsible for creating suffering in the world. Without us, there would be no pain. But there is, and it's our fault. Objectively, pain is not a bad thing, but it is subjectively. We, as living beings, have pain as the supreme reference point for everything that is undesirable. Our objective, biological nature imposes this condition on us. Just as pleasure is good, pain is bad - whether physical, emotional or psychological. Let the relativists stand up, with their crazy theories about the “arbitrariness” of the issue: we would like to see them believe this while we insert spikes under their nails. The presence of pain as something positively undesirable is an essential requirement for life to be sustainable, it is a condition imposed objectively on the survival machines that we are. Pain makes us efficient organisms, and without it we would not function properly, we would just die painlessly for ignoring the dangers that surround us. This means that when we make all the pain that exists on earth appear out of nothingness, when we put matter in the only condition in which it can suffer, that is, when we transform it into a living being, we become positively evil, responsible for the dissemination of suffering. Thus, intentional reproduction makes us perverse and immoral beings, and this in a purely objective sense, because it is a universally valid judgment, whatever the circumstances in which we find ourselves. As long as there is pain in existence, as long as life involves suffering, the act of reproducing means collaborating with its growth, perpetuating this misfortune, actively endeavoring to make the world a more painful and pitiful place."

"Non-living matter, being purely objective, is oblivious to the subjective phenomena that torment living creatures, that is, free from any and all suffering, in a state of perfect serenity. It does not makes sense to try to be "mean" with inanimate matter. There is no way to torture rocks by throwing them off cliffs, hammering them, etc. There is only one way to make matter suffer: by transforming it into a living being. It follows that, even from an objective point of view, we can find moral implications in reproduction, since it condemns matter to suffer needlessly in the form of a living being driven by afflictions and needs, only to later return to the same situation in which it initially found itself, without any meaning or benefit to it. From this perspective, we do not claim that reproduction is wrong, only that it is cruel. We affirm that, objectively, to live is to suffer. However, we do not draw subjective conclusions from this. Whether or not it is worth living is a different and subjective question, which refers to the value we attach to life. The immorality lies in the fact that the value of life is an issue that can only be considered by those who are already alive. When we reproduce, we impose our personal conclusions on someone who cannot even defend himself. Naturally, it is not a transcendental and absolute morality, but one relative to life. It can be understood as objective in the sense of referring to something that necessarily occurs, due to the very nature of life, due to the conditions imposed on subjective existence when inserted in the determinations of the objective world. Therefore, let us not confuse this observation with moral preaching about right and wrong, right and duty, etc. We are only concerned with objectively describing the physical consequences of the equally physical phenomenon of bringing into existence a new consciousness that will be haunted by the restlessness that moves life."

"Some children go on crying until they are quite old, later finding other forms of protest. A small child is a hive of explosive and irresistible needs, aspirations and desires. There is nothing a child says more than: “I want, I want, I want”. Children are constantly torn by desires they are now forced to manage in order to endure the life that was asymmetrically imposed on them, and to which they are compelled to live. The progenitors will deny their children most of what their offspring believe they must have, by telling them that the world does not revolve around their wants, ironically as these same parents endowed their children with bodies full of insatiable desires. Children constantly fall prey to their desires, especially under the multiple forms of painful expectations, discouragements and boredom, which require their parents to shield their offspring from the mortal danger of the being given at birth. This is, of course, the role of toys and of the entire paraphernalia of objects that parents are now compelled to put between their small children and the terminal being they have imposed on them. In the streets and in shopping malls, we see small children crying loudly, asking for this or that, being dragged away by irritated, placid or excessively attentive parents, or indifferent ones, who have neither the sensibility nor the patience to attend to their children’s complaints, unhearing and absentminded, as if the small ones’ demands were irrelevant and did not deserve attention. One may say that a few minutes later the child will be smiling or laughing again; but note that this happens just for a while when he finds some type of distraction, something that diverts his attention for a short period of time."

"Small children continue crying for many years; they cry and cry. This is a very usual spectacle that we constantly observe in the streets, children crying incessantly, most of the time met with a wall of indifference from adults, or else with laughter or impatience. Crying children often bother us, but we have to make a philosophical effort to understand that, from an ethical point of view, they are perfectly right, they have the right to cry. Moved by their tears, we have to accept their vindication, even if cries are strident and bothersome; we must learn to see children’s crying as ethical responses or instinctive political facts, as a perfectly fair and understandable reaction to what was done to them. Children’s tears must provoke our most profound respect, because they come from the depths of their structural helplessness, of their being made by force."

"All of the inescapable and tyrannical bodily necessities are already presented to the baby in the form of new cries and sufferings. Progenitors will become increasingly conscious of this and they will keep saying: “He’s crying; maybe he’s hungry”; “He’s crying; maybe he's cold”; “He’s crying; maybe he’s tired”, without ever arriving at the ominous “He’s crying because he was born”."

"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."

"The "eternal gratitude" is present not only in the early stages of life, but throughout children's long dependence upon their parents during the first ten years of life — in which they are even objects of exhibition — and in the harsh period of adolescence, in which children are endlessly treated as "ungrateful", as if they were never able to repay their immense debt; everything that is bought for them, for their future, their studies, all those things that the child never asked for, which are part of an affective and economic investment of the parents, is endlessly and for long and hard years, presented as proof of sacrifice and love, as an object of eternal gratitude, never fully repaid by the ungrateful children. The position of parenthood constitutes a powerful mechanism of domination in which even the physical violence of punishments and beatings is justified in favor of the never-requested raising of that being who was thrown into the world, with parents trying to build protections so that their child is not destroyed by the immense gift they just received."

"It is very curious that it is sometimes considered cruel or inhumane to raise the issue of the ethics of procreation, as if this showed a rejection of the unborn children, a kind of hatred for their lives. This is a total deformation of the intentions of an ethical reflection on procreation. On the contrary, this reflection is motivated by a deep concern for the possible children, due to the risk of their emergence being the consequence of a thoughtless, constraining and aggressive act towards small defenseless beings, on whom one thinks to have full right to plan everything about their lives to our full desire and satisfaction. A great part of the revolt that awakens in the adult world due to the simple mention of this issue indicates that the parents obtain a great pleasure in the procreative act, and react – sometimes angrily – against those who question this powerful source of pleasure, and consequently the immense power over the one who is going to be born. This total power over another life is intensely seductive and no one wants to give it up. But in the ethical reflection, whatever the subject matter is, it is never an issue of evaluating only the satisfaction we get from our actions, but of pondering whether what we do is right or not, whether the power we can accumulate over more defenseless beings is or is not ethically justified."

"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."

"When someone (including philosophers) defends the alleged beauty of "having children", they refer to the pleasure of "seeing them grow up": first as children, then adolescents, then graduated and independent adults (this happens not only in wealthy classes but also, in part, in more modest ones). However, it is strange that, when they speak about children, they inexplicably stop at this point and never refer to their decline, their aging, or their decay; perhaps because they think they will not be there to contemplate this decline. The parents prefer not to see the end of this process, as if the child vanished into thin air. The residual aspect of parenthood is omitted; only the flourishing aspects of the child are visualized. The death of the child-residue is denied any visibility. The consummation of the processes is concealed as something dirty and indecent, not worthy to be shown."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"There is no need here to detail again his thoughts on the futility of procreation and mankind's strange urge to reproduce. The child's constant wailing, however, moves him to infer that he (or she, as the case may be) is sickly and weak, and to remark with bitter irony, "The first present he received from his loving parents is weakness and ill-health.""

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

"Everything is wonderfully clear if we admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune event; but if we think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat like everyone else."

"When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered."

"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."

"Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"What is most curious is that humans of poorer classes are usually the ones who cultivate an unlimited adoration for their mother for having raised them with so many sacrifices. They suffer all kinds of misery, extreme poverty, disease, delinquency, discrimination, exclusion and torture, never realizing that it was their parents who put them in that situation for their own pleasure or due to irresponsible carelessness. And when the child commits some harmful act driven by the despair in which they were placed, people still sympathize with the "poor mother" for having a child that is "so ungrateful". All inherited misery magically becomes the child's responsibility! The same argumentative scheme which is applied here, is also applied in the theodicies: the impeccable Parent created their child out of love, gave them something very valuable, and also made them "free", while the child, being free, sinned, thus behaved wrongly and defiled this very valuable thing which was given to them, causing dissatisfaction for their unfortunate parent. It is an almost tragicomic scheme, because it is the exact opposite that seems to be true: our parents gave us, for their own pleasure and benefit, something of very dubious value which we, as a result of subjection and necessity – that is, very far from any real "freedom" – have to try to improve with a lot of our effort. As long as we do not reverse this prevailing valuation in our societies, ethical issues cannot even begin to be seriously considered, because the mother's viscerally egocentric and manipulative relationship with their children will continue to be regarded as a paradigm of ethical morality, which seems, at least, to be a crucial error of appreciation, a very serious mythology, a colossal mystification."

"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."

"Of course, the possibility of the newborn not having the strength to endure the life struggle is just a possibility, not a necessity. However, the point is that its mere possibility is enough for moral imputation. There are no strong causal relations between methods of education and raising of children to shape their destinies in life. As they say, a child is "a lottery". The precautions that progenitors take to avoid certain risks for their children could be precisely the ones that expose them to greater danger. The many human lives that end catastrophically seem to illustrate the very high price to be paid in an attempt to ethically justify the "gamble" of procreation, even if made in the most serious way by the sensitive procreator. However, it is important that even when none of these catastrophes occurs, the success of the newborn in life does not exempt the progenitors from the moral responsibility of having put him at risk of falling victim to one of these calamities. Moreover, even for the child who has "won" the gamble, his "success" will remain forever and indefinitely connected to the unilateral nature of the procreative act. The gamble will have been won, but this will never be the child's own bet. The newborn may get lucky and "win the gamble", but he was never in a position to refuse to enter into the competition."

"[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?"

"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.""

"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."

"Man's greatest crime on earth is the fatal fact of birth."

"The Cathar troubadours with an unknown then refinement loved beautiful French and Italian women. At the same time, they were unequaled promoters of the idea of "pure" love, i.e. love that does not lead to pregnancy. The Cathars thought that the devil had "equipped children of this world with the seed"; they identified the conception with the spawn of satan, they were cursing pregnant women."

"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."

"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."

"Undoubtedly, the reproductive drive has deep biological roots, but this does not free us from guilt either. Of course, it was not us who invented life and its rules, but it was us who propagated it. We intentionally created a life in circumstances where we knew that suffering would be unavoidable. The impulse of aggression often leads us to commit crimes, but we do not fail to consider it reprehensible. It is something equally instinctive and natural, rooted in us as deeply as the sexual impulse. The difference is that, in the case of procreation, our aggression will materialize nine months later, as if planting a time bomb in the heart of nothingness."

"Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?"

""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."