We have to talk about antinatalism... again

Distraction, by Erik Thor Sandberg

Eight years ago, I wrote and published on my Portuguese-written blog an essay titled We have to talk about antinatalism, in which I explained in a very basic way what antinatalism was. In fact, it was already possible to see there a glimpse of the interest that would lead me to study more about the relationship between the philosophy of religion and philosophical pessimism, especially the contemporary form it took in Arthur Schopenhauer and Emil Cioran. In the middle of last year, 2024, I defended my master's dissertation, titled Pessimism and Gnosis: Schopenhauer, Cioran and the Appropriation of Anticosmic Religions, at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro.

One of the things I have noticed throughout academia, not only in the humanities but also in the natural sciences, is that it helps a lot to study subjects that interest us. It helps even more to study subjects that not only interest us, but in which we have a vested personal interest, whatever that may be. However, it is enough to have an interest, without the need for personal involvement with the object of study. In my case, I have a great intellectual and academic interest in the study of the history and philosophy of religion, although I have not been religious for almost twenty years. If I were to practice a religion today, I would choose Buddhism, whether Theravada or Mahayana, but it would be for the metaphor and not because I truly believe in the supernatural.

But my interest in philosophical pessimism goes beyond intellectual and academic interest. There is a personal interest here, I am more involved with the object, because it relates to the way I see the world, life, existence. So much so that, except for scientific and historical facts, my blog, Metaphysical Exile, has never intended to bring a supposedly impartial or merely educational view of philosophy. Firstly, because, although impartiality in education and journalism is an ideal, it is like meritocracy in societies: it does not really exist. These things can serve as a guide, but no matter how close one gets, one is never completely impartial, just as it is never possible to have a perfectly meritocratic human collective.

In other words, in the case of my personal writings related to philosophy, I have never sought to convey an impression of impartiality. Just as you will not see impartiality in other writers and disseminators who follow this or that philosophical or even political school of thought, I write from a perspective that I consider to be the most accurate of reality. As much as I genuinely believe that I am presenting the vision of things as they are, I understand that it is one among others. Here I sell lucidity and despair as opposed to illusion and contentment. Having said all that, I decided to address the issue of antinatalism directly again in this essay, despite the topic permeating almost everything I write, since it is, in my view, linked to philosophical pessimism in general.

There are a few reasons why I decided to addressing the topic directly again, all of them bad: in all these years and especially in the last two or three years, I have read and seen many crude or simply false statements about what antinatalism is and about the interests behind those who claim to be antinatalists. Not that I think that I will change anything, whether I write in Portuguese or in English about this, but I feel that I need to get some things out there and try to put things in order, even though I will certainly fail miserably. Therefore, here I begin once more to address the topic in the most direct and clear way possible. I will briefly try to explain what antinatalism is and some common errors that I see being propagated.

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So, what is antinatalism?

The term “antinatalism” appears to have been coined by the South African philosopher David Benatar, author of the book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, published in 2006. Although the term is recent, the idea behind it, the idea defended by Benatar that it would be better to never have been born and that we should therefore refrain from creating new suffering beings, did not begin with him. His argument using asymmetries is original and, in my view, brilliant, but he himself has written and said on several occasions that the idea is very old, even mentioning Schopenhauer in some interviews, in addition to also mentioning Buddhism.

However, the idea that not being is better than being and that we should therefore refrain from creating new beings is one that emerges, or at least renews itself, around the world from time to time. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Argentine-Brazilian philosopher and professor at the University of Brasília, Julio Cabrera, began to propose what he called negative ethics, which reached the same conclusion as Benatar, that creating new suffering beings is ethically problematic. His negative ethics project culminated in the excellent book Discomfort and Moral Impediment, published in 2018 in Brazil, in which Cabrera explains his moral philosophy in detail. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, still in Brazil, we had one of the greatest writers of all time openly using the Schopenhauerian philosophy of the Will in his novels and short stories. I am talking here about Machado de Assis.

The refusal to reproduce by the character of Brás Cubas, who posthumously states that he did not want to pass on the legacy of human misery to anyone, makes his denial of the Will clear. Denying the Will to live that permeates the entire cosmos and uses sentient beings as disposable pieces is the crown of Schopenhauer's moral philosophy, and Machado de Assis knew this. Unfortunately, this aspect is almost completely ignored when teaching about the author. And this is far from being the only reference to Schopenhauer's philosophy in Machado's work; there are other important ones within the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas itself. However, the refusal and condemnation of reproduction are certainly the most impactful references to the pessimistic philosophy in ethical terms in Machado's work.

In 20th century continental Europe, two of the most prominent names associated with philosophical pessimism were Peter Wessel Zapffe and Emil Cioran. For the Norwegian Zapffe, evolution endowed humans with a deep consciousness that cannot bear the fact that they are an ephemeral creature among many others; therefore, man consciously or unconsciously seeks to alienate himself in various ways. However, Zapffe says that none of his alienations are capable of curing him and that the best thing is to abandon existence, refusing to bring new sufferers into a meaningless and painful reality. The Franco-Romanian Cioran wrote in several essays and aphorisms that human consciousness is a mistake in nature's path. For him, even the most minute degrees of animal consciousness are capable of making the creature suffer.

The ideal, for Cioran, would be a world inhabited at most by plants, or better still, by minerals. Life itself is an error of inorganic matter, according to him. Cioran, like Schopenhauer, was a great admirer of the Gnostics, Manichaeans, Bogomils, Cathars, Buddhists and Dharmic religions in general. All of these can be seen, in essence, as anticosmic religions, although there is much variety, especially in the Dharmic religions that survive to this day, such as Buddhism, Brahmanism and Jainism. The important thing, for Schopenhauer and Cioran, is that all of these religions treated birth as an evil from which we had to escape through certain religious practices — otherwise, we risked being eternally trapped in the infernal realms or on Earth itself, reincarnating successively.

It is worth making it clear that neither Schopenhauer nor Cioran really believed in these religions. For both, they came close to the truth only as metaphors. Even in the case of Schopenhauer, who postulated that there was a metaphysical Will that served as the foundation for all empirical reality, the anticosmic religions were seen as doctrines of faith. He contrasted them with the doctrine of persuasion, that is, philosophy, which would be the doctrine that uses reason to arrive at the truth without the aid of metaphors and myths, as do the religions that he considered to be the most correct.

Despite being a landmark for the concept of cosmic pessimism, pessimistic philosophies precede Schopenhauer not only by centuries, but by millennia. In 10th-century Syria, during the golden age of Islam, a thinker and poet named Abu Al-Ala Al-Maa'rri wrote about how the prophets of all religions were frauds and that being born was the original misfortune in the life of all men. One of his sayings was engraved on his tomb, in which he stated that he had not committed the crime that his father had committed against him by bringing him into the world, since he had no children. But the idea that non-being is superior to being and that being born is the most terrible event is much older.

In classical antiquity, a time when philosophy and religion almost always went hand in hand, we see it appearing in Greece, the Levant and India with greater or lesser intensity. More than 400 years before Christ, we have distinct and clear examples of this idea. In a passage from the play Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, the chorus announces that it is best not to be born and, when one is born, it is best to return to the darkness as soon as possible. In the Levant, the author of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes wrote that better than the oppressed are those who have already died, and that better than both the oppressed and the dead is the one who has never even been born, for he has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.

Around the same time, in India, Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, told his disciples that birth is the origin of all suffering. Mahavira, the founder of Jainism and a contemporary of the Buddha, made the same claim. Both came from a cultural background influenced by the Vedic religion, ancient Hinduism, which at that time already postulated the belief that we reincarnate until we finally achieve moksha, enlightenment, at which point our essence would return to Brahman, the undifferentiated, the ultimate reality from which everything emanates. These notions, although not in the oldest Vedas, are present in the Upanishads, which make up the later Vedic texts. It is important to remember that both Buddha and Mahavira were part of heterodox movements within Hindu thought, since they did not submit to the authority of the Vedas.

As early as the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, some early Christians began to interpret birth as an imprisonment of the spirit in the material world. They began to practice asceticism, just as the gymnosophists who had come from India to the West did. For these Christians, Jesus was sent by a God who was above the creator god of the physical universe, the demiurge. Marcion, born at the end of the 1st century and recognized as the first Christian to attempt to formulate a canon of the New Testament, was one of those who propagated this belief.

The Barbeloite and Valentinian Gnostics believed the same thing. It is very important to remember that these groups, at first, did not live separately from early Christianity. Valentinus, the leader of the Valentinian Gnostics, was even considered for bishop of Rome. In other words, a Gnostic almost became one of the first popes. Even among proto-orthodox Christians, the idea of ​​rejecting the material world as a prison was present, since passages in the Synoptic Gospels deal with this, such as Matthew 19:10-12. Some of the epistles of the apostles also deal with the subject, such as 1 John 2:15-17. The apostle Paul also deals with the superiority of the ascetic principle in 1 Corinthians 7.

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In other words, although the term antinatalism originated with, or at least was popularized by, David Benatar, it goes back to very old philosophical and religious ideas that consider sentient life as suffering. Birth is seen as the root of suffering and, therefore, morally reprehensible. But this is just a general view of the matter. What arguments do pessimistic and antinatalist philosophers give to support the notion that birth is something negative and morally reprehensible? Many. I will summarize here the arguments of three philosophers that I consider indispensable to the subject: Arthur Schopenhauer, Julio Cabrera and David Benatar. Other thinkers mentioned, such as Cioran and Zapffe, are also important, but I think that the three that I will summarize best provide some of the most solid arguments in a systematic sense.

For Schopenhauer, all empirical reality is a representation of the Will. Everything, from the laws of physics to the most complex living beings, are individuations of this same metaphysical principle. The Will is not rational and does not have an ultimate purpose. It is a pure thirst for manifestation. The universe is organized the way it is because, in order to manifest itself, the Will goes from simpler and more generalized degrees to more complex and specific degrees. When it begins to individualize itself in sentient beings, that is, in animals, pain arises. Just as there is friction in the inorganic world, friction is also present in the organic world. And, among living beings, the Will also manifests itself in animals, beings endowed with the capacity to feel pleasure, pain and boredom — and who are even moved by these states, with pain and boredom being the main ones. Pleasures and joys exist only when we are able to temporarily eliminate pain and boredom. By manifesting itself in increasingly complex ways, the Will reaches the human representation, the will-to-know.

In humans, blind will generates a being capable of understanding this entire process and realizing that it is devoid of ultimate meaning. Humans are also capable of feeling deeply and empathizing with all other sentient beings, recognizing themselves in them and as part of all existence. Thus, they have the ability to understand that what hurts others, hurts them. Given the understanding that existence always causes suffering for themselves and others, they are able to conclude that, in order to be truly ethical, they need to deny their own will. It is by denying their will that humans are able to give themselves to others, becoming ethical. Ultimately, the most ethical attitude we can have is to completely deny the will within us, refusing to add more pain to the world. The denial of reproduction is an expression of the denial of the Will in Schopenhauer's philosophy.

Now, according to Cabrera, when we come into existence, we acquire a diminishing or waning being, since we begin to end soon after we emerge. Death is merely the end of this process of terminality. From the moment we come into existence, we suffer three types of friction: physical pain, discouragement or mental pain, and aggression of all kinds from other humans who are themselves also affected by the three types of friction. To defend ourselves from friction and from our diminishing being, humans constantly need to create positive values. These values ​​alleviate or make us forget our diminishing and frictioned being. In short, they are the illusions we create for us to think that it is fine to exist in a universe that, for sentient beings, is intrinsically linked to suffering and terminality.

Even if we try to act ethically, we end up stepping on the toes of other humans and other sentient creatures simply by existing. At the same time that we suffer friction, we are part of the friction of others, no matter how hard we try not to be. Cabrera even considers the inability to act to help everyone around us as being part of our moral inability. It is therefore impossible to be completely moral when we exist. Based on these assumptions, creating a new terminal being to live in friction is morally reprehensible. Cabrera contrasts negative ethics with positive ethics. In negative ethics, there is a disvalue in existing, while all positive ethics treat existence as something positive or, at least, neutral.

Finally, we have Benatar's asymmetry argument. According to him, there is a crucial asymmetry between positive and negative states that makes never having existed always preferable for a potential being. For example, let's imagine a couple who is thinking about having a child. Let's call him John. According to Benatar, if John never comes to existence, John will not experience positive states, and this, for Benatar, is not bad, since there will be no John who will miss these positive states. However, in the same scenario in which John never came to exist, he will also not experience negative states and, contrary to what happened previously with positive states, Benatar argues that this is good, even if there is no one to benefit.

Benatar's argument is based on the idea that, although positive states are not missed by someone who never existed, it is always good when negative states do not hurt someone, even if that person never existed in the first place. In the scenario in which John never came into the world, he does not taste delicious food, it is true, but since he never existed, he does not miss these foods. However, he is also not exposed to catastrophes, violence, disease, deprivation, poverty and all sorts of negative states, and Benatar argues that this is good even though there is no one there to feel safe from these misfortunes. Another example we can give is the following: it is good that there are no wars and genocides on Mars, even though there are no Martians; however, the fact that there are no Martians to feel the ephemeral pleasures of life is not bad.

As writer Thomas Ligotti summarizes in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race:

The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real.

In the case of all these thinkers, the issue of suffering does not apply only to humans, but to all sentient beings, all those who can feel negative stimuli such as pain, suffering and boredom. Absolutely all beings capable of feeling some kind of pain are harmed when they come into existence. However, to simplify, since only humans are capable of pondering moral questions, the focus is only on them. But all the philosophers I mentioned — Schopenhauer, Cioran, Zapffe, Cabrera and Benatar — touch on the issue of animal suffering and how they, like us, experience the misfortunes that are part of sentient existence. This is where I think it is important to address some bad or clearly false interpretations of antinatalism.

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If antinatalism is the ethical position that considers birth, that is, coming into existence, to be something negative for a being given the suffering inherent in existence, then what is not antinatalism? Antinatalism is not birth control by the state. While it is possible to force a narrow interpretation of the term by claiming that antinatalism is simply the idea that birth is negative regardless of the reasons one gives for considering it negative, this ignores the entire history behind the term. But terms have histories and meanings that cannot be ignored to satisfy those who wish to criticize them. Thus, the one-child policy imposed by China between 1980 and 2015, for example, although laudable from a demographic point of view, is not antinatalism.

Antinatalism is also not the sterilization of certain populations and peoples because they are considered undesirable, as occurred, for example, in some South American dictatorships in the 20th century that sterilized indigenous women, in addition to the most famous example, Nazi Germany. This is called eugenics, a very well-studied concept that has absolutely nothing to do with philosophical pessimism and antinatalism. The grotesque pseudoscience of eugenics is also not the same thing as birth control, despite the concepts being mixed up by critics of antinatalism who have no idea what they are talking about. Unfortunately, however, in both cases, I see a recent attempt at association made by some people who do not have the slightest good will to even read the basics on the subject.

By associating the criticism of eugenics, a criticism with which I agree, with the criticism they make of birth control by the state, many have fabricated or exaggerated the danger of what they call “ecofascism,” even though the vast majority of true fascists have never cared the slightest about the environment. This criticism comes almost exclusively from left-wing political sectors. Many or most of them see the People’s Republic of China as the great hope and bastion of human civilization. However, they forget, or pretend not to know, that China was and still is the greatest promoter of birth control policies on the planet, and rightly so. They also forget that such birth control has nothing to do with eugenics, but with important demographic issues related to resource consumption, something that everyone in the West today pretends is not a problem, whether they are fascists, communists, or capitalists.

But not everything is rosy among those who call themselves antinatalists or who sympathize with the philosophy. A few years ago, antinatalists who call themselves efilists emerged in North America. Efilism is a neologism. In English, it is derived from the word life spelled backwards: efil is life spelled backwards. Efilists believe that antinatalism does not go far enough because it focuses only on humans. Personally, I see this as a problem with Anglo-Saxon thought, which is too pragmatic, categorizing, and averse to any idea of ​​fluidity. Schopenhauer, Cabrera, Benatar, Cioran, Zapffe, and several other thinkers who support the philosophy of antinatalism never ignored animal suffering. The focus on humans exists only for practical reasons and because humans are the only sentient beings to engage in philosophy.

However, the most important issue in efilist discourse is not limited to moral philosophy, but to social and political practice. It is in this online environment that antinatalists and efilists have moved beyond discussing philosophy, they have embraced these terms as social and even political ideals. For many of them, these are not mere ethical positions, but ideologies that require action to achieve victory. Among some, a negative and angry discourse is promoted about those who are parents. While I understand where the frustration and even anger comes from, I disagree with the method and even the goals, since I consider them to be impractical. Antinatalism, as a social or political ideal, is for me a lost cause. But why do I adhere to an ethical position that I treat as a lost cause when applied to a larger social or political context? I will explain in the following paragraphs.

Among some antinatalists and efilists on the internet there is a historical argument that I have seen used time and again. They use the example of slavery. According to them, during the time of slavery, it was not enough to say “I refuse to have slaves, it is morally wrong.” It was necessary, they correctly point out, to oppose slavery as an institution, attacking slave owners, whether with words, trying to raise awareness, or through violent action. All of this is correct and I agree with them. However, although it is a seemingly reasonable analogy, there is a huge difference not only in degree but in nature between the evil of slavery and the evil of birth.

Being very Schopenhauerian, I argue the following: slaves, like all sentient beings, were manifestations of the Will and sought to affirm it, as the vast majority of beings do. Once freed, they continued wanting to affirm it. Certainly there were, here and there, slaves who denied the will within themselves to the point of refusing to create new sufferers, but the rule of all life, of everyone as a representation of the Will, is to affirm their will. Using Cabrera's language: slaves, like all other humans, developed positive values ​​to survive and continue living, because, like all other living beings, they were programmed by nature to survive and reproduce.

Slavery, whether in ancient times or the slavery of Africans in the Americas, has never been unanimous. Many supported it and considered it natural, yes, but many opposed it. At a certain point, those who opposed it won and made the practice not only immoral, but illegal. Reproduction, on the other hand, has existed since the first single-celled organism, which existed more than 4 billion years ago. It is intrinsic to life. As I said, I believe there is a huge difference in degree, but not only that, there is a difference in nature between the evil of birth and all other evils. Yes, birth, in the sense of coming into existence, is the necessary condition for all suffering. But given that reproduction is the most natural thing that any organism can attempt to do, I consider the notion of treating the antinatalist position as a political ideology capable of winning the battle of ideas with other ideals to be completely flawed.

When I write that reproduction is the most natural thing any organism can attempt to do, I do not mean this in a positive way. I think, like Cioran, that life is a mistake of matter, and that consciousness is a mistake of life. Reproduction is the most natural thing an organism can do, yes, but being natural should never be used as a parameter for something to be considered by us as positive or negative. Viruses and bacteria are natural, and yet we medicate ourselves against them. Being eaten by a great white shark off the coast of Australia or South Africa is natural, but we avoid swimming in shark-infested waters.

I am simply trying to show how absurdly difficult it is to want to oppose something as fundamental to organisms as reproduction. Even many people who understand and agree with the pessimistic arguments regarding reproduction still reproduce, because no argument can win the day against the brutal reality of the will that animates everything that exists. It animates even us, the pessimists and antinatalists.

However, just because I think that antinatalism as a social or political cause is a lost cause, that does not mean that I consider my defense of the ethical position to be in vain. I am absolutely certain that, locally, among individuals and groups, it is perfectly possible to influence the mentality of many people here and there. After all, that is how I and so many others I know were convinced of the position. Who knows, maybe we will convince more and more people over time, until we have convinced almost everyone? What I do not believe will help to convince people that creating new sentient beings is always morally problematic are hostile speeches against those who are parents and violent actions.

And speaking of violent actions, a few weeks ago, a young man named Guy Bartkus blew himself up in front of a fertility clinic in the United States, killing himself and injuring others. He left behind a manifesto in which he mentioned efilism and antinatalism. This, however, does not seem to have been the trigger for his violent action, something that even some critics of antinatalism have noted, such as Katherine Dee. Bartkus already had severe psychiatric problems that were exacerbated by the recent suicide of his best friend. In any case, even if they are not the main reasons, his action does nothing to help the perception that antinatalism is something reasonable. In fact, it would be laughable to compare his action to that of abolitionists who injured or even killed slave owners in order to free them.

But critics of antinatalism have seized on this terrible act to blame even David Benatar, who had nothing to do with the story. They just forgot to mention that, in his manifesto, Bartkus also mentions how veganism, pro-mortalism and negative utilitarianism influenced his worldview, in addition to efilism and antinatalism. Pro-mortalism, for example, is the position that considers the death of those who are already alive to be positive, something that Benatar has made clear since his early writings that he does not defend.

The fact is that, even if it had been Benatar himself who had blown himself up in front of the fertility clinic, accusing philosophical pessimism and antinatalism as inherently violent ideals that should be condemned demonstrates a high degree of hypocrisy on the part of the accusers. This is because life-affirming philosophies, several religions and positive political ideologies have been and are responsible for, if not the majority of violence throughout human history, then a considerable part of it. Political, religious and philosophical ideals that affirm the value of life and existence have a terrible history of violence with the creation of oppressive structures of control. From theocratic and totalitarian states to small groups of extremists, violence has always been one of the main tools of those who affirm the value of life and consider it sacred. Opponents and individuals considered undesirable have been tortured and killed by them precisely so that life could flourish.

Even in the Soviet gulags and Nazi death camps, there was an assumption that life was worth living — not the lives of those who were confined there against their will, of course, but the lives of those who held them in those bloody dungeons. The justification was precisely that those imprisoned there parasitized and sickened the rest of society, which totalitarian regimes considered healthy. Even the world's liberal democracies, despite their advantages in terms of individual freedoms, end up throwing millions of people into metaphorical meat grinders through unemployment, inequality, financial despair, and urban violence.

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As I have written, the idea that being born is suffering is old. Very old. It is found in the first noble truth of Buddhism, which states that being born is suffering, growing old is suffering, getting sick is suffering, and dying is suffering, and that union with that which displeases and separation from that which pleases is also suffering. At the root of everything is birth. From antiquity to the present day, all religious expressions that have adopted real asceticism, that which rejects the world, have treated birth as a negative event or, at the very least, as bad luck for the one who is born. It was always when asceticism was relaxed or rejected, even within these traditions, that life-affirming violence took shape.

In pure philosophy divorced from religion, the practice of nonviolence among those who condemn birth ends up being clearer and more obvious, although rarer. Antinatalism, the idea that birth is bad for the being that is born, whether some want to admit it or not, is an ethical position linked to philosophical pessimism, the position of thinkers who concluded that not being is better than being, because being implies suffering. As Ligotti wrote, paraphrasing: nonexistence never hurt anyone, but existence hurts everyone. This philosophical pessimist notion of reality, a notion that is against the increase of suffering in the world, serves as the basis for antinatalist ethics. The rest is history, daydreaming and lies.

by Fernando Olszewski