Ethics

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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?"

"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."

"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?"

"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."

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

"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)."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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?"

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

"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?"

"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."

"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.""

"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?"

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Propagating life is propagating terror."

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

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

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

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

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

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