Asklemmy

It depends heavily. If youre choosing not to have kids because you think youre unable to provide a decent quality of life, or because you just dont feel the urge, or because you're having too much fun looking after #1 then cool.

I accidentally stumbled into r/antinatalism once though, and their reasoning seems to be "too scared to kill myself. Life is suffering. Fuck your cumpet." Which, you know, its hard to argue against but its not a reason that sits well with me.

I'm child-free by choice and I think there are a lot of good reasons not to have kids that I would probably share with antinatalists. I think there should be less population growth. But radical "no-one should be born ever" antinatalism goes to far I think. IMO the whole "being born without their consent" argument doesn't work, as the whole concept of consent doesn't exist for a nonexistant being. In order to make any kind of choice on whether you want to exist, you need to exist first. If you make the argument that not having kids is sparing them from suffering, then you can just as easily make the argument that you're depriving them from ever feeling love or happiness, which they "didn't consent" to either.

I'm not an anti-natalist, but I won't create a life out of nowhere just for it to become "wasteland thug #3" in the post-apocalyptic movie our future is going to become.

Our ecosystem has a tendency to keep over reproduction in check. For all species.

If the load becomes too high, resources become scarce, and reproductive rates fall.

For example, there's a reason why birthrates are falling right now, for humans. And why deadly diseases are becoming more common.

What if both absolutist viewpoints are wrong?

Maybe just let people decide for themselves and not for some sort of false choice that they need to make 800 babies or 0 babies and nothing in between is acceptable.

It's a very complex issue.

On one have. Having children or not is a deep freedom that feels wrong to constraint, one way or the other. I don't think messing around with "how many lids" should anyone have is good.

But on the other hand, I reason that resources are not limitless, and human footprint on the environment will be bigger the more humans there are. So O do think that the world would be a nicer place if there was less humans around. Less pollution, less worrying about ending up resources, more available land for each human, less over-crowdled everything.

But I won't be the one saying anyone to control their biological functions like that. At most I just wish more people realized of this and would voluntarily try to find a stable number of humans on earth that would be an order of magnitude less than we have now.

So yeah, in general I don't agree with anti-natalism as presented.

I think the future is bleak and procreation at this point is selfish. I'm not one to prescribe what other people can do, but even if I still could I would never have a child.

While there is the argument of not contributing to overpopulation, in my view anti-natalism is the application of moral utilitarianism to an absurd degree. I also think it can (not will of course) lead to eugenics policies. Indeed, a poor person birthing a child more immoral than a rich person. Certainly the rich child is much more likely to live a better life than the poor. Should we therefore be more willing to regulate the reproductive capabilities of the poor? I think this is where anti-natalism breaks down - forcing it on anyone, or creating policy to support it, is in my view will always be deeply immoral.

I think suffering is just part of the human condition. It has always been there and always will. To think that our times are special enough to warrant a movement like antinatalism, is ridiculously arrogant. It's like cultusts who commit mass suicide because the aliens will come rescue them.
In fact, suffering has been on a steady decline for ages.

You can look at this through the buddhist worldview:

After you die, you are going to be reborn in the world that you helped create. This could be a smile on another person's face or a project you helped realize. Especially, also children are a large part of what you helped create, so in a certain sense, a part of you is going to be reborn into them.

Then, the question is, if you could be born again in the year 2030, would you choose to? Would you think such a life is worthwhile?

Answering such a question might give you a hint of what your children would want, if they could be asked.

Capitalists consider unemployed people dead weight.

A tree trunk is dead weight too and that's what keeps the tree stable.

Same with society. A certain amount of dead weight actually provides benefits. It provides possibilities in case of urgencies and provides a stable environment in peace times.

I agree but the only thing I plan on doing about it is not having kids myself. I don't think it's ethical but it's also not worth starting shit over. I mean I won't be leaving behind anyone who have to deal with it, and you can't change people so why bother.

I'm an amoralist antinatalist. I think having children is fucked up on many levels, but I wouldn't try to argue it's inherently immoral

I see the whole thing as what happens when people fail to move beyond teenage angst. Having children or not is a a very big, very personal choice. And I fully respect someone who chooses not to, whether their reasons are personal, economic, religious or whatever. You do you. Turning that outward to the argument that humans are horrible, life is suffering and no one should ever have children is taking that sort of thing to the point of hypocritical religious zealotry. No, you didn't get to consent to being born. Until you were born, you didn't have the capacity. But, once you are an adult you have your full faculties and can make choices for yourself. If you really feel that existence is that horrible, there's a solution for that at your nearest tall bridge. Except, these folks never actually follow through. They want the attention that suicide brings, without that whole dying bit.

So ya, I fully understand that someone may choose not to have children. There are many valid reasons for making that choice. The whole argument that life is so terrible that we should work to off ourselves as a species, isn't valid. It's a cry for attention and the folks feeling that way should seek professional help.

The argument for "you can't consent to being born" does have a direct opposite argument: you also can't not consent to birth. The birth is what gives the ability to consent or not in the first place. You could argue that by being anti-natalist you're taking someone's potential to give consent completely away, which is the same or more unethical, you're essentially deciding for someone else that they should die/not exist without them getting a say in it?

You can do the same with suffering: life is happiness, everyone I know was happy sometime in their life (even if only as a child), so you're doing serious harm by not allowing people to have happiness since only people who exist can be happy.

I think anti-natalism is a philosophy mainly held by very traumatized people and/or that live in very bad conditions.

We know (roughly) how to handle trauma, we know (roughly) what makes good conditions. We know roughly what makes people happy or what makes them suffer. We have the potential to create a world where being born is mostly positive for everyone.

In that sense, currently, I think mostly people that are well off should have children, ones that can actually support children properly. However, that is obviously not a permanent solution, since the end goal should be for everyone to be well off and to be able to support children.

But part of the suffering in the world is also caused by too many people. We can't have infinite population growth while living in a world with finite resources. As such, we need to limit how many children people can have (which is already happening by availability of birth control and smarter people, able to make a choice if they want to have kids).

So in total, I don't think birth/existence is either good or bad, but it has the potential to be both depending on how we handle it.

I think humanity is a species of excess. The harm we cause our planet every day by not seeing the bigger picture is hurting pretty much everything on the planet.

I'm not an antinatalist, but I think we could stand to decrease our numbers rather than increase them at least for a couple of centuries.

Hmmm.. I believe in not having babies but for different reasons than that. I personally don't see any reason to have them, especially because many seem to get them because they get pressured into it or are expected to have them or even as a safety net when they get old?

I think that many regret having kids but don't want to admit it. Kind of like buyers remorse

Also, making decisions in what others should do, with such fundamental rights is not something I would support.

I get it.

edit:

Anti-natalists believe that suffering will always be there and no one should be born EVER.

Oh well idk. I think if I had been born in the Netherlands I might be more inclined to have kids, seems nice over there.

Sometimes it's due to trauma, fear and ideological confusion, which is valid, sometimes it's just a way for people to be even more selfish, nihilistic and hedonistic without the optics associated with them. It also feels like the equivalent of angry/sad MGTOW but for life and it's biological imperative, not just women. To each their own. 🤷

I'm against human reproduction.