Can anyone imagine that parents would knowingly act in such a way that their newborn child would be exposed to adverse living conditions? Hardly.

In an article published in the 12th of December 2025 edition of The New York Times, author Anurag Minus Verma candidly discloses that the present year marks his inaugural experience as a father to a baby girl. It is asserted that the infant in question should be a source of significant happiness. However, there is a concomitant concern regarding the potential adverse effects of air pollution on the infant’s developing organs.

The author explains:

“The air apocalypse dictates the basic rhythms and routines of life. It pushes us indoors, behind windows that are taped shut and where activity revolves around the air purifier that hums all day in its Sisyphean labor.”

From cradle to grave, Delhi’s inhabitants suffer from extreme air pollution. Perhaps very few would dispute that the case above is a case of a person being knowingly exposed to adverse living conditions. But in all other proceations, too, people are exposed to adverse living conditions from cradle to grave. It is just a little more difficult to recognise the nature of this exposure, which accompanies all procreation.

Of course, the question arises as to why her parents did not refrain from acting in such a way that this human being came into existence. In most cases, the answer is that the future child is imagined as a source of personal edification and joy.

All subcategories of antinatalism are centred around the concept and reality of suffering — suffering in the broadest sense. Reducing and preventing suffering lie at the heart of antinatalism. Therefore, the idea of an international league of antinatalists for the prevention of nuclear war appears to be in keeping with antinatalism’s basic idea. We may conceive of such a league pretty much analogous to International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Why? Because an all-out nuclear war would cause unprecedented amounts and intensities of suffering.

Unlike colourful-button thought experiments, the reality of nuclear war would be bleak. Mankind wouldn’t disappear painlessly within a fraction of a millisecond: While the dropping of bombs would annihilate tens of millions instantly, the aftermath would affect surviving hundreds of millions or billions of people, who would languish under darkened skies in years or decades to come.

Advocates of an antinatalist moral theory appear to have a point in that fewer people on earth go along with fewer occurrences of theates of mass-slaughter, also known as wars.
This view has now been confirmed in a Foreign Affairs article intriguingly titled

“THE COMING PAX GERIATRICA: Aging Societies and Depopulation Will Lead to Fewer Wars”

“The idea that international conflict will in future decades ebb may appear counterintuitive, given the large number of wars in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East during the first quarter of the century. But as countries grow older, governments will be forced to attend to their aging populations and contend with a shrinking pool of resources. All the while, as leaders and citizens age, studies indicate that they will be more likely to express a preference for peace. These factors will combine to create societies less capable and tolerant of waging war.”
[Mark L. Haas, THE COMING PAX GERIATRICA, Foreign Affairs, 24 July 2025]

Obviously it lies in the rationale of this article that if abhorring wars and mass slaughter of humans you should speak out in favour of mankind’s ebbing away.

The fact that comparatively few people advocate antinatalism (nor does the present article) is further proof of the irrationality of everyday morals. The same everyday morals that requires us to never act in such a way that a human being will die due to our action, with countless people dying as a consequence of procreation which is encouraged by said everyday morals.

A
Why did I start to exist? I never asked for it!
B
So you would have preferred never to begin to exist. But consider this: if you had never begun to exist, you would have had no way of protesting against it. So be content that you exist.

The Gnostic myth described the world as a huge satanic prison. A prison that was not created by the benevolent God, but by an evil demiurge, in which the souls separated from the otherworldly benevolent God must languish.

Japan’s population is ebbing away. There are more and more very old people who are wasting away in solitude instead of ageing with dignity as part of the social network of an extended family. Against this backdrop, more and more Japanese people are voluntarily going to prison. They commit petty offences in order to at least experience the security and minimal society of a prison.

Myths are not destined to ever be realised. The real process of self-imprisonment, however, materialises the gnostic myth: in order to make the gnostically diagnosed world prison more bearable, people voluntarily go to nominal prisons.

On a planet at an inconspicuous point in space-time, bipedal beings once found fire. They built settlements and cities and ravaged them with fire. Then they found reflection and the realisation that it would have been better if all this had never happened. And some forward people said: ‘We can’t turn back the hands of time, but we can make sure that no more people are struck by devastating fires in future: To achieve this, we must become fewer and fewer and eventually be no more.’ But the two-legged creatures missed the exit from the world. Instead, they began travelling back and forth like mad on the path of growth, incinerating the energy sources that had been formed over hundreds of millions of years. Having failed to exit the world by means of offspringlessness, they set out on the path of self-immolation by overheating their planet.

The ebbing away of mankind, heralded by antinatalism, is now foreshadowed by a falling tendency in the rate of birth and fertility. Overall, we’ve seen a 50% decline in fertility rates over the past 70 years. The empowerment of women, lower infant mortality and higher costs of upbringing and education have led to this sharp decline, the consequences of which, it is said, will be “dire”: People will be surrounded by an ageing human environment and there’ll be considerable pressure on health systems.

With this in mind, one would have to conclude that with fewer people on the planet, “life” is getting worse. The supposed remedy: “Produce more people.” Should we?

Should we do so even if the first few hundred million new people would suffer from the alleged ongoing devastating consequences of a declining population for the time being? After all, fertility rates would not rise overnight and the new armies of labour for the health sector would have to be replenished first.

Conversely, the remedy should be: stop producing people, to prevent people from experiencing the reputed evils of ageing populations with increasing pressure on health systems.

Antinatalist moral theory prescribes that we should not act in such a way that sentient beings begin to exist. At first glance, this seems an unproblematic proposition. After all, we generally assume that any sentience implies the capacity for negative sensations or perceptions. But does this have to be the case? Might there not be sentient beings who are only capable of neutral sentience (or only positive sentience)? Firstly, the widespread assumption that pain sensation is an evolutionary advantage for the preservation and reproduction of organisms argues against this thesis. Sentient organisms capable of movement and equipped with an appropriate sensorium will flee from enemies or unfavourable environments. All this is probably very true.

But let’s look at jellyfish. Researchers believe that jellyfish have a certain degree of vision, but that they only perceive their surroundings in shades of light and dark. They are also said to be able to register vibrations in the water. Of course, we don’t KNOW if jellyfish really SEE the shades of light and dark, or if they really FEEL vibrations in the water. But if this is the case, it does not seem implausible that these perceptions of light and dark, or of vibrations, could be neutral sensations. If this were the case, and if jellyfish were only capable of these two types of neutral sensation, then from an antinatalist point of view there would be no prima facie reason not to produce more jellyfish (the secondary effects of too many jellyfish on the ecology are another matter). And if it is not true that jellyfish or certain species of jellyfish have exclusively neutral sensations (or sensations which are at least not unpleasant), then perhaps there are other creatures that have exclusively neutral perceptions.

For those who believe that nerves or a brain are the prerequisite for consciousness, however primitive, jellyfish can have up to 1000 nerve cells. And it may not be too far-fetched to think of the jellyfish organism as a kind of brain with primitive sensations floating or swimming in the water.

It is often said that antinatalism is essentially a moral theory that speaks out against the creation of sentient beings. This raises the question of whether a more precise formulation is required. For we cannot prima facie exclude the possibility that there are beings that are sentient, but whose scale of sentience – due to their biological nature – does not allow for negative perceptions. For example, there could be entities that are only capable of perceiving light and dark. And without there being any unpleasant light or dark. In other words, there could be sentient beings that are not capable of suffering. Perhaps jellyfish or certain single-celled organisms are such creatures. From an antinatalist vantage point, though, it would still be regrettable if we were to discover that such creatures exist(ed) on a moon of Jupiter or Saturn or elsewhere in the universe. After tens of millions of years of biological evolution, pain-sensitive creatures could (have) emerge(ed) from them.

Many antinatalists are concerned with the question of when the word antinatalism was first used in the sense of a theory and practice critical of reproduction. As outlined in my book Antinatalism – A Handbook, an early equivalent usage of the word can be found in Francis Ronsins 1980 book La Grève des Ventres:

‘It was a woman, Marie Huot, who first made available antinatalist ideas to a large number of people. In reality, the radicalism of Marie Huot’s thoughts is far away from Malthus’s philosophy and has only a distant connection with neo-Malthusianism.’

Now, does this mean that antinatalism was “born” in 1980?

Certainly we will soon come across an even earlier equivalent usage.

Both Anthropocene and Anthropodicy are used to describe new epochs. Anthropocene is used to indicate that humans have become a geological factor because of their large-scale activities that are changing the face of the earth, perhaps best epitomised by mountaintop chopping. Anthropocene is tantamount to saying: Wherever you look on Earth, we (sometimes just our waste) are already there, or have been there.

Anthropodicy is also a term for a new epoch, namely an epoch in which the existence of suffering human beings can no longer be blamed on God. With God’s death, the continued existence of suffering human beings is our responsibility, since we could simply stop procreating without interfering with God’s creation.

Taken together, anthropodicy and anthropocene are corresponding terms that indicate that we have entered an epoch in which man has become self-made.

In his short essay La Grève des Ventres [The Birth Strike] from 1908, Fernand Kolney (1868-1930) anticipates, as it were, the last Messiah, of whom the Norwegian existential philosopher Zapffe would later speak. Kolney begins by telling us that waiting for the Messiah for thousands of years was a futile endeavor:

“And still you are messianically minded and call with all your might for the coming of the Messiahs. It has already been three thousand years that you have been looking for them; three thousand years in which you have been mocked, sold, deceived, starved, enslaved, shot, and yet you have kept raising this hope; three thousand years in which you have followed prophets of all colours and various leaders – kings, bishops, generals, ministers, politicians – who have tried to introduce you to the peaceful Eden, the promised land, the city of harmony, and so on.”

Next, Kolney explains that the power of words, as reflected in socialist or anarchist systems, is not enough to change the world for the better:

“You believe in the virtue of words; you believe that a little rhetoric and some wisdom can change the face of the world; you think that a system, be it socialist or anarchist, must immediately make man better, overcome class egoism, overthrow the oppressive bourgeoisie and finally create a society based on mutual brotherhood and help.” (3)

Every movement relied on leaders who sooner or later betrayed the people. Kolney argues that the people must act without a leader:

“O people, when will you finally understand that the task of leaders is still to commit treason? When will you finally realise that you have to make your revolution all by yourself, yes, all by yourself, without augurs, without messiahs, without politicians?” (9)

Below, Kolney gives a first, etymological, hint of what the coming revolution will look like by taking a closer look at the word “proletarian”:

“Please hear us out. We are not Orvietan salesmen, not charlatans selling panaceas. You have never seen us standing in front of the campaign wagon, and you will never find us there. We just want you to know that the last name you were given is Proletarian, which means ‘he who multiplies, he who has many children’.” (10)

While even today we still have to listen to the argument that man is a reproducing being by nature, Kolney’s readership was already taught better at the time. He positions himself against all Rousseau-isms and captures the continued effect of biological radicals despite all social transformation. Kolney challenges us to resist the pseudo-natural diktat of birth. He knows that man is a cultural being right up to the continuation of the species:

“Do not forget that social laws are in part a reflection of the laws of nature, and that if the laws of nature are bad, nature will remain the eternal adversary of man. Don’t listen to the poets, the thinkers of the academy, the salons or the protective forces, the purveyors of commonplaces, the negotiators of the four seasons with ready-made phrases and sentimental ravings. They will tell you that nature is the nurturer, the mother, the watchful benefactress. Yet nature has invented all the evils you suffer from, illness in all its forms, ruthlessness in all its nuances. With the human swarm dictated by her, she has created barbarism and thus the very abominable society that is crushing you. Do not forget that nature makes the individual sacrifice himself to the species by ordering him to multiply without measure or rule. You have the right, even the duty, to limit your procreation, to be an individualist – an egoist in the sublime sense of the word – by refusing to perpetuate your own pain in your offspring and by trying to improve yourself physically and morally. You will already have realised this: Only after the emergence of selected, perfected beings will it be possible to create a just civilisation from scratch.

So free yourself from the instinctivity of the animals; learn to be a real human being, i.e. not to create thoughtlessly.

Make few children; make no more and you are saved.” (10f)

In what follows, Kolney propagates the birth strike as the only effective means of leaving capitalist society and its forms of exploitation behind. His recipe is not a genuine antinatalism, but only a denatalism à la bourgeoisie, because the bourgeoisie has long practiced the one- to two-child family. Procreation is, as it were, the only reserve of the working class into which the ruling class, despite all its armed force, cannot intrude in order to conscript more workers:

“Your mind is sharp, your reason is comprehensive. Eliminate only the Christian virus and you will understand that Malthusianism is the only means of carrying out the social revolution without cataclysms and massacres. It is the supreme, most terrible, most implacable weapon of the people. Refuse to procreate, do not organise the strike of the hands, from which you always emerge as the loser, but the birth strike. – And you hold victory in your hands! Don’t breed any more slaves. Since you are unable to leave your hell behind you: Do not multiply any more, do not create children, lest they follow you into this infamous hell, and the bourgeoisie will be devastated. As you can well imagine, they will never agree to populate their barracks and industrial workhouses with their own sons. So what will they do? Should they pass laws? Oh no! This time it is the people who are in possession of the means of salvation. Legislation, whatever it may be, cannot compel the subjugated to multiply if they voluntarily abstain from the task. If those who oppress you use the means of shooting to secure the preservation and continuance of the present monstrous state of things, yet they cannot use guns to compel new flesh for exploitation.

If the workers adopt Malthusianism even to the extent that the wealthy class practice it, we shall have a real shortage of wage labourers within the next twenty years. No theorist, however, dares to set such a short deadline for the revolution. The calculated, progressive suicide of the people means the general upheaval of society. Capital stands helpless and powerless before its accumulated riches, before its heaps of gold, which will henceforth only have the value of pebbles or piles of rubble. What is the lazy class to do when labour becomes scarce, when there are no longer enough hands for slave labour, when in fifty years there may be none at all? If it wants to continue to eat in the future, Capital will have to work for its part and perform all the abominable labour that it imposes on the proletariat through the omnipotence of its laws and its money. If it continues to strive for luxury, it will have to participate in human labours in future.” (12f)

Kolney’s Messiah is the human being who remains by himself – who does not reproduce himself and his suffering. It remains incomprehensible why Kolney only advances to a resolute denatalism and does not dare to undertake an anti-natalist breakthrough. His insight into the continued effect of biological radicals in humans and his skepticism towards socialism or anarchism alone suggest an antinatalist breakthrough. Nevertheless, a residual hope for a completely different society must have persisted in him.

From the preface of VEREBBEN DER MENSCHHEIT? NEGANTHROPIE UND ANTHROPODIZEE (EBBING AWAY OF MANKIND? ANTHROPODICY AND NEGANTHROPODICY; published in 2000)

At the beginning of philosophy, so it is recorded, Democritus expressed his astonishment at the belief that the creation of new human beings was one of the things that was inevitable by nature and according to the traditional order. The number of people is still growing. On the other hand, if the current birth rate in Germany and similarly rich countries were to be found everywhere on earth, humanity would probably die out around the year 2400. The question ‘Should humans exist?’ arises right here. Among the people who are produced, there are always those who have to suffer unspeakably. This is a fact that is not only emphasised by Schopenhauer or so-called ‘pessimists’, but should be an occasion for philosophising for anyone who only – and especially – looks at the 20th century. So far, no one has been able to show that those unthinkable and yet practised inflictions of suffering in Auschwitz and in all regions of all times, as far as tradition goes, could be compensated for by earlier or later happiness of the sufferers or other people. Even where the good was originally striven for in the attempt to establish a society without oppression and superfluous misery, this led to millions of tragedies in the 20th century for which there were neither historical nor natural necessities. […]

In the history of unrealised antinatalist breakthroughs, the reform pedagogue, anarchist and suicidal Paul Robin (1837-1912), who was thrown out of the First International by Karl Marx, occupies an extremely interesting position. The intellectual environment that led him into the courtyard of antinatalism was neo-Malthusianism. The latter is characterised not by the finding that the procreation of further humans is reprehensible per se, but only under given conditions, which are generally regarded as reformable. Robin maintains the view that the conditions of existence require a temporary denatalist practice, but not a genuine antinatalism.

Robin published, for instance, in the Librairie de Régénération, which functioned as the ‘Organ de la Ligue de la Régénération humaine’ and whose motto was: PROCRÉATION CONSCIENTE ET LIMITÉE (Limited and prudent procreation).

In his short treatise POPULATION ET PRUDENCE PROCRÉATRICE (Population and Procreation Prudence), Robin opposes what could be described as the imperative of combative procreation. We quote from the fourth and expanded edition of 1907:

‘They are pushing like mad to produce an even greater excess of offspring, and in their abominable fear of the invasion of foreigners and above all of the demands of the poor, they want even more cannon fodder, even more factory meat.’[1] (Librairie de Régénération, Paris 1907, p. 5)

Here, on the one hand, Robin rejects the state natalism of his time, which was in favour of unconditional growth of the French population in order to be able to stand up to arch-rival Germany natalistically.
On the other hand, Robin above criticises the production of new people whose fate would be to eke out a miserable existence in factories as poorly paid workers.
While France’s entry into a denatalist phase was registered with an anxious sideways glance, particularly at Germany, Robin recognises this as a victory for reason:

‘France was the first nation to take this path of common sense and reason. It has the lowest birth rate of all nations, and the complaints of the pro-creatomaniacs indicate the approach of a time when its population will no longer increase slightly because mortality is declining, but will actually decrease and France will be depopulated.’[2]

Against the procreatiomaniacs
Robin calls the procreators of his day ‘procreatiomaniacs’. His injunction against procreomania reads:

‘Let’s repeat what the procreatomaniacs say, but with a clearer objective:
‘Mothers, give birth in pain to many miserable offspring. Despite all your tenderness, you can only care for and feed them poorly, they will be unhappy and therefore very likely to become villains‘.’[3]

Space, time and the social
According to Robin, numerous factors have to be taken into account before a new human being can be created. It is astonishing that he does not categorically rule out procreation once they have been duly taken into account:

‘… the creation of a new human being is an extremely complex undertaking, involving considerations of time, place, people and public institutions;’[4]

Meliorism
It appears that Robin believes that only the present is a bad time to create new humans. In the future, on the other hand, he imagines periods of happiness that make it seem justifiable to him not to completely refrain from perpetuating the species:

‘We consider it a great mistake, both familial and social, to bring children into the world whose maintenance and education are not sufficiently assured in the environment into which they are now born.’[5]

Denatalististic enlightenment
According to Robin, a higher standard of living is less responsible for the success of denatalism than a certain denatalist enlightenment:

‘To the extent that a family, a class, a nation becomes more enlightened, it also becomes less fertile of its own accord and tends to put the number of new people brought into existence into an appropriate proportion.’[6]

Neronic Principle
Robin is also familiar with what one might call the Neronic Principle. He knows that you never know what kind of person a new human being will develop into. – Although it should be specified here that he sees the moulding of inhumans as particularly mileu-dependent.

‘And they become not only victims, but also terrible executioners, soldiers who are less suited to defending their homeland – which no other people intend to attack – but rather to plundering, murdering, setting fire to the homeland of the poor, peaceful people, the so-called inferior races, and occasionally even taking action against their own countrymen.’[7]

The Hospitality Principle
Why is there no breakthrough to antinatalism in Paul Robin’s work? At least two of his convictions seem to be relevant. Firstly, his belief in humanity’s fundamental capacity for improvement. And secondly, in combination with the first moment, his upholding of what we can call the hospitality principle. – According to which we must first work to make the earth a more welcoming and hospitable place for new people – for new people whose emergence Robin only wants to see postponed, but which he does not categorically reject:

‘We do not deny that certain reforms and improvements will enable the earth to feed a large number of people more abundantly; nevertheless, we maintain that it is essential – before wanting to increase the number of births – to wait until these reforms have been implemented and have taken effect, and that, moreover, concern for quality must always take precedence over concern for quantity.’[8]

Birth Strike
Robin’s somewhat unenthusiastic use of the term ‘’birth strike‘’ (the originator of which is generally considered to be the antinatalist Marie Huot, but whose inventor Robin cites as Augustine Bron) can be explained against the background of his – from today’s perspective – incorrigible optimism:

‘Birth strike – as one of you said! (1) O women! Make such children as will strengthen and emancipate the working class – which is destined to absorb all other classes into itself – and not such as will only help to reinforce its oppression’.
(1) Augustine Bron, Peuple de Bruxelles, 1893, followed by many others, including Séverine.[9]

---

[1] Ils poussent follement à surprocréer davantage, et, dans leur immonde peur de l’invasion des étrangers et surtout des revendications des pauvres, ils veulent encore plus de chair à canon, plus de chair à usine.

[2] « La France est entrée la première dans cette voie du bon sens, de la raison. Elle a la natalité la plus faible de toutes les nations, et on peut prévoir le temps très prochain, prédit dans les lamentations des procrèatomanes où sa population au lieu de s’augmenter légèrement grâce à la mortalité décroissante, ira réellement en diminuant, où la France se dépeuplera ! » (ibid., p. 6)

[3] Répétons ce que disent les procréatomanes, mais en précisant bien leur but : « Mères, enfantez dans la douleur beaucoup de misérables rejetons. Malgré votre tendresse, vous ne pourrez que mal les soigner, mal les nourrir, ils seront malheureux, donc auront forte chance de devenir méchants. » (ibid., p. 7)

[4] « … la création d’un nouvel humain est une question très complexe, contenant des considérations de temps, de lieux, de personnes, d’institutions publiques ; »

[5] « Nous considérons comme une grande faute familiale et sociale de mettre au monde des enfants dont la subsistance et l’éducation ne seront pas suffisamment assures dans le milieu où ils naissent actuellement. »

[6] « A mesure qu’une famille, qu’une classe, qu’une nation devient plus éclairée, elle devient volontairement moins prolifique, et tend à proportionner le nombre des nouveaux appelés à la vie… » (ibid, p. 6)

[7] « Et en plus, pis que victimes, ils deviendront d’horribles bourreaux, des soldats, propres non à défendre leur patrie, qu’aucun autre peuple ne songe à attaquer, mais à piller, assassiner, incendier dans celles des pauvres gens paisibles, des races dites inférieures, et à l’occasion, à agir de même contre leurs propres compatriotes ». (ibid., p. 8)

[8] « Nous ne contestons pas que certaines réformes et améliorations permettront à la terre de nourrir plus lard un grand nombre d’habitants; mais nous affirmons qu’il est indispensable, avant de vouloir augmenter le nombre des naissances, d’attendre que ces reformes aient été exécutées et aient produit leur effet, et que du reste, la préoccupation de la qualité devra toujours précéder celle de la quantité. »

[9] « Grève des ventres, comme l’a dit une des vôtres (1)! O femmes! Faites des enfants qui relèveront, émanciperont la classe des travailleurs, destinée à absorber toutes les autres, et non de ceux qui ne contribuent qu’à augmenter son écrasement».

According to the Gnostic world picture man was not meant to be in this world. In order to neutralise this view, western philosophy has since tried to generate meaning.

Had Camus enjoyed the benefit of the teachings of Henri Cazalis (1840–1909), or had Cioran been familiar with the arguments of this latter’s “Livre du néant”, both authors would perhaps have felt inclined to formulate more radical propositions than they did in fact formulate regarding the necessity of a metaphysical revolt of those “Sisyphus”es that we all in fact are.

French	English
Un jour certainement viendra où l’homme ne voudra plus procréer son espèce. À quoi bon ? Pour prolonger la durée de cette infernale comédie, pour perpétuellement refaire ce travail de Sisyphe, remuer toujours cette boue et ce néant ?	The day will surely come when man will no longer want to propagate his species. What good would that do? To prolong the duration of this hellish comedy? To do the work of Sisyphus for all eternity and to continue stirring up all this dirt and this nothingness?
Quelle chose plus grave et plus misérable pourtant dans la réalité de la vie, que la création d’un être !	What could be worse and more miserable in real life than the creation of a new being?
Tu es entré dans le monde étrange des compositions et des décompositions chimiques : ta vie et ta mort terrestres, agrégations et désagrégations continuelles, jusqu’au jour où il ne restera plus la moindre trace, le moindre souvenir de cette chose immonde qui sera ton cadavre.	You have entered this strange world of chemical compositions and decomposition processes: your earthly life and your earthly death, constant mergers and dissolutions, until the day when not the slightest trace, not the slightest memory of this abominable something – which will be your corpse – remains.
Les hommes sont tellement accoutumés, par des habitudes séculaires, à la platitude, à la honte, à l’absurdité de leur vie, qu’ils ne pensent même plus à s’en étonner, comme ceux qui, depuis l’enfance, vivent dans la vermine, et à la fin ne se grattent plus.	As a result of centuries-old habits, people are so accustomed to the lowliness, ignominy and absurdity of their existence that they no longer even think to wonder about it, similar to those who live among vermin from childhood and end up not even scratching themselves.
On ne dira jamais assez comme ce monde est vieux. L’homme s’ennuie si profondément aujourd’hui, et méprise si bien son espèce, qu’il ne ferait rien sans doute pour la perpétuer davantage, si la Nature (…) n’avait eu l’esprit d’attacher à la reproduction certaines voluptés auxquelles, il le faut bien avouer, l’homme a rarement la force de résister longtemps.	One cannot stress often enough how old this world already is. Contemporary Man has been seized by such a profound ennui and despises his own species to such a degree that he would surely take no steps to ensure its continuation, had Nature (…) not seen to it that procreation is associated with certain pleasures, the temptation of which – one should not hesitate to admit it – human beings can only rarely withstand for very long.
La Nature n’a peut-être créé la Beauté, que pour nous asservir davantage à la reproduction de l’espèce ?	Would nature have created beauty just to subjugate us even more to the reproduction of the species?
La Nature est riche, et peut jeter l’or par les fenêtres ; mais par malheur c’est nous qu’elle jette ainsi, et nous nous brisons le crâne en tombant.	Nature is rich and can just throw the gold out of the window; unfortunately, however, it is we who are thrown away in this manner, and we break our necks when we fall.
Enfin la liberté, où est-elle ici-bas ? Suis-je libre de naître, libre de ne pas mourir, libre de changer mon cerveau, ma forme, la livrée que m’a imposée la naissance ?	And finally, freedom: where is it here on earth? Am I free to be born, free not to die, free to change my brain, my shape, the equipment that birth has imposed on me?
Ce qui condamne la vie, c’est que seulement après nous avoir déshonorés et flétris, qu’elle nous tue.	What judges life is the fact that it only kills us after it has debased and disfigured us.
La vie, comme le haschich ou l’opium, nous donne quelques hallucinations rapides, puis nous tue.	Much like hashish or opium, life gives us a few transient hallucinations, but then it kills us.
Le Bouddha, qui égale le Christ par son amour sans bornes, sa divine miséricorde pour les êtres, lui est, je crois, supérieur par sa conception de la vie. Il la juge dure et cruelle, vide au fond et pleine de néant.	The Buddha, who is equal to Jesus Christ in his boundless love, his divine mercy towards all creatures, is, I believe, superior to him, superior in his view of life. He considers it hard and cruel, ultimately void and full of vanity.
Et, dans tout son enseignement, quelle profonde pitié pour toutes ces existences, « qui naissent de l’enchaînement fatal des causes et des effets ; » pour tous ces esclaves de l’erreur, pour tous ces malheureux condamnés à naître, à vieillir, à mourir, et à souffrir à travers cette forêt de douleurs tant de misères et d’inquiétudes !	And yet how profoundly deep is the compassion throughout his teaching for all these beings “who arise from the fatal concatenation of causes and effects”, “for all these slaves of error, for all these unfortunates who are condemned to be born, to grow old, to die and to suffer so much misery and sorrow through this ocean of pain”.
Le Néant, roi des choses, comment le vaincre ? Par l’ascétisme, la méditation et l’amour. L’ascétisme et le célibat lui refuseront et lui raviront des victimes.	Nothingness – the ruler of all things – how can we overcome it? Via asceticism, meditation and love. Asceticism and celibacy dispossess it and deny it its victims.
Le lendemain du jour où ce monde sera mort, qu’aura-t-il servi de l’avoir créé ? L’éternité est un cimetière, où pourrit si vite la mémoire des morts !	The day after the death of this world – what was the point of creating in the first place? Eternity is a graveyard where the memory of the dead soon decays!
Regarde le désert : il ressemble au néant de ce monde. Combien d’êtres traverseront ce néant, sans y laisser aucunes traces ; que d’êtres l’ont traversé déjà, dont les traces sont effacées !	Look at the desert: it resembles the vanity of this world. How many people will cross this nothingness without leaving a trace; how many people have already crossed it whose traces have been erased!
… tu m’as fait possesseur un moment du trésor de l’existence, de la pensée, du splendide manteau de la vie. Mais tout à coup paraît la Mort : tu me ravis l’anneau magique, et tu me fais rentrer dans la nuit du néant.	For a moment you made me the owner of the nobility of existence: the mind, that splendid coating of life. Yet suddenly death appears: you take this magic ring away from me again and make me return to the night of nothingness.
Qu’importe dans la vie éternelle qu’une étoile naisse ou qu’elle meure ? Qu’importe que tu sois ou que tu ne sois pas ?	Of what concern is it to eternal life whether a star is born or dies? What does it matter whether you are or are not?
La naissance m’a délivré jadis de cette prison de ténèbres, où je dormais sans conscience, et le monde m’est apparu, beau comme une peinture. Mais aujourd’hui ce monde lui-même n’est plus pour moi qu’une matrice ténébreuse	Once, birth freed me from the prison of darkness in which I slept unconscious, and the world seemed as beautiful to me as a painting. Today, however, the world itself is only a dark canvas to me.

At any given moment, there are countless people in the world who are determined to reproduce. Has it ever happened that such a person changed their decision because they were persuaded by the arguments of antinatalist moral theory?

The history of philosophy is,

not least of all,

the progress of humanity

in becoming aware of the fact

that human beings do not have to exist.

As for AN, every single person can contribute and do what is necessary to achieve its very goal. This is not true for a future perfect society, say communism. Countless people have devoted their lives to making communism a reality, to little avail. Someone who abstains from procreation has basically done all that can be done to bring about the ebbing away of humanity.

Anti-natalist
So you definitely want to have a child.

Birth-oriented
Well, yes, I am definitely unwavering in my stance.

AN
But you certainly wouldn’t consider having children if you knew that your child would inevitably be born with an extremely painful condition, with pain that is not amenable to medical treatment?

BO
If I knew that my child would suffer I would most certainly abstain from procreation.

AN
Consider, if the unspeakable suffering of your child did not begin at birth, but a week (a month, a year) after birth, would you change your mind about having a child?

BO
Most certainly I would then revise my decision.

AN
As an ethical person, would you refrain from procreation if you knew that your child would start to suffer unspeakably 10 years after birth?

BO
Of course I am not prepared to see my child suffer. Therefore, I would refrain from procreation if it were a proven fact, or more or less certain, that it would suffer terribly from the age of ten.

AN
You seem to be an ethically responsible person. As an ethically responsible person, would you also refrain from procreation if it were more or less certain that your child would start to suffer unspeakably at some point in the future when you weren’t around anymore, let’s say 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 or even more years from now?

BO
Yes, definitely. My child will still be my child, even at the age of 95!

AN
Now brace yourself for a perhaps unwelcome conclusion: You have moved from being in favour of procreation to an antinatalist position. From a certain age on a vast majority of older people is assailed by various physical or psychological problems. Let me just mention cancer and loneliness here.

BO turning AN
Let me think about this.

Metaphorically, there is often talk of the sweet sleep of non-existence, from which “we” were roused when our creators acted in such a way that we began to exist. Now, if it is true that our brain does not produce consciousness in phases of deepest sleep, then this metaphor – in a different context – has an ontologically accurate core. Essentially, we are the consciousness produced by our brain. Against this background, we do not exist as long as our brain does not produce any consciousness. If I am now awakened from unconscious sleep, what happened at the very beginning of my existence only metaphorically takes in fact place. It is entirely possible that the temporary non-existence of countless people was and is brutally ended by all kinds of wake-up mechanisms.

Content
ALGO, NADA, NADIE (From antinatalism to antiabortion: an ontological-existential approach), by Julio Cabrera. ………………………………………………………………………………… 3
ABSTRACT ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 3
DEVELOPMENT …………………………………………………………………………………………… 4
EMBEDDING ANTI-ABORTIONISM INTO ANTINATALISM? ON EMBRYONIC EXISTENTIALISM, by Karim Akerma ……………………………………………………………… 15
A mentalistic definition of “living being” ………………………………………………………… 15
A few objections to my mentalistic definition of “living being”: ………………………… 18
The problem of killing and of homicide …………………………………………………………… 19
Autonomy versus sentience ……………………………………………………………………………. 23
KILLING, MANIPULATION AND SUICIDE (Replies to Karim Akerma), by Julio Cabrera……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 28
(I). DO NOT KILL ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 29
(II). DO NOT MANIPULATE ……………………………………………………………………….. 30
(III). DO NOT KILL YOURSELF ………………………………………………………………….. 36

SECOND REPLIES TO JULIO CABRERA, by Karim Akerma ……………………………. 38
BETTER NEVER TO HAVE ARGUED? By Julio Cabrera ………………………………….. 44
Introduction: Return to the primary intuitions …………………………………………………… 44
PART I. Recovering the initial argument. ………………………………………………………… 45
(1). Ontological difference revisited: something and nothing. …………………………. 45
(2). What does it mean “to exist”? ……………………………………………………………….. 46
(3). Life and existence do not coincide. ……………………………………………………….. 48
(4) Avoiding academic disputes. …………………………………………………………………. 49
(5). We are born by others; we are aborted by others. …………………………………….. 50
(6). Abortion is not a scientific question. ……………………………………………………… 52
(7). Why shouldn’t an existent be aborted? …………………………………………………… 53
(8). A decision neither logical nor arbitrary. …………………………………………………. 55
(9). Who makes the decision? About women suffering. …………………………………. 56
(10) The anti-abortion argument recovered. ………………………………………………….. 58
(11). Between legality and morality. ……………………………………………………………. 59
(12). Not reaching the abortive situation. ……………………………………………………… 61
PART II. AA without or within AN ………………………………………………………………… 61
PART III. Argumentation in a pessimistic environment. …………………………………… 64
Concluding remarks and proposals………………………………………………………………….. 71
FINAL REPLY TO JULIO CABRERA, by Karim Akerma ………………………………….. 75

Extended Abstract (access to full German version HERE)

Nietzsche considers himself as an overcomer of Christianity and of the expectations of redemption and salvation associated with this religion. In his words, he philosophizes with a hammer in order to envisage new and non-Christian ways for a successful existence.

As regards ethics, Nietzsche’s turning away from Schopenhauer becomes particularly apparent in the fact that he does not ignore the suffering in the world, but wants to leave it behind him and humanity in a superhuman-heroic way. The category of the tragic is central to this.

With an appropriate tragic attitude, Nietzsche argues, it is possible not only to deal with the suffering in the world, but also to face the undoubtedly forthcoming end of humanity. Some- thing that we can call the “light of the lived moment” seems to Nietzsche to be capable of compensating for long periods of endured suffering. He explains this light of the lived moment to his readers in the manner of a secularized substitute for the sacred-religious:

Even in the smallest moment, in the shortest atom of his life’s journey, Nietzsche says, man can encounter something sacred that transcends all struggle and hardship. This is what he means by tragic feeling. And if the whole of humanity must one day die – of this, Nietzsche says, we can have no doubt – then the supreme task for all future times is to grow together into a whole and a common whole, so that humanity as a whole goes towards its imminent downfall with a tragic spirit.

According to Nietzsche, to the extent that our existence is permeated by a tragic attitude, we can easily compensate for all the negatives of life and are open to an intangible joy of being. But there must be a blind spot in this joie de vivre, for Nietzsche himself pointed out that, for cosmic reasons, humanity will eventually come to an end.

Nietzsche does indeed consider how the end of humanity, which is ultimately inevitable for astrophysical reasons, might be faced. In answering this question, he extends the idea of sacrifice from the individual to the whole of humanity.

The starting point for Nietzsche’s ETI reflection is the conviction of the sublimity of sacrifice: if Christian pseudo-humanity demands that no one be sacrificed, then the greatest distance from this aspect of Christianity would be achieved if all humanity were to sacrifice itself. Which immediately raises the question: How could such a sacrifice be offered for the good of the species, if the species would cease to exist with the sacrifice?

What is the systematic meaning of “sacrifice” for Nietzsche? For him, the idea of sacrifice is entirely consistent with his anti-Christian heroism of existence, with which he believes he has overcome “effeminate” Christianity. More specifically, it is also the idea of sacrifice in the context of which he will think about extraterrestrial intelligences and even consider intensive and extensive communication with ETI.

So when, according to Nietzsche, would the whole of humanity be ready to sacrifice itself? Contrary to his earlier convictions, Nietzsche writes in “The Dawn of Day” that the time would come when, in return, we would receive the knowledge of truth or a great deal of knowledge from extraterrestrials.

Extraterrestrials seem to take the place of the Christian promise of salvation he criticized. One could articulate this constellation as follows: After Nietzsche has tracked down the Christian God in all regions of the world and driven him out of all corners of it, a vague shadow of this God is nevertheless still present: as extraterrestrial intelligence.

In this guise, however, the Christian God banished from the universe has undergone a pro- found metamorphosis and is hardly recognizable. He is, as it were, only a pale material shadow of himself. Yet Nietzsche assigns this material shadow a systematic place that enables us to interpret it, as it were, as an extraterrestrial resurrection of the old God Nietzsche thought dead.

In his extraterrestrial-material atrophied stage, God has lost the attribute of omnipotence.

What still belongs to the atrophied stage, on the other hand, is a secularized form of the former divine omniscience. For Nietzsche, this omniscience is sufficient to offer us humans a substitute for salvation.

Nietzsche’s remarks are countered in this article with reflections by his contemporary Eduard von Hartmann, who, against Nietzsche, adheres to a cosmic pessimism.

While Nietzsche sees E. von Hartmann as a prisoner of the pre-Copernican world view, the latter actually turns out to be a philosophical escapee from terracentrism.

What E. von Hartmann finds scientifically-speculatively in the vastness of space, however, would have met with lively opposition from Nietzsche: worlds full of suffering, of which, according to von Hartmann, it would be better if they did not exist.

1. What do antinatalists claim?

Antinatalists propagate non-propagation. To justify this claim, they try to show that the suffering we experience is ethically more important than the happiness we experience. Antinatalists do not deny that happiness exists. However, they question whether, for example, my current happiness can compensate for my past or future suffering or the suffering of other people. To give a concrete example: antinatalists deny that the alleged happiness at the time of the German economic miracle in the 1950s could compensate for even a tiny fraction of the suffering in the German concentration camps. Because of the preponderance and inevitability of suffering, antinatalists advocate not having children and plead for an ebbing away of humanity by way of natal abstinence.

• Do natalists need good arguments for the creation of life? After all, their position is in a way “biologically default”. Maybe the burden of argument is on the antinatalists’ side? What is your opinion on this? 

At a first glance it may look like the burden of proof is on the antinatalists. Animals do procreate and many people consider man as an animal of sorts. However, our biology does not compel us to procreate; human sexuality is not closely linked to procreation. Contraception is almost as old as history. What “dictates” us to procreate are, rather, cultural institutions, social expectations and intuitions: family members, neighbours, communities or states. Still, against this overwhelmingly pronatal background it looks like the proof of burden is with antinatalism.

At the same time, there is a basic rule that puts everything in a completely different light. I call it the Never-Act Rule:

Never act in such a way that a person will die due to your action

Today it appears to be an accepted verdict in most countries that – except in cases of legitimate defence – one must never act in such a way that a person will inevitably die as a consequence of that very action. Now, procreation is an act as a result of which a person will inevitably die. Since procreation is not an act of legitimate defence, one must not procreate. Looked at from this angle, antinatalism is embedded in our most fundamental values and suddenly it looks as if the burden of proof can be reversed and placed on the pronatalists!

While it is true that antinatalism doesn’t have too many adherents today, it is also true that the Never-Act Rule, according to which we must not procreate, is a widely accepted moral rule.

• Do you think that the axiological postulate of antinatalists would ever be put in practice widely and thus lead to the extinction of humanity? Would the spreading of this ideal have any (whether positive or negative) influence on political or economical processes?

Unfortunately, the human capacity for suffering seems infinite. If this were not the case, the vast majority of all people would have long since opted for the extinction of humanity by means of natal abstinence. After the great catastrophes of the Armenocide, the Judeocide, in the face of the events in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Congo wars a perpetuation of mankind seems hardly justifiable. However, it is not only the capacity to suffer that appears to be immense; selfishness must also be boundless. How else can we explain the fact  that hardly anyone shrinks from bringing children into such a world which will also be a world of heat with hundreds of millions of people migrating due to global warming.

Even though it seems extremely unlikely to me that mankind will die out because everyone has become a convinced antinatalist, it could well be that in future there will be significantly fewer people on earth due to a declining global birth rate.

This would probably have a major economic impact. As we know, we live – at least in consumer and industrial societies – in growth-driven societies. That is, our capitalist economies cannot continue without growth. A sharp long-term decline in birth rates would probably be tantamount to an end of capitalism. Against this background, antinatalists and denatalists are called to think about alternative and non-maximalist forms of economy.

While capitalism is growth-oriented, antinatalism is anti-growth. It would seem that antinatalism and capitalism do not go well together. If the antinatalist ideal were ever to be taken seriously on a global scale, there would certainly be a strong reaction from the defenders of a growth-oriented economy.

It would be an attractive task to describe the economic form that would be required to allow an “orderly” ebbing away of mankind.

• Can we say that the arguments supporting  antinatalism may also support suicide?

Certainly, many advocates of antinatalism and suicide have a common denominator and shared convictions. Upon closer inspection, however, the moral theory of antinatalism is not per se linked to suicide. The aim of antinatalism is to minimize suffering. As a matter of fact, an act of suicide often leaves near and dear ones suffering. Perhaps it could be said that suicide can be defended against the background of antinatalism as follows: The antinatalist moral theory holds that the presence of human beings on earth, is not an overriding value to which everything else must be sacrificed. This also applies to the individual: If his or her continued existence has become unbearable for him or herself, he or she does not have to make a sacrifice by continuing to exist.

• To what extent does antinatalistic view also relate animals other than humans? Apart from the sterilization of domestic species, should we also stop breeding farm animals, and strive for the gradual extinction of other species?

Antinatalism is a moral theory that focuses on  ill-being and suffering. It calls on  all morally capable persons to stop producing  more beings that are prone to suffering. According to this principle, people should not have children. Now, there is no fundamental difference between human and animal suffering. Against this background, the antinatalist moral theory urges all moral persons to also reduce the amount of animal suffering and the number of suffering animals as much as possible without creating new suffering. What are the means of achieving this moral goal? The following means appear to be obvious: 1. A diet and clothing without animal products. 2. The extinction of livestock breeds by means of sterilisation. 3. Reducing the suffering of wild animals through sterilisation, where this can be done without creating new animal suffering. 4. Where this measure leads to the extinction of entire species, we may lament this as an aesthetic loss, but we must not forget that the perpetuation of a species is often a great generator of suffering.

• What is the difference between the postulates of antinatalists and those put forward by the advocates of eugenic projects?

Already at the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship there were eugenic efforts to prevent the procreation of the hereditarily unfit or the biologically inferior through forced sterilisation. To enhance the genetic stock, only “valuable” women or men were allowed to reproduce. It is immediately obvious that such dictatorial state-natalism has nothing to do with an antinatalist moral theory, which addresses people who are free to act.

Regarding current human enhancement projects, I think they are just escapes from antinatalism.

• Which erroneous views (stereotypes) about antinatalism do you observe most often? 

a. Antinatalist hate children.

b. If the goal is that there should be no more people (or: If it would have been better if one had never begun to exist), then it would be better if I no longer existed either. So antinatalists therefore wish for my death!

c. Antinatalists want to dictate the reproductive behaviour of other people.

d. If they don’t like it here, antinatalists should go to a world yonder and commit suicide.

e. Antinatalists want to destroy humanity instead of helping to solve mankind’s problems.

f. In principle, antinatalists would have to approve of wars, because many people are killed in wars.

• What benefits can we (including those of us who choose to raise children) have out of philosophizing on antinatalism?

A study of antinatalist moral theory gives us insights into the extent and meaning of suffering in the world and teaches us to question received intuitions.

Certainly there are people who find the antinatalist moral theory convincing, but who at the same time have a marked desire for children that is stronger than ethical insight. Such a person might still attempt to persuade others not to have children of their own.

• What ontological assumptions would make antinatalism most convincing?

1. If there were a Supreme Being who suffered unspeakably at the disappearance of humanity, then it would be somewhat more difficult to defend the antinatalist moral theory. Therefore, an atheistic worldview is conducive to antinatalism. At the same time, I would counter the appeal to a Supreme Being with an anti-theism that blames the responsible Supreme Being for the suffering throughout history up to this point.

2. The same goes for an ideal value sphere: If there were an ideal sphere of values “aiming” at realisation, then it would be slightly more difficult to defend antinatalism.

3. A naturalistic-realistic ontology appears to be conducive to antinatalism. If there were a paranormal dimension behind our everyday world then it might well be that mankind is embedded into a more comprehensive or encompassing structure such that our disappearance could be conceived of as a loss. Today parapsychology is mostly carried out as a critical science that tries to refute alleged paranormal phenomena. Provided that the findings of parapsychology to date are correct, we should not expect human beings to be embedded in a more comprehensive reality.

Additional question:

How do you define denatalism? (We would add a capsule explaing the meaning of the term as you understand it).

The goal of denatalism is to limit population growth in the face of scarce resources. While antinatalism ultimately wants to reduce the population to zero, denatalism aims to reduce the number of people to an environmentally or socially acceptable level. In the context of population policy, the latter endeavour has been called antinatalism since the 1960s. With the emergence of moral-theoretical antinatalism, a categorical differentiation has become necessary.

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Antinatalism in Ancient Egypt, in Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Gnostic Religion

The following text is the revised version of a lecture I gave at the University of Hamburg on 30 August 2022 at the invitation of interested students.[1] In 1997, I submitted a postdoctoral thesis to the University of Hamburg, which was published in 2000 under the title Ebbing away of Mankind? Neganthropy and Anthropodicy. In my habilitation thesis I defended, among other things, the argument for an abstention from procreation on the basis of an onto-ethical asymmetry:

If we do not procreate, then there is no one whom we would have deprived of existence or happiness or anything else. If, on the other hand, we do produce human beings, there will be some among them who suffer unbearably; and it would have been in our hands to prevent this amount of suffering. Now we cannot say that all suffering is compensated for by happiness, because suffering in the case of procreation represents a real malum, but unrealised happiness in the case of non-procreation (our parental wishes aside) does not represent a malum. Suffering would be endured by a produced person, whereas non-existent happiness in the case of non-procreation, however, cannot be considered a withheld happiness. We can call this the onto-ethical prevalence of suffering. The onto-ethical preponderance of suffering over happiness further means: There are reasons not to produce “someone” in view of future experiences of misery – there are no reasons to produce someone in view of future experiences of happiness.

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Perhaps best known for his science fiction stories, Ray Bradbury is in fact a grandmaster of magical realism and can be considered a phenomenologist of proto-antinatalism:

‘If you watched half an hour there wasn’t a face in the entire enclosure that didn’t wince, cry, redden with anger, pale with fear, one moment or another. Really! Who said Childhood was the best time of life? when in reality it was the most terrible, the most merciless era, the barbaric time when there were no police to protect you, only parents preoccupied with themselves and their taller world.’

‚His mind rebelled. The smell and look of the place were still vivid. That writhing world with its atmosphere of cuts and beaten noses, the air as full of pain as a dentist’s office…‘

‚I used to look back on childhood with great nostalgia. But now I realize I was a sentimental fool. It was nothing but screaming and running in a nightmare and coming home drenched with terror, from head to foot.‘
[Ray Bradbury, The Playground]

Bradbury dares to critically expose the holy grail of care-free childhood, implicitly questioning whether childhood – and thus humanity – should be continued as a generator of suffering at all.

Are we really entitled to continue to act in such a way that future people are forced to make statements like this one?
‚My name is Ann Kristen; my husband’s name is Roger. We were born in the year A.D. 2155. And we lived in a world that was evil. A world that was like a great black ship pulling away from the shore of sanity and civilization, roaring its black horn in the night, taking two billion people with it, whether they wanted to go or not, to death, to fall over the edge of the earth and the sea into radioactive flame and madness.‘
[Ray Bradbury, The Fox and the Forest]

LISTEN to the latest take of my urban-eco antinatalist song COMPLICITY

The lyrics:

Kick-start a life      and celebrate        your child’s first drive,

perfume the air,    particulates  matter,

Compli-city

Born into    the world a leaf     swirled about        by      powerful

market forces

For just two days, a flight to where,  the sun burns down,      it’s anywhere,

a hotel pool,         departing:

Cool

Upmarket stuff     related to     conditions of        hardship

Complicity

Take a seat, *on a rush-hour train, *play your muzak, *at full blast, *unheard of,

*Acoustic *pollution

our smartphone necks *are ridiculed *by minerals *extracted by *underage *labour

Buy a new one

Catch the early *train and resign *yourself to eight more *hours of vain

*Pharma profits

Day in day out*, awareness scouts* bring it home* to us* but we deny* the fallout*

complicity

The juicy steak, a foolproof fake, the cheapest cut, but in its wake, horror reigns, no humane, meat

Take a later train and resign your-*self to insights *gained long before:

compassion

Since utilitarianism is a consequentalist ethics, it is extremely versatile. This was already formulated by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). Mill stated: Utilitarianism would not have to be shelved even if we had the certainty that happiness is fundamentally denied to men: “…utility includes not solely the pursuit of happiness, but the prevention or mitigation of unhappiness; and if the former aim be chimerical, there will be all the greater scope and more imperative need for the latter, so long at least as mankind think fit to live, and do not take refuge in the simultaneous act of suicide recommended under certain conditions by Novalis.”[1] Novalis (1772–1801) pondered whether voluntary self-abolition of humanity would not be preferable to an ineluctable destruction of the species by natural forces.[2] With his remarks, Mill anticipates the core of what would later become known as negative utilitarianism (NU).

A remote proto-NU thinker is the Cyrenaic Hegesias (late 4th to early 3rd century BC). He definitely held the view only hinted at by Mill, believing that happiness is in principle denied to us humans. At the same time, he believed that physical pain is the greatest evil. Therefore, Hegesias advocated in terms of individual ethics to always act in such a way that as little physical pain as possible occurs.[3] Against this background, he recommended individual demise by starvation – as recommended for the last phase of life also by the Jain religion – thus becoming a proto-promortalist of sorts.

---

[1] Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter II, see online https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11224/11224-h/11224-h.htm)

[2] See, Novalis, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, Werke in einem Band, Aufbau-Verlag 1983, p. 83f.

[3] Eduard von Hartmann, classifies this as negative eudaemonistic morality, see his Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Berlin 1922, p. 49f.

Click HERE for today’s take of my song WAKEFUL LARKS

Silence, darkness, sisters, twins, spurn gloomy thoughts of putting in

New beings into space

Darkness round you quite profound, creation sleeps, there is no sound

I will give it here a tongue

Wakeful larks will listen to my midnight song

Wakeful larks trill melodies to cheer the doom

Haste, haste, haste, death lies in wait, on mental floor, is at the door

Knocking on the supreme void

Every night you‘d die again, each morn are born anew and then

Find yourself torn, forlorn

Einstein said just move on fast and time will blast your future passed

Move on stay unborn and flee you fray dim child of dust and see

Wakeful larks will listen to my midnight song

Wakeful larks trill melodies to cheer the doom

Prisoner of life  you’d call the stars  to listen to the song of

yore before the fall Into

Space-time warps your very thoughts be content, your being nought

is fine, decline to be, behold

Wakeful larks will listen to my midnight song

Wakeful larks trill melodies to cheer the doom

If we do not procreate, then there is no one whom we would have deprived of existence or happiness or anything else. If, on the other hand, we do produce human beings, there will be some among them who suffer unbearably; and it would have been in our hands to prevent this amount of suffering. Now we cannot say that all suffering is compensated for by happiness, because suffering in the case of procreation represents a real malum, but unrealised happiness in the case of non-procreation (our parental wishes aside) does not represent a malum. Suffering would be endured by a produced person, whereas non-existent happiness in the case of non-procreation, however, cannot be considered a withheld happiness. We can call this the onto-ethical prevalence of suffering. The onto-ethical preponderance of suffering over happiness further means: There are reasons not to produce “someone” in view of future experiences of misery – there are no reasons to produce someone in view of future experiences of happiness.

[Quote from my Ebbing Away of Mankind? Neganthropy and Anthropodicy, presented in 1997, published in 2000]

The year 1760 seems unremarkable. One lives shortly before the onset of the industrial revolution and thus before the beginning of the man-made climate revolution. In other words, one lives in 1760 before the start of the age of human self-combustion. Today’s level of self-combustion: In one year, as much petroleum is burned as was created by the decomposition of organisms in 5 million years.

In 1760, about 760 million people live on Earth. At least as many people on earth today have no access to clean drinking water. And about 600,000 people die each year as a result of consuming contaminated drinking water. Of the approximately 760 million people living in the world in 1760, many had access to clean drinking water. Despite the thousandfold increase in human output through the use of fossil fuels, there were fewer people without access to clean drinking water in 1760 than today.

Currently, about 865 million people worldwide suffer from malnutrition. That is far more people than lived on earth in 1760. Consequently, viewed from 1760, we now have more than an entire world population of undernourished people. How could this happen, given all the technological and energy advances of past centuries?

Currently, about 760000 people commit suicide every year. Based on the world population of 1760, this would be one in a hundred people. Many people choose “free” death because they have fallen into debt traps from which they can no longer escape. How can so many people fall into debt traps on the one hand, when numerous others no longer know how to invest their money?

When people bestow people on people, people are exposed to what people do to each other.

Long before the birth imprecations of the Old Testament, which we encounter in the prophets Jeremiah and Job, it was noted in ancient Egypt perhaps 4000 years ago in the letters of admonition of Ipu-Wer:

“Old and young say: I wish I were dead! Little children say, I should never have been called into life!”

A whole new picture emerges when we now take into account that there is already a call for the ebbing away of humanity in the Ipu-Wer’s letters of admonition:

“Would that there were an end of men, without conception, without birth! Then would the land be quiet from noise and tumult be no more.”

Unlike the continuous curses of existence, the breakthrough to antinatalism achieved in ancient Egypt does not seem to have continued into the Old Testament.

A metamorphosis or rebirth of the imprecations of birth into antinatalism then occurs in early Christianity.

What about Islam here? The Qur’an seems to know no revolts of the believer against God. Job appears in the Qur’an only in the role of acquiescer:

“And (remember) Job when he cried out to his Lord: ‘Behold, the plague has touched me, but Thou art the Merciful of the Merciful’.” (Sura 21:83, Reclam 1991)

Only in its sectarian fringes does Islam seem to know metaphysical revolt. For example, in Chayyam (~1048-1131), see the article MORGENLÄNDISCHE NIEGEWESENSEINSWÜSCHE.

Going beyond the widespread wishes of never-being, the reading of the BOOK OF Suffering by Farid ATTAR, which has only recently been translated into German in its entirety, now reveals that the thought of a never-being of all humanity has at least been thought of in Sufism:

“Either You should not have created human beings at all, or You must provide their sustenance unconditionally”.
(Attar, Buch des Leidens [Book of Suffering], Verlag C.H.Beck [2017] p. 74)

With these words the GOD TABOO is touched. This is analogous to Immanuel Kant’s questioning of the parental taboo: parents, according to Kant, are obliged to care for their children until they reach adulthood in such a way that the latter would have chosen existence over non-existence.

“Would that there were an end of men, without conception, without birth! Then would the land be quiet from noise and tumult be no more.”
[Ipuwer Papyrus, Section VI]

Until now, it seemed plausible to assume a course of development for the genesis of antinatalism that leads from mere imprecations of existence (‘Would I never have been born’ – for example in ancient Greece and in certain prophets of the Old Testament) to actually antinatalist formulations: ‘It ‘would be better if no more human beings were generated’. The Ipuwer Papyrus quoted above was probably written sometime between 1990 BC and 1250 BC. The quotation shows that the Old Testament imprecations of existence must perhaps be seen as the fading stages of an already more clearly formulated antinatalism, rather than its precursors. According to some researchers, the Ipuwer Papyrus could have been one of the sources for Ecclesiastes (4, 2-3):

“So I concluded that the dead are better off than the living. But most fortunate of all are those who are not yet born. For they have not seen all the evil that is done under the sun.”

The moral theory that questions human procreation is now called antinatalism. Before ‘antinatalism’ became a common term, the French author Annaba spoke of anti-procreationism (antiprocréationnisme). And viewed in the right light, the term ‘anti-procreationism’ actually describes what is meant somewhat more accurately than the term ‘anti-natalism’. Seen in the right light, it is about not procreating in the first place and only secondarily about not birthing children: If anti-procreationism is followed, no children are conceived whose birth would then have to be prevented – by means of abortion – in the broader sense of anti-natalism. Anti-procreationism focuses on the commandment of non-procreation, while antinatalism encompasses the commandment of non-procreation and abortion after procreation has occurred.

Absolute lack of need, says one aspect of Asian spirituality, verges on no longer being. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) modifies this insight in an occidental-masochistic manner by saying that only those who suffer are allowed to exist at all: The simple fact of our existence constitutes a package of guilt that we have to work off suffering. Feuerbach would certainly have spoken out against an existence allowance in the present day – against an unconditional basic income:

“Only the suffering being is the necessary being. Needless existence is superfluous existence. What is free of needs at all also has no need of existence. Whether it is or is not, that is indifferent – for itself, for others. A being without need is a being without cause. Only that which can suffer deserves to exist. Only being filled with pain is divine being. A being without suffering is a being without being. But a being without suffering is nothing other than a being without sensuality, without matter.” [Ludwig Feuerbach, Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie (Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy)].

Before people act in such a way that new people begin to exist, they should at least have ensured that the world is a place that welcomes new people. This is especially true in view of the ecologically dire present and future.

Otherwise, the words of Ray Bradbury apply:

“You know, of course, how babies kill their mothers at birth. Why? Could it be resentment at being forced into a lousy world like this one?”

The term ante-natalism is used to describe a widespread pronatalist concept. Ante-natalism can be translated as: Pronatalism from pre-existence. In several variants, this concept assumes that there should be something qua pre-existence: according to ante-natalism, it is necessary to act in such a way that new humans and animals begin to exist, because otherwise one would be depriving THEM of something. Ante-natalism thus presupposes the myth of shadow existence. People or animals that exist only in shadow, as it were semi-real, shouldn’t be deprived of a full-fledged existence. However, this concept suffers from the fact that the subjet addressed above with THEM is a pure phantasm.

The justification of the breeding of suffering-susceptible animals, a breeding which human beings manage and are responsible for. Many billions of animals exist only because human beings wish to eat them and breed them for this reason (poultry, goats, sheep, pigs, cattle), or because people order them with their breeders for the purpose of making them pets (birds, dogs, cats), because hunters fed them up and fence them in in order to be later able to shoot them (boar, deer, lions) or because they are used in sports that humans enjoy (horses).

Not just human beings but also livestock and animals in the wild are beings susceptible of feeling suffering. A comprehensive antinatalism is always also a vegetarianism, since it quite generally takes a stance against the bringing into the world of sentient beings (which also, incidentally, means that, above and beyond a zoodicy, do not require a biodicy, providing we assume that plants are not sentient beings). A zoodicy could only be successfully developed if those developing it succeeded in presenting the ephemeral and even trivial taste-experience associated with the consumption of meat as of greater ethical weight and import than the sufferings of animals. But this taste-experience clearly belongs to the aesthetic rather than ethical dimension. Consequently, such a zoodicy or carnedicy[1] seems bound, in advance, to fail.

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[1] See Akerma, Carnedizee – Philosophie als fleischlastiges Denken statt brotlose Kunst

Whereas apologists for “original sin” hold that we are born already burdened with this latter, we antinatalists propose the idea that that person burdens him- or herself with sin who undertakes to beget offspring. Any individual who has acquainted themselves with even a portion of the past history of the human species burdens themselves, by procreating, with this “guilt of begetting”, assuming that they had the freedom to omit doing so. Generally speaking, the “guilt of begetting” will be all the greater the more familiar the begetting individual is with the >Certificate of Conduct of the human species, the greater their contact with nativistic >Enlightenment, and the greater their >”freedom of begetting”.

The fact that parents communicate to their children – most of the time themselves actually believing what they here communicate – that the child they wanted was this specific child that they got. In fact, however, parents want “a” child; as a matter of fact, often enough, “a child at any price”. This “incognition of begetting” is, today, on the retreat to the extent that parents are beginning to be able indeed to select specific characteristics for their child and to form and fashion it by means of biotechnology. A truly “wanted child” would be, in fact, a child whose whole nature had been bio-psychologically determined by its parents. At the same time, however, such “wanted children” would be beings instrumentalized and reduced to “means to ends” in a way totally contrary to the idea of human dignity.

The “freedom of begetting” is that historically developing freedom of men and women to call into question the social, religious or biological imperative of procreation. Freedom of begetting is constitutive with regard to >Parental Guilt. The individual can be burdened, or can burden him- or herself, with parental guilt only where said individual enjoyed the freedom to resist – without having to suffer any extremely grave harm or disadvantage through this resistance – any imperative to procreate that was laid, or that they felt to have been laid, upon them.

There corresponds to the freedom of begetting a certain social-historical index (>Index of Guilt). An example of this is a problem which became a very weighty one in the context of Buddhist and Hindu aspirations toward salvation: namely, whether or not one has the moral right to become an ascetic who renounces the world (sramana/samana) if one has not yet begotten any progeny. The question was: did the sramana enjoy the right to deprive, through his own childlessness, his forefathers of those ritual services which would normally have been secured for them by the cult of ancestor worship also present in the societies that produced Hinduism and Buddhism?[1]

Especially in the West, the general availability of modern >Contraceptives along with the equally general decline in religious belief has given a tremendous boost to the freedom of begetting. Correspondingly graver, then, is, today, the >Parental Guilt for the suffering of all children.

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[1] See on this topic the accounts of Hinduism and Buddhism given in Max Weber’s books on The Sociology of Religion: Ges. Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Vol. 2, p. 180.

In terms of moral theory, people are considered as beings capable of justifying, and of taking responsibility for, their actions and omissions of action. Antinatalist >Enlightenment urges people who may, initially, be willing and ready to engage in procreation to undertake an estimation of the consequences of this procreation. Part of such an estimation, if it is to be thorough and circumspect, is a taking into account also of unforeseen and unintended consequences against the background of a >Heuristics of Fear

Objective-Collective Co-Responsibility of all Parents all that which Befalls All Human Beings

There resides in these unforeseen and unintended negative consequences of an act of procreation, which are nonetheless accepted as “worth it” by one engaging in such an act, what we call the objective-collective co-responsibility of all parents for all that befalls human beings be it through Nature or through the agency of other human beings. Generally speaking, parents do not pose themselves the question of the objective consequences of their bringing other human beings into existence, since they tend either to act egoistically in doing this or to look upon their progeny as “realizing” certain values. Procreating persons understand themselves as place-holders for such fundamental values as the “necessary” survival of the species or of the state, or the desirability of the presence of “freedom” in the universe; they leave out of account the fact that their value-directed actions give rise to consequences which undermine these very values. The community of procreators, in other words, imagines itself to be in harmony with a ruling system of values and narrows its gaze down onto the corresponding value-sphere alone: for example, onto the sphere of the family, or of that which sustains the state. Every procreative act, however, has effects in neighbouring value-spheres to its own: the natural environment, the state in its conflictual relations with other states, and the “life” thus brought about itself, the >”Gift” of which inevitably brings with it the death of another human being. – The realization of “the value: life” is indissolubly intertwined, then, with the negation of this very value.[1]

The objective-collective co-responsibility of all parents for all that befalls human beings becomes even clearer where we also apply, as follows, to the unintended consequences of progenerative decisions the standards of the unforeseen (1) and of the unforeseeable (2):

(1) Whoever has begotten children whom some ill has later befallen in their lives usually excuses himself by telling himself that he had not wanted this nor had he foreseen it. But this argument hardly holds water, since almost all that befalls human beings at present or is likely to in future has already befallen human beings in the past: really, everything was foreseeable and “checkable” inasmuch as it could be gleaned from the human species’s >Certificate of Past Conduct – i.e. from the testimony of history – so that it was really impossible to exclude just such conduct’s reoccurring in future. As in so many cases, what was supposedly “unforeseen” proves in fact to have been something deliberately ignored. Whoever makes a decision in favour of procreation does so in the knowledge – which is a definitely accessible knowledge which ought to be made still more accessible by antinatalist Enlightenment – that the future will not look very different from the present or from the past.

(2) Whoever begets children exposes them, furthermore – in a manner that is irresponsible and that therefore involves a moment of co-culpability – not just to the unforeseen but to the unforeseeable, inasmuch as she has taken her decision despite the given objective uncertainty.  Progenerative decisions are always also decisions made under conditions of objective uncertainty because, for example, nothing certain can ever be said either about the emergence of, or, once emerged, the persistence of, social or environmental conditions that will be tolerable for the begotten child. For this reason the parents are also in this regard co-responsible both for the suffering that befalls these begotten children and for that which they occasion.

Not-Being-Able-to-Know as Disguise for Not-Wanting-to-Know. On the Assigning of Moral Responsibility for the Consequences of Pro-Generative Decisions

Against the background of a reflectively-examined history of our species – a history in which genuinely humane states of affairs have remained, throughout, essentially absent – the generation of progeny is, in our view, an aspect of human action and omission which is most definitely susceptible of having moral judgment passed upon it. Both “common sense” awareness and philosophy, indeed, have largely immunized themselves against any attempt at making an examinable problem of the fact of human procreation (>Immune system). We have to do here with nothing less than an anathema set up by society as a whole (> “Criminal” Antinatalism).

Of key importance is a discussion of the criterion of intentionality. Since – so it is argued – it is not possible to impute a subjectively evil intention to any individual who engages in procreation, it cannot either be possible to render anyone responsible or culpable for the likelihood of the misery that has characterized mankind’s past and present’s continuing on into the future. If it is indeed the case that the human beings of the future end up in situations of physical and mental distress, this can at most be said to be due to a “systemic evil” arising spontaneously out of the sum of collective actions – an evil, in other words, that the individual could never do anything about and for the perpetuation of which his individual contribution had necessarily to be negligibly small. We cannot speak of “culpable causation” or even of “calculability” where the causal agency seemingly exerted by a single individual tends in fact to be dissolved in the structures of complex social systems or indeed the incalculable complexity of the future. The conditions we live under are so complex that it is impossible for anyone to know what effects his actions might produce, regardless of whether he procreates or not. Thus, inhumane conditions likely to obtain in the future due to pro-generative decisions taken today are excused and forgiven on the grounds that these decisions, and thus the later conditions, were not intended. Future inhumanity is, in this way, presented as something entirely separate from the decisions made by any individual.

This exculpation, however, by reference to the non-intentionality and non-foreseeability of any such inhumane consequences as may emerge in the future, of every individual making up the community of procreation amounts to nothing less than a liquidation of moral subjectivity. It is indeed indisputably the case that that individual who brings about the existence of another human being only follows imperatives arising from biological radicals, from the urge to self-realization, and from the value-claims of the various collectives in which she moves and lives. But it is also the case that mere reference to the facts that whoever procreates intends no evil thereby and that the future is unforeseeable is powerless to ground any anthropodicy and does not at all suffice to exculpate the individual. The decisive consideration remains rather the following: whoever, today, commits procreation ignores and forgoes, in doing so, the appropriation, and the existentially responsible mental processing, of knowledge that is easily accessible and of which she cannot possibly be oblivious. This is a knowledge which, provided only that the will to process and implement it exists, cannot but lead to the reconsideration of any such pro-generative decision as may already have been taken. The belief in the tenability of a simple dichotomy opposing intended to unintended ill forms part of that social >Immune System alluded to above; it is this belief, in large part, that serves to sustain the socially-required illusion of the moral incontestability of procreation.[2]

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[1] For the above see Robert K. Merton, Die unvorhergesehenen Folgen zielgerichteter sozialer Handlung, in: H. P. Dreitzel, Sozialer Wandel, Luchterhand, Neuwied und Berlin 1967, p. 169-183.

[2] Instructive with regard to this issue are certain remarks made in Wolfgang Würger-Donitza: Grundlegung einer negativen Anthropologie. Band 2: Die Macht und das Böse, p. 152-189.

To act in such a way that, as a consequence of one’s action, someone necessarily dies is (except in cases of self-defence) considered to be acting criminally. In order, then, to distinguish actions as a consequence of which an already-existing human being must die (real criminality) from actions as a consequence of which some additionally-arising human being must die, we speak of a “criminality of begetting”. There would belong to the general class of acts falling under the rubric “criminality of begetting” also all types of action ancillary to this latter, from the performing of artificial-insemination measures through to midwife services.

Fernand Calmettes on Léon Dierx

„… he will say to them that there is really only one form of crime which comprises the origin of all other crimes: namely, the crime of offering up victims to life, of allowing children to come into the world.”[1]

Mayreder (1858–1938)

A good sense for what constitutes “the criminality of begetting” is displayed by Mayreder when she writes of the offence of conception as a symmetrical form of the offence of homicide: “Since it counts as a crime to take life away from a human being, is it less of a crime to give life to him?” (Mayreder, Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit, S. 192) People, who premeditatedly beget another human being do not just impose countless ills upon the begotten person but also arrange things so that, in one way or another, a human being loses their life. In her memoirs of her youth Mayreder describes how – despite a mistrust of and rebellion against her own father – she did not succeed in recognizing, herself, this “criminal offence of begetting” but had to have this aspect of the matter pointed out to her by a young friend. What Mayreder presents to us in her Critique of Fatherhood as her own insight was in fact nothing to which she felt, emotionally, inclined although, rationally, she could not but concur with this insight: “Despite the inner resistance I felt to paternal despotism within our family no thought so heretical as that of calling my father’s moral right to beget children into question ever crossed my mind. Imagine my shock, then, when a young man from a rather more exalted social circle than our own one day, in my presence, raised the question: ‘with what right do fathers bring children into the world and impose on them the expectation that they should endure existence in it – indeed even that they should show gratitude to their parents for this thoughtless and arbitrary deed? If it generally counts as a crime to take the life of a human being, is it really less bad to give such a human being life?” I was stunned to be presented with this way of looking at things: it seemed to me fundamentally false and yet at the same time irrefutable, provided only one ceased unthinkingly to feel and perceive life itself to be an incomparably valuable >Gift (Rosa Mayreder, Das Haus in der Landskrongasse)

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[1] „… il vous dira qu’une seule forme de crime existe qui contient en elle l’origine de tous les autres, le crime de livrer des victimes à la vie, de faire naître des enfants…“ (In: Fernand Calmettes, Leconte de Lisle et ses amis, Librairies-Imprimeries réunies, Paris 1902, S. 155)

A cognitive distortion which brings it about that the duration of a negative experience becomes, retrospectively, of relative unimportance, provided only that the stretch of time in question was not concluded by said negative experience and that at the end of this latter there occurred some relative improvement.

Not least of the intentions behind the raising of “human dignity” to the status of highest principle of the current German constitution was surely a certain desperate aspiration to take actions leading to new human beings’ beginning to exist and make them appear, even after the terrible mass murders of the 20^th century, ethically defensible. After the human species had once again degraded itself – and perhaps this time more deeply than ever before – in the course of the Second World War (àFall, neganthropic) the taking up of a supposed guarantee of human dignity into the German constitution represented an attempt to circumvent what was really the only appropriate and adequate reaction: a voluntary renunciation of all procreation as the only measure that could really prevent something so terrible from ever occurring again.

This general political-juridical commitment to “human dignity”; the fact that the demand for this dignity’s preservation has found its way, in the 20^th century, into so many state constitutions and international declarations – these are, far from being expressions of mankind’s having risen to some new and higher level of moral awareness, rather to be ascribed to the fact that this century represented a culmination point in terms of infringement of just this human dignity (See F. J. Wetz, Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar) F. J. Wetz argues as much in his book Human Dignity is Violable: “Today, at the end of the 20^th century, which has seen two world wars, liberation struggles, tribal conflicts and revolutions on all continents, with millions of men, women and children of all ages dead, crippled, raped or otherwise robbed of their dignity, history continues to offer a spectacle of misery, a comfortless drama of suffering…” (Wetz, Die Würde)

While the constitutions and declarations, then, continue to describe “human dignity as inviolable” this dignity is in fact gambled with, irresponsibly, with each new birth. Because no institution or person in the world was or is in a position really to guarantee any new-born human being an existence with dignity. And every birth means the condemnation of a human being to a freedom which he can often only acquire by taking his own life.

The appeal to human dignity is part of that cultural immune system which is intended to preserve us from insight into the fact that, since Auschwitz at the very latest, the only morally defensible way to preserve this dignity is to remain without progeny. The author of the just-cited book appears also to intuit this truth; but he omits to make the antinatalist consequences explicit – something which also goes to show how deeply-lying and effective this cultural immune system continues to be:

“Humanity’s fate was always a difficult one and it is an illusion to believe that it was only in the 20^th century that the world went ‘out of joint’ and that all was well and good before. Many places on the earth have always been sites of suffering and destruction, so that one cannot help but anxiously confront the question of whether life is not perhaps something which, rather than being lived with dignity, must, at best, be suffered through and put up with till the end (c.f. Wetz, p. 65) It seems impossible to fathom how, on the basis of this insight, there has failed to arise a general demand that distance be taken, in future, from the bringing of any more human beings into the world.

The fact that, even in the face of the history of the human species up till now and with the fates suffered by their respective relatives, dead near and dear ones and other acquaintances plainly there for them to observe, there are still people who become parents.

Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus arrives at the conclusion: “The word ‘well-born’ is a complete untruth. One would hear such an untruth from the mother of any baron if one were to ask her how things had gone for her during the birth of her son.” (Grimmelshausen, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus

The existence of human beings, and the continuation of this existence, enjoy the status of an absolute value. The glistening of this absolute value renders us blind to the fact that the realization of this value is to be effected only at the price of the negation of many other values, indeed at the price of the collapse of whole value-systems.

Instead of saying “XY is dead” it would perhaps be less open to miscomprehension to say: “The world is now without XY”. If we say “XY is dead” the amphiboly of the concept of existence suggests that this person is still – even if in some quite other state or condition – somehow amongst us. More correct is the form of words: “XY is no longer amongst us”. Analogously, it is not correct to say that we “enter into existence”; more correct is: “the world is increased by us” when we begin to exist.

In times and places which have already entered the >Era of Contraception it is overwhelmingly mostly premeditated >Perpetrators of Existence that become parents. Individuals take a conscious decision not to prevent the worst occurring: namely, that yet one more human being will have to suffer and die. They decide not to make use of contraceptive methods – which are nonetheless easy of access – in order that children that they wish for themselves begin to exist. Long before the start of the Era of Contraception Schopenhauer expressed what is essential about this fact of “premeditated begetting” when he wrote, in his Parerga und Paralipomena that “To bring a human being into the world without any subjective passion, without the drive of sexual pleasure or any other form of physical urge, merely by premeditation of the act and in cold-blooded deliberate intention, simply in order that the human being in question be brought to ‘be there’ – this would be a profoundly morally questionable action the onus of which only very few would take upon themselves; indeed, one might say that such an act of premeditated begetting stands in the same relation to the conceiving of a child due to simple sexual desire as a coldly planned and premeditated murder stands to an act of manslaughter committed in a moment of blind fury.” (Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena, § 167) But Schopenhauer clearly makes a fundamental error here. Even where we take due account of “subjective passion”, in times and places where contraceptive methods are quickly and easily available it would be impossible for conception to occur without a certain “premeditation and cold-blooded deliberate intention”. It is not, then – as Schopenhauer suggests – only a very few who take upon themselves the onus of such a “profoundly morally questionable action” but rather the great majority of the members of many societies. The great majority of people take it willingly upon themselves to act in such a way that a person (their own child) will have to die, after having undergone various moments and phases full of pain and suffering. The argument that every such person brought into the world experiences joy and pleasure as well as suffering does not hold water inasmuch as the prevention and diminution of pain and suffering weighs far more heavily, ethically, than does the bringing about of joy and happiness. Heinrich Heine also appears to have conceived the idea that “premeditated begetting” is something immoral. He writes: “Neither of us have any children. In order to beget children, a certain conviction is necessary.” (Heine, Aphorismen und Fragmente) Unfortunately, Heine does not specify in any more detail just what kind of “conviction” a person would need to have in order premeditatedly to beget offspring.

Natality-critical category intended to designate an abrupt, usually diffuse coming-to-consciousness of one’s own having-been-placed-in-the-world, of one’s own heteronomy and one’s status as the effect of a cause that is not oneself, and of the non-necessity, in the last analysis, of the fact and manner of one’s existence.

From the fact that most of us, at almost every point in time and in almost every life-situation (>Readiness for Misery) have, qua >Vitality, the bionomically-induced wish to go on living – i.e. from the fact that we are biologically driven – there is drawn first one erroneous conclusion, namely that new, other human beings ought to begin to live, and secondly a further erroneous conclusion, namely that procreation requires no justification:  

Since I believe that I know it to be true of myself that I would wish to go on living even in misery and that I would accept such misery rather than putting an end to my own life, I conclude that I can pass on life to others with a good conscience. But whoever thinks like this overlooks the fact that misery is decidedly something from which we try to escape. Analogous to this “voluntary fallacy” is the “exploitative fallacy”, which runs:

Since exploited human beings prefer to persist in their enslaved, subservient, exploited existence rather than take their own lives, exploitation must be something that is morally defensible.

Bernard Williams (1929–2003) – biological radicals weigh heavier than reason

Williams brings to expression here the idea that the rational reasons for persisting in our practices of procreation are so weak that, were this question to be decided by reason alone, humanity would long since have died out. “Humanity would quite certainly die out if the wish to live were not stronger than any reasons perceived to speak in favour of human beings’ remaining alive.” (Bernard Williams, retranslated from German edition)

The impetus behind this movement for the voluntary extinction of the human race is , in the first instance, a consideration for the interests of other organisms and living beings and biotopes which are – such is clearly the intention here – to be left, after the ebbing away of humanity, to tear each other to pieces without any further human involvement or intervention.

In the following passage the great Existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers concedes that the impetus behind our perpetuating our own existence from limit-situation to limit-situation is essentially an impetus of bionomic-vital nature: “Why do we remain alive? The simplest answer is: by virtue of the vitality which causes human beings, as creatures, to cling on to life even in states of weakness and sickness. […] It cannot be denied: vital force, the drive toward life per se, something which we possess in common with all other animals, retains us in life, even filled with specifically human, perceptions, feelings and thoughts.” (Jaspers,Wahrheit und Bewährung,[1]

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[1] Already in the second volume (Existenzerhellung) of his three-volume PHILOSOPHIE Jaspers had asked: “Why do we remain alive? – Initially out of an unquestioning lust for life … by virtue of our vitality…“

Those of us, at least, born after 1945 in an industrialized nation should reflect on Auschwitz as a conditio sine qua non of our existence: Auschwitz, we must realize, could only possibly not have come to be if the constellation of historical and social forces had been entirely different; but in such an entirely different constellation of historical and social forces we ourselves would not have come to be either, since our parents would either never have met or would have conceived a child at quite some other point in time, with quite another recombination of genes, from which not we ourselves but someone quite different from us would have resulted. In this sense it is indeed the case that all those of us born after 1945, at least, have entered existence “via Auschwitz”. Given this background, it should be easy for any one of us to perform a symbolic >Renunciation of Existence. But “via Auschwitz” also lays claim to our attention and reflection in quite another way:  Just as we speak of a Via Dolorosa so too can we speak of a Via Auschwitz – which shines a strong, harsh light on the fact that the path which we have taken in history has been a wrong path.

It is constitutive of contracts that there should exist a freedom not to conclude them. But this alone suffices to prove that there cannot be said to be any contract, bearing on our existence, between ourselves and those who initiate this existence. It is precisely this “contractlessness”, or distance from all contractuality, that constitutes the quasi-dictatorial aspect of every begetting. Thus, Hans Blumenberg notes that: “The metaphor of a contract has contributed, perhaps, most of all to rendering the obligations of human beings comprehensible and worthy of assent […] It was only one’s relation to one’s own existence, it appears, that was insusceptible of taking on the binding nature of a contract. Who existed had not assented to do so. It was impossible for him to have been asked about it.” (Blumenberg, Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne) Notwithstanding all this, however, there was generally assumed to exist a certain unwritten contract whereby children were to be grateful to their parents for their existence and to repay these latter by behaving as good and reverent offspring.

Ironically, it is only at the point at which children attain their “majority” that parents are relieved of the legal obligation to see to these children’s welfare while it is only once the children have attained the age of (limited) “capacity to contract” that they come into a position to appeal to the law in order to dissolve, retroactively, the unwritten – and indeed un-writeable – intergenerational contract with the effect not, indeed, of rendering undone the beginning of their own existence but of giving, at least, their parents to understand that they (the children) had never consented to their begetting and would place, therefore, the demand upon these parents that the latter should indeed see to their (the children’s) welfare their whole life long. In short, this moral obligation for parents to provide for the welfare of the children they have begotten becomes something that the children are able to legally enforce only at the very point at which the children’s becoming “major” relieves the parents of this same obligation. 

If, then, the contractual character of the begetting of a human being is to be rescued, this is possible only, as Blumenberg shows, by recourse to the notion – a notion of Schopenhauerian inspiration – of a pre-individual blind will which nonetheless individualizes itself in and through the act of begetting new life or, in other words, by recourse to the notion of an àInfinitesimal I-ness: “It was only when Schopenhauer turned ‘Will’ into a metaphysical First Principle and the conceptive act of two humans making love into the execution of this First Principle that the generandum of the nasciturus became, with its ‘will to live’, the agency by which the ‘agreement’ binding the two parties in the act of conception was established. Fundamentally, they were both one and the same contractual party, each of whom concurred in the decision of the other to enter into existence. This presupposes that one may impute to the “becoming party” – or rather to that party that is just beginning its process of becoming – a having agreed to all those obligations involved in and implied by life.  More or less in the sense of accepting, indeed even of cultivating, both itself and the cosmic conditions of its own existence.” (ibid.) – This metaphysical rescuing of the contractual nature of our existence is, indeed, a fine construction. If it were meant seriously, however, it would founder, already in the first instance, on the fact that the will evoked here is a blind one,  a detail which gives rise to the further question of how such a will could possibly be “godfather” at the begetting of a specific individual. Nevertheless, this remains, for Blumenberg, “the only way in which it is possible to conceive that a human being ‘owes’ the world something. Because the other view, namely that it is the will of a providential deity, before whom all those must abase themselves who live by virtue of this deity’s power and strength, displays all the characteristics of absolutism: retroactive submission to the inevitable, heteronomous capitulation before the verdict that one is not one’s own master.” (l.c.) To adopt Blumenberg’s own vocabulary: the fact that we are “kicked into existence”, through the choice and action of others, rather than stepping into existence ourselves is to be understood as an “absolutism of reality”, as an imposition vis-à-vis a subject that would, then, be no more than apparently autonomous. Metaphors such as “the light of the world” and mythologemes such as that of the “pre-existing I” are intended to make this imposition something that human beings can live with.

If it really were a matter of such great importance to every living person that he or she began to exist, then we would all go through the world all our lives labouring under a certain nativistic sense of guilt. Because had things been different by only a hairsbreadth then not we ourselves, but rather some other person, would have been begotten and born. But this in turn would mean – so runs this nativistic mythologeme – that because we came to be, someone else did not come to be. Through our becoming another human being began not to exist who otherwise might have partaken of all the happiness on account of which there exists, supposedly, a moral obligation to beget new human beings.

(Prospective) parents like to speak of “taking on” responsibility. The formulation implies that this responsibility is passed over to these parents from some place or person external to them. What is overlooked, in other words, is that this situation of “being responsible” is created only through the act of bringing into existence a new human being. That is to say, rather than being a responsibility “taken over”, it is a self-created responsibility. From this point on, it is argued, everything possible must be done for the child thus created; it is above all incumbent on one to protect him or her from all the adversities of life. This aspect of “the ethics of parenthood” strikes one as constituting a special case of that general mechanism that was pointed up by Nietzsche in his On the Genealogy of Morality: a human being is deliberately exposed to harm in order that help, thenceforth, can be afforded him, thus serving to prove the moral worth of the person affording said help.

“Calling someone into existence” in order then immediately to set about protecting him or her from this existence is what the Argentinian antinatalist Julio Cabrera calls a “second-grade morality”. It is quite rightly, then, that Cabrera raises the question: “why should one have called someone into existence in the first place if one must then immediately begin to protect him from this very existence?” Herein is founded nativistic irresponsibility. Cabrera reminds those willing and eager to procreate that it may be a moral thing, indeed, to want to love, care for and protect someone who is already in the world but that one can never be justified in first bringing about the existence of a human being in order then to set about loving him, caring for him and “saving” him. Paradoxical as it may sound, the person eager to procreate leaves ab initio out of account that true philanthropy manifests itself in the form of acting in such a way that no further human being begins to exist.

True responsibility consists in having no progeny for whom one might need to “take on responsibility” in the first place. Mechthild Zschau articulates this truth when she writes: “I am afraid of the terrible responsibility that is implied in ‘creating’ a human being. I feel no ‘vocation’ to motherhood. I am afraid of the great power that a mother enjoys over her child, who remains totally dependent on her for a number of years. Indeed, I am afraid of power in general and wish to exercise it in no area of life at all.”[1] Applied to mankind in general this same truth runs: “True responsibility for the future of humanity consists in sparing it any future at all”. (Kohlbecher to Akerma, February 2011)

Irresponsibility of Procreation (Hans Reiner, 1896–1991)

Some remarkable insights into the irresponsibility of procreation are formulated by Hans Reiner in his 1960 book Der Sinn unseres Daseins: “Which of us has ever really meditated on the question of how we are really to answer for and justify the bringing of a new existence into the world, that is to say, the begetting of a child? From the viewpoint of a believing Christian, indeed, this question is not an urgent problem: because, as Christians, we let ourselves be guided by God’s exhortation to “go forth and multiply”. But even for the Christian the question remains of why God wanted, how God possibly could want, such a problematical race of creatures as human beings to come into existence and to perpetuate this existence generation after generation. [>Antinatalism, Christian-Theological] But if we set aside Christian belief, be it either because we have no such belief or because this belief has become, for us, something problematical, how then can we continue to bear the responsibility for the persistent procreation of new human beings? Does there, once we find ourselves in this position, suffice as justification for this action the simple fact that we want to have children, either because children are a source of joy for us or because it saddens us to think that our line will die out with our own deaths?” (Hans Reiner, Der Sinn unseres Daseins. Quotation found by Guido Kohlbecher).

Reiner also expresses in this book the idea that nativistic irresponsibility tends to manifest itself most clearly precisely there where parents become acquainted with the notion “better never to have been”. The continued procreation of something which is now perceived to be without sense or meaning demands an >Anthropodicy without the availability of which the future of humanity would be, at least metaphysically, at risk and would not look bright: “If we take all this into account and if there arises in our minds, in the face of it, even just a serious doubt about whether it is better to be born rather than not to be, how then can we take upon ourselves the responsibility of being ourselves the cause of others’ suffering that fate of being indeed born into this world? [>Damnators] The problem of this responsibility tips us, then, once more, in aggravated form, into the question of a “meaning of existence” that would extend beyond the meaning inhering just in the goals that we set for ourselves day by day and the general longing for happiness in which these latter find their common denominator. But this problem reveals itself, on closer consideration, to be one which does not just concern the personal ethical responsibility of each individual but is in fact of the broadest possible consequence for the future fate of humanity as a whole. If it is the case that we human beings have no other reason at all to procreate beyond the wish of the individual to “have children” or mere animal sexual desire, this tends to open up very poor prospects for the self-preservation of humanity in general, and in particular for that of its most intellectually advanced, leading strata. Because the technology of contraception today offers, to a very great extent, satisfaction to the mere sexual drive without procreation having to enter into the matter. And the wish for children has, especially among society’s upper strata, been greatly weakened and diminished by various other factors and circumstances. All this being the case, a doubt arising regarding ‘the meaning of life’ in general could well be a coup de grâce delivered once and for all to this weakened urge to procreate.” (Hans Reiner, Der Sinn unseres Daseins).

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[1] Mechthild Zschau, Sterilisation. Nirgendwo ein Kinderwunsch. Eine Erklärung.

The field of objects covered by antinatalist moral theory comprises not human beings alone but rather all beings susceptible of suffering. For this reason there are perhaps more practicing antinatalists than one would think. Mostly without being aware that they are doing so, vegetarians and vegans practice a certain antinatalism: the more human beings adopt vegetarian or vegan diets, the fewer animals kept as livestock are slaughtered, eaten, raised, born, fattened up and slaughtered again. – Correspondingly, there are fewer suffering animals. If all human beings adopted vegetarian or vegan lifestyles, then numerous breeds, such as the domestic chicken, the domestic pig, or domestic cattle, would die out. >Axiopaths see an ethical iniquity in such a development, since (so they reason) every living being, species and breed of animal is valuable in itself and the world would become a place much poorer in values if one were to voluntarily cease to engender the maximum amount of living beings and to preserve the maximum number of different types and breeds.

Below we reproduce a brilliant humorous dialogue invented by the Bavarian comedian Karl Valentin which renders whole collections of essays on these topics redundant:

LANG. So, you are a pessimist?

KARL VALENTIN. And you? An optimist!

L. I am indeed.

K.V. So everything looks rosy to you?

L. Indeed – everything!

K.V. The roses too?

L. Well, I would imagine that the roses look rosy even to you!

K.V. The roses, yes – but apart from them, nothing much looks rosy!

L. So how do you see the world?

K.V. Well, not rosy, I’ll tell you that! – Even though the old song goes: ‘O how lovely is the world…’

L. But why not? – Don’t you find the world to be lovely?

K.V. Not at all! – What’s lovely about it? – Everything, from birth on, is the very opposite of lovely. Or do you find birth lovely? Ask a midwife.

L. Well, “lovely” it isn’t – but that’s just the way things are.

K.V. Yes, “just the way things are” – and that’s just what isn’t lovely. It would be “lovely”, in my opinion, if things weren’t the way they are at all.

L. But if things weren’t the way they are, then you wouldn’t be in the world at all!

K.V. And wouldn’t that be lovely!

L. But if everyone thought like you there would be no one in the world at all!

K.V. Still lovelier!

L. For whom?

K.V. For all the people who wouldn’t have to be in the world!

L. But people who were never in the world can’t decide whether the world is lovely or not!

K.V. But just that is the lovely thing: that they were never in the world.”

Here, Valentin wittily jumps over the Shadow of his own existence by declaring frankly and freely to his interlocutor that a course of the world without him, Valentin, in it would have been preferable to the actual course of the world. The interlocutor, on his side, proves practiced enough to retort that it cannot really have been a fine thing for those human beings who never existed to have indeed not existed.

Utopias are indices, and sometimes eloquent expressions, of a fundamental refusal to condone and tolerate our Conditio in-/humana. In many utopias we find an implicit avowal of the neganthropic constitution of our existence.

In his 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility Hans Jonas treats the presence of human beings on the earth as indeed an unconditional imperative. Which is as much as to say that human beings ought to be, and are to continue to be brought into being, quite regardless of whatever conditions they might have to live under. Some years later, however, we see Jonas begin to express some doubt regarding this ruthless principle of an absolute imperative to exist, under all and any circumstances whatever. That “responsibility vis-à-vis Being”, as the “guardians” of which Jonas had long conceived us, begins to take on the form of a guilt:

Jonas’s Confession of Primal Guilt

“What exactly is it that justifies our imposing existence on a being – a being that cannot possibly have had any part in this choice – by bringing it into the world? There is a sort of primal guilt involved in the begetting and bearing of a child. Because we do not just give the child the >Gift of Life; we impose it upon him [>Diktat of Birth] without his having asked us to do so. We do simply presupposing that this child will surely “want his own life”, that is to say, that the life we are bringing into the world will surely be one that will embrace and affirm itself. But this is, in a certain sense, to be monstrously presumptuous.  Every one of us must be prepared to respond to that cry which once issued from the mouth of the prophet àJeremiah: “O Mother, why did you bear me?” And the response to this cry can only be: “Because the order of things in Nature will have it so, that it is only under this condition that human beings can be – although this being is a gamble, inasmuch the bearing of children means that the beings born are not only empowered to be human beings but also condemned to it”.

– The burden of existence is heavy, and perhaps those human beings whose existence has been the most worthwhile have been those who have suffered most under this burden. I remember once asking Martin Buber, who had known Kafka personally, what kind of impression this great writer had made. I will never forget his answer: “I can say one thing for sure: he was the unhappiest man I have ever encountered. Nevertheless, that a man like that should have existed is surely worth all the suffering. This is a terrible thing to say, I know, but his sufferings surely were ‘worth it’. [>Damnators]. Let me rather turn the question around. The problem, surely, consists not in what we owe the new-born baby in order that he or she might survive – this, we may say, is the aspect of positive responsibility – but rather in how far we may legitimately go in imposing existence upon a child that has been begotten by us.” (DIE ZEIT, 25.8.1989 Nr. 35, p. 9–12)

Just a few years before his death in 1993 we begin to see the re-emergence in Jonas’s statements of those >Gnostic themes and sentiments in the examination of which he had first made his name as a scholar. Jonas openly concedes that existence is an imposition; it is not so much “given as a gift” to the child – as the metaphysics favoured by all parents would have it be – as “dictated” to the child, and the child “condemned”, without his consent thereto, to take the burden of existence upon himself.

In the case of human beings who have contributed a great deal to human culture, such as Kafka, Mozart, Beethoven or Van Gogh, this “suffering from existence” is often at its most intense – but it is a suffering, Jonas suggests, that can be seen (at least retrospectively) to have been “worth it”, since the imposition of existence upon these men has resulted in their giving so much to others that has, perhaps, made existence easier for these many latter to bear: great books, great music or great painting. Jonas is performing, here, a crude utilitarian calculation in the worst sense of the term “utilitarian”: “condemnations to exist” are necessary because, without such condemnations, there could not only be no “useful” human beings but indeed no human beings at all. The question of just why there should be human beings remains, however, no more elucidated by Jonas in this context than he succeeds, elsewhere in his work, in justifying the imperative that there be a human race. Instead of this, it begins at least to dawn on him that the condemnation of human beings to an uncertain existence might be something irresponsible. Whereas in most of his writings Jonas tends to aspire only to equipping human beings, using the tools of metaphysics, to deal with present and future outbreaks of barbarism – to render them, in one image used by him, “Auschwitz-proof” – so that human existence is not sacrificed to the anticipable horrors of what it is to be human, here at least Jonas raises the key question of the >Limit Value, inasmuch as undertakes to consider “how far we may legitimately go in imposing existence upon a child that has been begotten by us”

Most parents begin to become sickly and frail only at a point in time when their children have already become parents themselves. This means that parents generally come to live through those nightmare aspects of the Conditio in/humana to which they have condemned their own children only when it is too late. To experience these terrible aspects “in good time”, in this context, would mean: being an eye-witness to the sufferings of old age and sickness, as these become manifest in one’s own parents, early and vividly enough to shrink back from imposing these things on one’s own children, so that one rescinds any pronatal decision one might have taken, or takes no such decision in the first place.

In Fabio Volo’s novel The Road Home two brothers visit their aged father, who is slowly dying of dementia. Of one of the brothers Volo writes: “He knew that his father’s present state was the future that awaited him himself. When he looked at him, then, he saw not just ‘him’ but a ‘we’, a collective fate.”[1] – It is high time that human beings, through moral action, put an end to this grim collective fate!

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[1] „Sapeva che il presente di suo padre era il futuro che lo attendeva, per questo quando lo guardava non vedeva solo un ‚lui‘, ma un “noi”, un destino collettivo.“ (La strada verso casa).

Each of us, we may say, lives in “time immemorial” in the sense that we are unable to envisage a world in which we would not exist: as soon as we attempt to do so, we find that we are indeed present in the world that we envisage. This “immemoriality” may well go to nourish the effectiveness of the  >Natal Myth even on into our modern age: of that myth, that is to say, whereby we come from far away and were, at least in the form of an “infinitesimal ‘I’”, always already somehow “there”.

Whoever is horrified at the idea of having to die, or simply puts the idea of dying out of their minds due to the uncanny feelings it inspires in them, ought not to beget other human beings, since it must be assumed that they will be equally averse to dying. In other words, whoever begets human beings even despite his being, for his own part, far from indifferent as regards his own existence’s end, contravenes the principle fundamental to all ethical systems: that of universalization.

The fact that Man is a being so evidently and constantly in need of ethical control and guidance, a characteristic that ensues directly from Man’s freedom, reveals him as a creature whom neither members of his own species, nor members of others, can reasonably be expected to live with. This is an insight which not even pronatal ethicists make any attempt to hide:

“When one speaks of freedom one usually means the replacing of fixed, inflexible modes of behaviour with individual reactions which are no longer determined by genetic programmes but are rather able to orient themselves by cultural norms. There can be no doubt but that the reduction of the sway of instinct has made it possible for human social life to develop in entirely new ways. (…) But this same reduction has made human beings capable of acting not just independently of genetic programmes but also contrary to the norms of their own moralities (…) Such a being as this, that no longer has to do anything but can do a great deal, is indeed in dire need of morality… (…) We need, for example, to be alarmed by the falling away of that inbuilt inhibition preventing the killing of another member of the same species which exists in many species of animal but no longer in  Man (…) Man is that living entity which brings life’s tendency to consummation by developing the capacity to negate life.” (Vittorio Hösle, Moral und Politik)

This passage brings out very clearly how far any ethics is “playing with fire” that simply presents human beings as “beings in need of morality” without having first raised and decided the fundamental question whether it is morally reasonable to expect human beings – not to mention other animal species – to put up with each other. Those concerned with ethical questions, above all, should be aware that human beings, as animals in whom instinctive inhibitions have been considerably reduced, represent, where no ethical principles restrain them, a constant danger for members of their own species. Like animal-tamers, ethicists make it their business to look for universalizable maxims that might clarify ways of preventing that emergence of an inhuman monster which they know is possible at any time in any human being. It constitutes the fundamental root of the failure of all ethical enquiry – constitutes, so to speak, what is unethical in all (positively understood) ethics – that the question is never posed by the ethicist of what ethical principles can possibly be used to justify the bringing into being of these beings so sorely in need of ethics and morality who can still at any time, be it without or even with the corrective of ethical or moral principles, begin to commit immoral acts. 

In the worst imaginable case the perpetuation of the human race means that people are subjected to torture by other people – something which, for the tortured persons, means the destruction of the ethical structure of the world: tormented by pain, they can no longer act ethically. Every human finds his limit when confronted by instruments of torture and in the application of such instruments there is collaboration by every ethical organization in the world. Because, once filled with physical pain, we find ourselves no longer capable of abiding by any set of ethical principles, be they Kantian, Utilitarian or Stoic; rather, we are thrown back completely on ourselves; when torture reaches its maximum, we are simply incapable of even perceiving the interests of other human beings. (For more details see Cabrera)

Any ethics which does not self-reflectively work through this whole set of problems inevitably becomes the accomplice of those actions counter to morality that necessarily ensue from the free, and thereby partially tendentially inhuman, nature of Man – a point which Paul Ricoeur makes very succinctly when he writes: “To affirm freedom is equivalent to taking the origin of evil upon oneself.” (Paul Ricoeur) Any ethics which, being a theory of morality, fails to question back critically behind the apparent moral self-evidence of continuing to bring new human beings into the world – and thereby of ethics’ true object – becomes, due to this deficiency in self-reflection, obsolete – a kind of “un-ethics”. Considering things from this point of view, Nietzsche is surely not entirely wrong when he advances the following thesis: “All the methods which have hitherto been applied with the intent of rendering Man more moral were, in fact, fundamentally immoral.”

The reproach of “wrongful life” is one that is made by parents against parents, or doctors, or indeed, on the metaphysical level, against anyone and everyone who contributes to the creation of new human beings. Thus, already the Adam of Milton’s Paradise Lost complains that he had never asked to be brought into the world but had rather been created without having been consulted beforehand. A similar complaint was somewhat later to be uttered by the artificial human being imagined by Mary Shelley as having been created by Dr Frankenstein.

But the suggestion that a child might sue his or her own parents for “damages”, and claim “compensation”, for having been begotten without his or her consent is one which one encounters, perhaps, for the first time explicitly in the novel “Rien n’est…” by the French writer Georges >Poulet. Nevertheless, where negligence or omission on the part of medical practitioners led to the existence of a human being who had reason, on account of some grave disability, to curse this existence, such a human being had, until recently at least, little alternative but simply to curse, in the style of the ancients, the fate that had befallen him in coming into the world. Here, then, one must note and bear clearly in mind a certain striking disproportionality: it appears that one is much more inclined to acknowledge the validity of the lawsuits brought by parents who have become such as a consequence of some medical blunder than to recognize the validity of charges brought by children who have begun to exist without having wanted to do so or even burdened by serious illnesses or disabilities. Thus, a decision passed down by the German Supreme Court in Charge of Civil Cases includes the judgment that “a child must, in principle, accept his or her life in the form in which Nature has produced it and cannot lay claim to a right to have been prevented from being born, or otherwise removed from existence, by others…” (BGHZ 86, 254, quoted from Picker, l. c.). The child would thereby also have no claim to compensation, since the recognition of such a claim would presuppose that the child’s non-existence would be a state or condition preferable to his or her existence, that is to say, that the child’s existence would constitute a “harm done” to said child (see Picker, >Amphiboly of the Concept(s) of Existence). We surely are confronted, then, with a significant moral-logical discrepancy if, on the one hand, parents are to be permitted to sue for compensation where medical malpractice has led to the arrival of a child that has forced an alteration in the lives they had planned for themselves while, on the other hand, it is also judged that a child who wishes to bring a lawsuit with regard to his or her own existence must be obliged rather to respect this existence as the highest and most sacrosanct of values.  

It has, however, in the meantime become the case that such a child can – albeit with only a minimal prospect of success – bring a lawsuit against those medical practitioners who gave (from this point of view) “bad” advice or medical treatment to said child’s mother and, for example, cast their vote against the termination of the pregnancy. After a series of such àExistence Lawsuits had been brought, during the second half of the 20^th century, without in any of these cases the suit proving successful, there occurred finally, in the year 2000 in France, a lawsuit brought by a seriously disabled person claiming compensation for his own existence in which the right to such compensation was acknowledged and the compensation awarded.   But let us look a little farther back: In 1960 a US court tried the case of an individual who had been born with serious disabilities due to a traffic accident occurring while it was still in the womb. The claim to compensation submitted in this case argued that “[…] justice requires that the principle be recognized that a child has a legal right to begin life with a sound mind and body.” (quoted from Gragl)

In 1967 the Supreme Court of New Jersey rejected the lawsuits brought by three plaintiffs which demanded, albeit for three different sets of reasons, a right to compensation for the beginning of the existence of one and the same physically disabled human being. This person’s mother, Sandra Gleitmann, brought a civil suit for pain and suffering demanding compensation for the emotional stress which had been caused her due to the terrible state of the health of her child;  the father, Irwin Gleitman, brought a civil suit demanding compensation for the costs incurred in caring for and seeing to the other needs of this same child; finally, the child in question himself, Jeffrey Gleitman, demanded compensation for his own existence – an existence which he himself had never asked for. As the Gleitman family succeeded in proving to the court, Sandra Gleitman had informed her gynaecologist, in the second month of her pregnancy, that she had just recently suffered from a case of the measles and asked him whether this was likely to have an effect on her child. The gynaecologist had assured her that the recent measles infection would not affect the child’s health. But the child Jeffrey, born in 1959, proved in fact to suffer from serious sight and hearing problems, as well as problems of limb articulation.

The court did not decide in favour of this lawsuit – in which the plaintiffs also cited the above-mentioned lawsuit brought by the individual born disabled as a consequence of a traffic accident during pregnancy – since, so the court reasoned, there had never existed any possibility of the child’s being brought to birth in a non-disabled condition. The suit, then, was rejected with the following justification: “The infant plaintiff is therefore required to say not that he should have been born without defects but that he should not have been born at all. In the language of tort law he says: but for the negligence of defendants, he would not have been born to suffer with an impaired body. In other words, he claims that the conduct of defendants prevented his mother from obtaining an abortion which would have terminated his existence, and that his very life is ‘wrongful’.” (Quoted from Gragl) In order to allow the family’s claims, continued the court in its judgment, it would have had to do something that was in fact onto-logically impossible: namely, weigh up the value of the individual in question’s actual existence with all his disabilities against his possible non-existence. Instead of this the court referred to the Conditio in/humana to which both the striving for life and the persistence in it belong (>Tyranny of Biology): “By asserting that he should not have been born, the infant plaintiff makes it logically impossible for a court to measure his alleged damages because of the impossibility of making the comparison required by compensatory remedies. […] It is basic to the human condition to seek life and hold on to it however heavily burdened.” (quoted from Gragl)

Let us look back now at the case from the year 2000, the judgment in which constituted, at least up until the year 2008, the only judgment according to a disabled person compensation for their own existence. In this case too, a previous German Measles infection of the mother’s had resulted, in her child (Nicolas Perruchet, b. 1983) suffering from disorders of the nervous system, deafness in both ears, and compromised visual abilities, so that the mother in question would surely have terminated the pregnancy if she had been informed beforehand of the extent of the damage that her previous infection was likely to do to her child.  With regard to the child, Nicolas Perruchet, the court recognized that he had indeed suffered “a certain harm through having been born” (“préjudice d’être né”). French legislators, however, found themselves obliged, shortly after the announcement of this judgment – due to criticism of it both from the side of the public and from the side of various politicians – to revise the findings expressed in it, so that a new judgment was issued stating that “no one enjoys a legitimate claim to compensation for harm or damages merely on the grounds of their having been born.”  (quoted from Paul Gragl, Wrongful Life – Gibt es ein Recht, nicht geboren zu warden? For the above, see the same author)

On what, then, can someone base himself who undertakes to make certain medical practitioners, or his own parents, responsible for the existence which he did not ask for and which he finds unbearable and to bring a lawsuit against these parties on these grounds? Whoever already exists cannot claim, obviously, that he/she is now in a worse position than he/she was in before the beginning of his/her existence. Normally, in order for a lawsuit of this sort to be successful, the plaintiff must indeed be able to demonstrate that a certain alternative action or course of events would have been more to his advantage, which would in this case mean: that it would have been better for him himself never to have existed. But since existence is a fundamental precondition for taking up any different position at all on the scale of “better” or “worse”, no lawsuit evoking any such thing as “being worse off” due to the beginning of an existence can ever hope to be successful in a court of law except where there succeeds in asserting itself an essentially irrational metaphysics whereby it would have been better for me, had I never begun to exist.  

Nevertheless, it remains the case that a certain claim to compensation for the fact of his existence should, after all, be accorded to whomever is not in agreement with his own having-been-begotten. It may indeed be the case that I was not harmed by certain persons’ acting in such a way that I began to exist. It is correct, however, to say that there was imposed upon a person – a person who was eventually to become me – all those things of which it was already known that they were unacceptable: an “unacceptable gift” consisting in such things as the wearisome living-out of an entire existence, in sicknesses, in one’s own inevitable death as well as the necessity of witnessing >the Deaths of Near and Dear Ones.

The argument is often made that it is immoral to beget a human being whose life will (by reason of genetic predisposition or in view of the social situation in which he will find himself) in all likelihood be a miserable one. This conclusion may, as a basic matter of principle, be expanded to take the form: the decision to beget progeny should be rescinded in every case in which it cannot be absolutely excluded that these progeny will ever undergo suffering and in every case where it is not absolutely certain that they will be able to die in the “epic” manner of passing away having had their fill of life and with full serene assent to this death.

Nativistic Anonymity

It is true, of course, that parents can in such cases have recourse to nativistic >Anonymity and retort to their children, should these latter begin to complain about their own existence: “When we decided to have a family we did not decide specifically to have you but rather to ‘have a child’ quite generally. You cannot, then, accuse us of having done something to you through our engaging in procreation.”  But to this the child discontented with the fact of his own existence can object: “Even if it is indeed the case that you did not convey me from one state into some other state by bringing about the beginning of my existence, the fact remains that without your deed of procreation I would not exist: I, who must now drag myself through this life for many decades, suffer illnesses, and finally suffer death. It is correct, then, to say that you begot ‘someone’ and could not have envisaged me as this ‘someone’ as you did so. But it is also correct to say that you ought to have reckoned with the certainty that you would beget thereby a human being who would not take it kindly that you acted in such a way that both the beginning of his life and its end became inevitable. It is for this reason that I demand of you that you render me, for so long as I am alive, as content as possible with my own existence.

But to this, in their turn, the parents might retort: When we begot you we were – as so many tend to be – too young and inexperienced to be able to conceive such thoughts. The provision of compensation for existence is rather a task that the >State ought to take over and bear: namely, in the form of an unconditional securing of a good existence for everyone and the commitment to render content with their material lives all citizens who demand that they be so made content (>Existential Money) and also in the form of an uncomplicated assistance provided by the state to all those who, after careful consideration, choose the path of freely ending their own life as a way of reversing and removing the >”Diktat of Birth”.

The reproach of “wrongful birth” or “wrongful progeny” is one that is made by parents against doctors who have neglected to prevent the beginning of the existence of a child suffering from a detectable or predictable (genetic) defect, even though the medical-technical resources and/or the relevant better knowledge were in fact to hand that might have obviated such an eventuality.  Often, the parents in question even make to these doctors the reproach that, had they wanted to, they could have helped them to bring to birth another child: a healthy one.

In response to such complaints from parents one court judgment passed in Germany – namely in the Higher Regional Court in Bamberg in 1978 – argued that the birth of a child never constituted, even in part, a “value negation” but rather in every case a “value realization”. A different judgment was passed in 1980 by the German Federal Supreme Court which recognized that there did indeed exist a right to compensation in cases where, as a result of a medical error, a child has ended up coming into the world – and this even in the case where the child in question is a healthy one (see Eduard Picker, Schadenshaftung für unerwünschte Nachkommenschaft) This judgement put into circulation a certain “buzzword” – “the child as compensable damage” – which drew attention to how “the value of human life”, hitherto posited as an absolute, has recently become subject to relativization and even to reconceptualization as a negative.

If a child begins to exist as a consequence of a pharmacological or medical error, and if a doctor or a chemist is compelled to pay, as it were, “maintenance payments” for the child thus erroneously brought into the world, there may occur to any child who gleans that his birth may have occurred contrary to his parents’ wishes and desires the thought à”Pardon me for having been born!”

Whoever acts in such a way that a human being begins to exist attaches a being that, ideally, should be autonomous, their whole life long to the chain of a “will to survive” the claims of which reside in strata of existence that lie far from all that is mental and, by this same token, far from all that is autonomous. There where fear of death retains us in life even when we have long since understood that it would be better to cease to exist we surely have reason to speak of a “biologically guaranteed amorality of survival”. Ilse Aichinger indignantly notes: “My mother was a doctor and I was very often witness to how people took eight days to die: ways of dying. At such times I thought to myself: this surely is out of all proportion at the end of an existence that one had not asked for in the first place. To speak of ‘suffering’ is inadequate in such cases! Dying is a bodily process. And the body, which reacts like an animal, resists it absolutely, powerfully and desperately.” (Ilse Aichinger)

It is often objected to antinatalism that its moral theory describes a morality which overstrains human moral capabilities and is, already for this reason alone, a questionable one. Instead of preaching antinatalism, it is argued, one does better to contribute to the actual improvement of the world. To this we retort: is “the improvement of the world” not a far more utopian undertaking than the mere resolution not, oneself, to procreate? And is it not fitting, if one is concerned about one’s progeny, to first bring the world into such a condition that they would feel comfortable in it?

To whomever expresses regret over the burdensome fate he is suffering, and most certainly to whomever reproaches his parents with having imposed this fate upon him, the retort is always ready to hand: “Be content that you have come into the world as a test-tube baby/as deaf and dumb/as someone sick with AIDS/as a future casualty of war/as an unemployed person/ as someone sick with cancer. Because the alternative would be your not having existed at all – and surely you would not have wanted that?” But anyone who makes such an argument is committing an onto-ethical fallacy. They are falling under the spell of one of the great myths of modernity, whereby we were, “pre-existentially”, some sort of àquasi-existent or >infinitesimal “self” which was “freed” from this most pitiable of all “conditions” only by the act of conception or the experience of birth.   

If, in the case of such a myth as this, any greater degree of existence is morally preferable to a lesser degree, then “no existence at all” – which is surreptitiously enhanced to become a “quasi-existence” – must represent a great evil which needs to be remedied at any cost.

Human beings who act in such a way that a new human being begins to exist expose this latter to what has been described by many as the tyranny of biology:

Revolt Against the Tyranny of the Gene

Contrary to what is suggested by Richard Dawkins’s book title The Selfish Gene, Dawkins does not believe that human beings are merely executing agents of what is genetically programmed into us. On the contrary, Dawkins advpcates “rebelling against the tyranny of the selfish replicators… We, that is our brains, are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them. As already noted, we do so in a small way every time we use contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way, too.”

The transition from small-scale contraceptive rebellions to a “general strike” against the tyranny of the gene leads to nothing less than the ebbing-away of humanity.

In transhumanism dissatisfaction with the Conditio in/humana has come to express itself in the form of a belief in the technological perfectibility of the human being. Just like the (somewhat more conservative) belief in a species-wide optimizability of the human being by means of genetic engineering, transhumanism can be understood as the ultima ratio and the final rearguard action of a humanity staggering on unsustained by any viable anthropodicy and thus as a last escape strategy in the face of the growing inevitability of embracing a moral theory antinatalist in nature.

As Nemilow convincingly argues in his book “The Biological Tragedy of Woman”, that constellation which lies behind the tragedy of woman is especially tragic by reason of its being a biological one. As Nemilow states toward the end of his book, an overcoming of this biological tragedy of woman is possible only via the route of her remaining childless. In Nemilow’s day, the artificial uterus which plays a role, today, in the consideration of this problem, was not yet imaginable.

Interestingly, it seems hardly possible to speak of a “biological tragedy of man” analogous to that of woman. A man is prisoner of his biological “housing” only to a much lesser degree than is a woman. Instructive here is the following passage from Balzac’s Père Goriot: “How lucky we women are to have nothing to do with duels! But we have sufferings to deal with too. We bring children into the world and the sicknesses associated with motherhood are wearisome!” (Balzac, Père Goriot) Without intending to Balzac expresses here the idea that women bear, in great pain, those human beings who then inflict even greater pain on one another as they destroy each other.

A sin-based antinatalist argument – one to which we do not subscribe – might emphasize the moral taint of the background to our own existences: “We are all the descendants of a long line of murderers. Murder lurks in our bones.” (David Buss, Der Spiegel, 35/2005, p. 146) We do not subscribe to this argument because the moral dignity of a person is not passed down between generations. But we nevertheless insist that is indeed morally negligent, in the face of what history has proven to “a long line of murderers”, to beget progeny who might either fall victim to such murderers or become such themselves.

Every bringing of a human being into the world goes implicitly hand in hand with the passing of a sentence of a death: one more human being that has to die. What must be emphasized about this inevitable dying is that all parents must be aware from their own experience that almost nobody actively wants to die. They themselves, it must be supposed, want to go on living. Nevertheless, they accept the unintended consequence of their progenerative decision and beget this human being who will have no chance of escaping a having to die. They will perhaps already during the pregnancy have played out in their minds how they will answer those questions with regard to the abyss of death that will be posed to them by their surely already partially aware progeny – among these the question whether everyone must really die. “Why did you beget me if I must then afterward cease to live” – have the couple posed this question to themselves ad hominem and do they know how to answer it?

Feldmann, Arthur (1926–2012)

Following Arthur Feldmann, we might express this notion through the image of a “lifelong sentence of death”: “Already before being born I was given a life sentence and also a sentence of death. Only the exact date of the execution remained unspecified.” On this same terrain he dismantles all the talk of “the gift of life”: “One exposes a child to death in giving him ‘the gift of life’”. (Kurznachrichten aus der Mördergrube)

Walser, Martin (*1927)

With regard to this sentence of death that goes hand in hand with every conceiving of a child Martin Walser feels justified in describing parenthood as “unforgivable”. In an interview with the magazine Psychologie Heute he candidly states that he himself has passed four such sentences of death:

“This is also the really base and wicked thing: that someone was once a child and then later has to die. What is unforgivable in parenthood, I find, is that every time one becomes a parent one passes a sentence of death on someone else. I have passed such sentences of death myself. PH: Four, in fact, no? Walser: Yes, and it is only gradually that one becomes aware of what one has done. This too belongs to the inalienable conditions of human existence.” („Meine Mängel sind mein Denkanlaß“. Der Schriftsteller Martin Walser über Kindheit, Psychoanalyse und sein Selbstverständnis als Deutscher, in: Psychologie heute. March 1993)

Imprisoned, apparently, within the fleshly housing of the Conditio in/humana, Walser leaves unconsidered the most fundamental principle of philosophical anthropology: that act of becoming a parent which founds another existence, and which is also necessarily the passing of a death sentence, is, in the case of human beings, not that mere inevitability that it is in the case of other animals but is rather left up to the choice and discretion of that constitutively cultural being that Man is. We are not condemned to procreate but rather – as Sartre famously recognized – “condemned to be free”. And thus also to be free to produce no progeny.

That the founding of another human being’s existence goes hand in hand with the passing of a death-sentence on this human being is something, Walser states, “of which one becomes only gradually aware”. And indeed it does seem to be the case that, even despite all the massive catastrophes that have befallen it, our human species remains so mentally dominated by one or another variant of pronatalism that almost no social >learning progress in the direction of antinatalism is yet to be registered. Until some radical new development occurs, then, the situation will remain that Walser and all other individuals will have to try to push forward alone and unassisted to a recognition of the moral value of antinatalism and that countless human beings will have to continue to be born only to die.

Every person who takes a decision not to procreate is a person who acts in such a way that fewer people will have to die. A similar thought has been enunciated by Huysmans, who speaks of what a meritorious action it is to preserve, through an act of abortion, an innocent being from having to live: “One must add,” thought Des Esseintes, “that for justice’s sake it is not the careless man, who rapidly vanishes from the scene, but mostly rather the woman, the victim of this carelessness, who must do penance for having preserved an innocent from having to live!” (Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours)

Confessions of parental guilt are rare and are likely only to be expected in certain limit-situations. For example, in the case of the Dutch author van der Heijden, whose son was killed in a traffic accident. Whereas Schopenhauer still supposed that no one who was thinking clearly would ever decide to beget a child, van der Heijden confesses: “We took the decision to have a child. I conceived it wilfully and knowingly with her… And now Mirjam and I are left here, until our respective dying days, with a loss the size of life instead of a living son. It was all a lie, then, this sense of safety and protection that a family of our own had seemed to guarantee. It was a stinking lie to imagine that our child would be a kind of buffer before the lonely chill of our own deaths.” (van der Heijden, Tonio) Van der Heijden’s nativistic frankness deserves great praise; but he appears not to be fully recognizant of the fact that, in begetting a child as a “buffer before death” – one that unfortunately “died before his time” – he had in fact exposed this child himself to the “lonely chill” of the inevitability of dying.

If someone is told that his or her own children did not necessarily have to come into existence (and thus would not necessarily have had, in future, to die) this person will, in most cases, construe this as a calling into question of these children’s right to go on living. And whoever questions the basis of these children’s existence by posing the question “Why do you have children?” will, unfortunately, be looked on as someone seeking to take these children’s lives. For this reason alone, even if for no other, whoever tries to persuade his fellow men of the truth of antinatalist moral theory should proceed very carefully.

In view of the sufferings – for the most part underappreciated, because literally unimaginable – not only of livestock animals but also of animals living in the wild we advocate also an animal antinatalism, whereby one should strive, so far as possible, to act in such a way that no further animals should begin to exist.

By enunciating the insight that God is just a projection of human ideas the critique of religion undermines, at the same time, that notion, still resonant even in our present day, of all human beings as >“Children of God”. Human beings become more and more clearly visible as what they have, in fact, always really been: children of other human beings. With the driving of God out his place in the psychical economy of human beings those critical questions and accusations which had accumulated in all the attempts at theodicy undertaken in the course of many centuries come now to be directed no longer at God but rather at procreating human beings themselves. Since there was once a time when human beings permitted themselves to see themselves as God’s compliant agents (“Go forth and multiply!”) these same human beings must now be called to account for all that pain and misery supposedly facilitated and “allowed” by this God. Every accusatory cry of suffering once raised against God now falls back upon human beings as God’s >Accomplices, since without such accomplices’ own will to parenthood we ourselves would soon no longer exist, and consequently evil, suffering and death would no longer exist either. Two important differences, however, between theodicy and anthropodicy must be recognized:

1. God can compensate us for all our sufferings by means of the àParadisal Compensation; the human individuals alive at any given time, however, in their capacity as “Mini-Demiurges” (>Parents as Mini-Demiurges), have nothing comparable to offer to their progeny other than a postponement of the hoped-for “good life” into the generation of these children’s own children and thus of the “earthly Paradise” into some indeterminate future. After the collapse of those great promises for the future that flourished throughout much of modernity human beings now find themselves bereft of any plausible justification for their imposition of suffering and misery on billions of beings born without their consent.

2. As accomplices of God human beings can shift, in substance, their own responsibility off onto an almighty Creator who created us out of love and who commands us to put up with all our suffering as the price to be paid for eventual eternal salvation.[1] In light of these considerations we may paraphrase Epicurus as follows:

“Either human beings wish to eliminate evil by ceasing to procreate but are unable to do so; or they are able to do so but do not wish to do so; or they are not able to do so and also do not wish to do so; or they are both able to do so and also wish to do so. In the case where they wish to cease to procreate but find themselves unable to do so, this means that they are weak-willed, which is surely true of many people. In the case where they are able to do so but do not wish to do so, they knowingly condemn their progeny to suffering and death, something which also cannot be put past many human beings. In the case where they neither wish to cease procreating nor are able to do so, they are both >Damnators and unfree, something which cannot be true of human beings. But in the case where they both are able to cease procreating and wish to do so – which is really the only one of these possibilities that is really acceptable for morally acting beings – there will soon be no evil of any sort upon the earth.”[2]

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[1] This entry is based, in part, on certain formulations of Guido Kohlbecher (September 2012).

[2] The model for this paraphrasing is to be found in: Epicurus

In the work of many writers, and specifically in that of Hans Jonas, we encounter – something that will surely surprise and shock many of those familiar with this author – a vulgarly Darwinistic and to all appearances extremely brutal “thanatalistic compensation principle”. “Now, just as it is clear,” writes Jonas, “that mortality tends to be balanced out by natality, natality acquires the latitude it needs through mortality. The dying of the old makes room for the young. […] Given that this is the situation, should we really attempt to extend the lives of the old still further by tinkering around with that biological clock of our mortality that has once been set by Nature – by attempting, as it were, to outwit Nature and thus to reduce still further the room for youth in our ageing society? I believe that the welfare of humanity bids us answer: ‘no!’” (Jonas, Philosophische Untersuchungen und metaphysische Vermutungen, S. 96)

This passage might indeed be described as “vulgarly Darwinistic” inasmuch as what counts here as the highest value is clearly not the wishes or the dignity of already-existing, ageing human beings but rather that principle, alien to all kindness and benevolence, of new generations pushing bionomically forward and demanding room for their existence, to which the older are summoned to cede and yield. It would surely have been more rational if Jonas had allowed space for asking why new generations should be pushing forward when there are already sufficient older people there whose wish it may be to grow still older.  

Jonas’s attempt to “balance out” mortality with natality comes to grief on the double Diktat of thanatalism: an involuntary having-to-die cannot be “balanced out” by any natality if for no other reason then certainly at least for the reason that it is not possible, except post festum, to acquire the consent to existence from any existing human being.

“Thanatality blindness” refers to the fact that parents, and all those who acclaim procreation, generally pay regard only to the beginning of a new human being’s life, not to that entirety of this life which must inevitably be sealed by death. When looking at a baby suckling at a mother’s breast the dominant thought tends to be: How wonderful that people acted in such a way that such a being came to be. But in the face of a person dying from a mortal illness or an extremely old person wasting away in a care home it is seldom, if ever, that we hear the thought expressed: What moral irresponsibility was shown by the people who begot you in order for you to die this way. To the enthusiasm associated with the beginning of life there corresponds only an awkward silence in the face of life’s usual end, whereas the most justified reaction would surely be: Who caused this horror through the act of causing you to be?

Thanatality designates the fact of our existence’s being to a greater degree an “existence forward towards death” than an “existence forward away from birth”. The pronatalist invitation to a celebration of natality, whereby we live, being each of us a respective new beginning, much rather forward from birth than forward towards death is an invitation which may, with some justification, be directed at new-borns or very small children (see, however àRölleke’s Daughter), but it cannot reasonably be directed at self-aware, adult persons certain of their own future. The following writers, all of them meditators on thanatality, question back behind the apparent self-evidence with which parents, even in the face of the certainty of their own children’s deaths, nonetheless act in such a way that these latter begin to exist.

Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (1742–1799)

“Tell me why thousands are born with grave disabilities, struggle and groan through a few years of life and then die? Why the child full of hope, the joy of his parents, dies just when these parents are at an age where they begin to need his help? Why others are forced to leave this world when they have only just entered it and are born only in order to die?” (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Über Physiognomik; wider die Physiognomen)

Leiris, Michel (1901–1990)

“As soon as I became an adult I felt no longer able to tolerate the notion of having a child: to bring a being into the world that, per definitionem, never asked to be brought into it and that is destined to die after it itself, perhaps, has seen to it that this chain of procreation is prolonged.”

 

Bernhard, Thomas (1931–1989)

“Who was it who had the idea of letting human beings go about in the world, or in what we call a world, in order then to bury them in a grave, in their grave?” (Thomas Bernhard, Frost)

Fels, Ludwig (*1946)

“Whoever brings children into the world/However oblivious to the future he may be as he does so/Is offering up victims to himself/ As a murderer deserving of ostracization. / Being born means, today/Having been ‘aborted into life’” (Ludwig Fels, Knüppelwiege. Ins Leben abtreiben. Ein langes Gedicht)

Evocation of the “thanatal hiatus” (the long period of time elapsing between having-been-begotten and having-to-die) serves pronatalists as a way of repudiating antinatalists’ evocation of “thanatality” as a component part of the Conditio in/humana: For the great majority of people the unwelcome necessity of having-to-die lies in so far, or at least in so abstract, a distance that thanatality does not count among the factors that diminish or compromise the happiness of existence.  

Pronatalists generally provide the thanatal hiatus with the following factor of proportionality:  the longer the period of time a person has left to live, the more acceptable is their having-to-die. The corollary of this is: where younger people die, be it in a natural catastrophe, in war, or in traffic accidents, this is usually portrayed in news reports as something especially tragic (with very little distinction being made here between a death in great pain and a painless one).

In contrast to the claim that pronatalists make upon the thanatal hiatus we antinatalists advance the following formulation: ceteris paribus, the shortest possible interval of time between  the >Beginning of Life and the >End of Life is to be preferred; what counts, for us, as especially tragic is an agonizing death after a long life full of experiences of care and misery.

Few people are able, or would wish, to look the necessity of their own death in the face. But these people beget children, nonetheless, or applaud when others beget them. – Subliminally aware, perhaps, that they are expressing verbal approval of something that they themselves could not bear, they must strive, henceforth, to come to terms with a thanatal conflict of conscience as an inhabitant of their psychical household.  

When questioned as to how they can condone the begetting of beings who are doomed to die, those with a firm foothold in existence reply that this having-to-die is something that lies in the distant future (>Thanatal Hiatus). But these same people will lament, at the next opportunity, the brevity of life.

Symbol for the situation of the human being whose religious faith has been shaken but who nevertheless stands in need of meaning and consolation and who is therefore obliged to wish for the impossible. A foundation for meaning and significance in the form of God seems close enough to grasp but evades his grasp, nonetheless, in all his lived existential limit-situations, leaving him in the lurch. The Tantalus Feeling is at its most intense in the case where the person longing for meaning and consolation not only imagines himself to have been left in the lurch but also believes that he perceives, behind the senseless torture of humanity, a God who takes malicious pleasure in it – after the model of Zeus who, in the mythical narrative, took delight in the torments of the punished Tantalus.

We may describe the “Tantalus Feeling” as an existential experience in, as it were, the antechamber of antinatalism, an experience preparatory to the àAccusation of God. Belief in a “good God” is gradually dismantled and what remains is a wicked àDamnator, whose immorality is communicated, in the end, to the parents.

One of the most frequently-encountered reactions to antinatalistic moral theory is “suicide cynicism”. We have to do with this latter in each case where there is retorted to a person protesting against existence something like: “So why don’t you just kill yourself, then?” We are justified in describing this attitude as cynicism because, in the first place, we are retained within our existences by powerful bio-psychical bonds that lie far beyond the power of our wills and, in the second place, no one ever began to exist by his own will or request. Schopenhauer has an apt reply to this “suicide cynicism”: “But who would choose to linger in life, life being what it is, if death were just a little less terrible than it is?”

According to the Global Suicide Report published by the WHO[1] around 800,000 people put, every year, an end to their own existence. From the fact that this figure is not much higher opponents of antinatalism conclude that the great majority of human beings are quite content with having been born. This conclusion, however, is open to challenge, since we must take into account the existence of a kind of biological àSound Barrier as a àBrake on Suicide. In order to bring about an end to their existence human beings must overcome their fear of death. That they fear their dying is far from being proof that they love their life. Whoever prefers the prolonging of an unwanted existence to putting an end to this existence by one’s own hand has very good grounds for this preference: namely, an instinctive shying away from death, the anticipation of terrible pain, the uncertainty as to whether the attempt at taking one’s own life will succeed, along with the wish not to cause pain to relatives and friends thereby.[2]

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[1] https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/suicide-prevention-report/en/, accessed on 18.5.2015.

[2] Vgl. Sarah Perry, Every Cradle Is a Grave. Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide, p. 158.

Whoever poses the demanding question “Is it justified to act in such a way that further human beings begin to exist?” must be prepared for the possibility that the person he poses it to will not answer the question as posed but will prefer rather to respond to a quite different, and simpler, one and to say: “Everyone should have the right to live”.

“Never act in such a way that a human being will die as a result of your action!” What good, decent, ethically acting human being would not want to append his or her signature to such a statement? What kind of person would one have to be in order for one’s right to append one’s signature to it to be legitimately called into question? The answer: every father or mother can have their right so to append their signature legitimately called into question, since all fathers and mothers have indeed so acted that a human being will die as a consequence: this human being being their own child.

If one really wishes to proceed to such precise differentiation, “fear of death” needs to be distinguished from “fear of dying”. The former is the fear of no longer “being there” in the future; the latter is the fear of the event or process of dying itself. “Fear of death” is really as devoid of foundation as is >Fear of Never Having Been. But we have good reason to be afraid of that event or process of dying to which we were condemned by those who brought about the beginning of our existence. As regards our own selves, we can contemplate our entry into death – the beginning of our non-being – with complete equanimity. We are quite justified, on the other hand, in being anxious with respect to the final years, months and weeks of our existence. The fear of this closing phase of our being, then, is by no means devoid of foundation. The authoress Ilse Aichinger rightly replied, when she was asked if she feared death:

“Everyone fears death. But really it’s not death that I’m afraid of, it’s dying. Because one cannot know what will occur there on the biological level, how strong a biological will to remain alive will break forth and what sort of terrible prolonged death-struggle will result therefrom.” (Ilse Aichinger, Es muss gar nichts bleiben)

In terms of the logic of argumentation, having to die is necessarily preponderant over being allowed to live. If a couple conceives a child then there is thenceforth someone there who will have one day to die. But if a couple conceives no child there is no one there of whom it might be said that they were not allowed to live.

If someone states that they find themselves unable to accept their own having-to-die, it is no valid retort to say to them: “But you wanted, after all, to exist, didn’t you?” Such a retort is invalid because, pre-existentially, there was in fact no one there who was striving or pushing to exist.

Whoever laments the necessity of our dying should not be permitted to avoid talking about the non-necessity of our conceiving / having been conceived!

One’s own children’s having to die may, indeed, be an unwished-for consequence of progenerative decisions. But it is not an unforeseeable consequence but rather an already-known, because unavoidable, consequence of every act of procreation. Procreation itself, however, is avoidable.

In an apartment-house courtyard bathed in the strong rays of the afternoon sun, four grown-ups are standing around playing ball with a small child of an age such that he is just about able to toddle but not yet to speak: “The sun is much too strong for you,” says one of the parents to the toddler. “If we don’t put some sun-cream on you, when you’re 80 you’ll die an agonizing death!” With these words the parent in question at once concedes a certain co-responsibility for the welfare, or otherwise, of his or her child while at the same time drawing a veil over a more fundamental level of this responsibility: namely, the responsibility for this small child’s existing and for his having – like almost all human beings – with great probability to die an agonizing death.

“That no human being has ever yet seen the light of day for whom some hour did not come in which he wished that he had not been born.” [1] This dictum of Friedrich Spielhagen’s (1829-1911) makes clear the extent to which every procreation is an imposition and touches upon the >Parent Taboo. One might be tempted to dismiss Spielhagen’s dictum with the contention that it expresses just the mood of a passing moment. – But this is to forget that such a wish never to have been born may be the culminating point of some despair of much longer duration. Alternatively, one might take the attitude that “once in a while, in a long life, one is bound to feel that way” – an attitude, in our view, which lies at the root of nativistic >Ruthlessness.

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[1] Friedrich Spielhagen, Problematische Naturen. Zweite Abteilung (Durch Nacht zum Licht)

No one has ever resisted the beginning of his own existence; indeed, it is impossible to imagine how such a thing would be possible. It is only possible to wish that one had never been once it is too late for the wish to come true. But a certain metaphysical scandal inheres, nonetheless, in the existence of every human being: namely, in the fact that he did not begin to exist autonomously. With the rise of Existentialism there emerges a philosophical tendency which attempts to draw our attention fraudulently away from this scandal inherent in our own existence by declaring the individual to be essentially a product of his own freedom. But even >Sartre’s famous phrase “we are condemned to be free” faintly betrays the underlying truth that we did not choose our own existence: we are only unfreely free.  

In this regard Hans Blumenberg succeeds in bringing out the fact that “human self-experience of our own facticity shows that it is – or could be, indeed must be – a fundamental vexation to every one of us that he was never consulted in this most important matter of his own self-determination. Existentialism has tried to remedy this problem by declaring each individual to be the product of his own freedom. Existence (so it is claimed) means: to be causa sui ipsius. But what is being raised here to the status of a form of human dignity is, in reality, no more than a renunciation, a passive acceptance of the inevitable.” (Blumenberg, Ein mögliches Selbstverständnis) Existentialism, then, generates its notion of human dignity only by devious and illegitimate means. If one traces out the logic of Blumenberg’s argument, then it is seen that human dignity, instead of being something sacrosanct and inalienable, is rather undermined from the very start by reason alone of human existence’s always being heteronomously brought about. Without himself being an antinatalist, Blumenberg promotes with this argument a certain existential >Disobedience.

Someone who feels himself quite content to be condemned to travail and death, or who presents to others, as a kind of good fortune, a life which consists essentially of senseless travail, and who acts in such a way that new human beings come to begin such an existence.

Parents wish a long life for their children and tend to forget, when doing so, that whoever does not die young is usually condemned to experience the ageing, decay and incurable sickening of their own body and mind. All this is aggravated further by the >Shame of Old Age, the tormenting thought of having become a burden on others. Ageing, sickness and death are morally disposed of by naturalizing them (>Naturalization) and seeing in them that “inevitable course of things” which may, indeed, have been in part the cause of the conception of the individuals suffering these things.

Already the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (365–290) had deplored the fact that Man is condemned, already through his very begetting, to suffer through lingering weakness and illness in old age: “At the birth of a man suffering is born as well. Therefore, if a man attains a great age, he becomes thereby only dull and stupid and his long suffering does not die. O what a bitter thing is this!” (Zhuangzi, The True Book About the Southern Land of Blossoms)

>Forgetfulness of Ageing

Certain utterances only succeed in convincing if they are accompanied by a symbolic renunciation of the self. Utterances of this kind are: a. Would that Auschwitz had never happened (>Auschwitz-lessness Through Self-lessness); or b. I would give anything not to have to die (so as not to have to witness the dying of my spouse, my child, my friend or my life-partner).

Utterances of the type of a. require a different course of history, one in which one never, oneself, began to exist; utterances of the type of b. reject what is in fact an inalienable part of the Conditio in/humana. Some further examples of situations which require a symbolic renunciation of the self are:

Right of Accusation and Symbolic Self-Renunciation

A symbolic renunciation of the self is required in every case where a child wishes to bring an accusation against his parents by reason of their having been the ones who initiated an existence (namely, his own) which he feels to be intolerable and not reasonably to be expected to be tolerated by anyone. Doctors, judges and the parents themselves will give the accusing child to understand that excepting in that state which he now finds to be so disagreeable there is no other state in which he could possibly have existed and will put the question to him of whether he would prefer, then, that his existence had never been brought about at all. This enquiry, then, would indeed demand a symbolic renunciation of the self.

>Right of Complaint and Symbolic Self-Renunciation, >Claim to Empathy and Symbolic Self-Renunciation

Right of Complaint and Symbolic Self-Renunciation

Whoever undergoes profound suffering has not just “been unlucky” but is rather experiencing something structurally unavoidable. Someone who suffers and complains that this suffering is something completely undeserved by them is, where things are considered more closely, only justified in making such a complaint if they are prepared at the same time to declare that they would have preferred events in the world to have taken a course such that they themselves had never begun to exist. Since there can be no existence without experiences of suffering, any such complaint must involve a symbolic renunciation of one’s own existence whereby neither said experiences nor said existence itself would ever have come to pass. Instead, then, of simply complaining: “why did this misfortune, this loss, this sickness befall me?” one would need rather always to complain: “why was my existence brought about?” Against the background of the Conditio in-/humana a person complaining of their profound suffering can only be authentic in doing so if they arrive, through a symbolic renunciation of their own existence, at the conclusion that  >It would be better if they had never begun to exist.

>Paradox of Self-Excuse, >Proof of Self-Renunciation

Claim to Empathy and Symbolic Self-Renunciation

No one can bring it about that he himself, his own children, or indeed anyone else should never have come to be. Anyone, however, can imagine the never-having-come-to-be of himself, his children or any third party. The question thus arises: in what kind of a state would we ourselves, our children, or a third party need to find ourselves in order for us to be able to make use of this capacity for existential abstraction in such a way that we might wish that we ourselves, our children, or some third party might never have begun to exist? This is the question regarding the neganthropic àLimit Value for ourselves, our children, third parties (or humanity as a whole).

Here, we need to expand this question regarding the neganthropic limit value by drawing into it a certain reflection relative to the ethics of empathy. Anyone who – being presently, for his own part, free of suffering – speaks for himself and, speaking purely theoretically, says that he would subscribe under no conceivable circumstances to the view that it would be better never to have lived, he thereby proclaims, on this level of reflection, his renunciation of all empathy or pity of which he might be the recipient. Because there surely count among these “conceivable circumstances” situations, for example, in which the person in question might find themselves grievously injured without access to pain medication or locked away for years in a cell without having done anything wrong. By having refused in his unafflicted state the symbolic-metaphysical option of having never existed and therefore having never suffered, he thereby also renounced any claim he might ever have made on others’ compassion. He set his pure existence above all else and considered it to be impossible that those same things might befall him which had caused countless others to cast a curse upon their existence.

Much the same applies in cases where parents informed about the genetic risks run by their genetically defective children-to-be express a preference for the existence of these children over a world in which they would never have come to exist; in contrast to the children in question themselves, these parents cannot, prima facie, hope for compassion; rather, they deserve the reproach that they are, as àPerpetrators of Existence, initiators of that suffering on the part of the children which, to their own benefit as people wishing to be parents, accepted, at the children’s expense, as “part of the deal”. Someone who, when completely personally intact, entirely refuses the notion of a symbolic self-renunciation, thereby renounces all claim on our compassion, much as that person renounces any such claim who commits himself beforehand to a refusal of all euthanasia, whatever the circumstances. He knowingly ignores the fact that his physical pain might one day become so terrible, and grow so far beyond any medical power to mitigate it, that he himself might plead for that assisted suicide which he refuses, today, to accord to anyone the right to demand.

The imperative of “having suffered oneself” goes hand in hand with the “prohibition on universal empathy”. It denies the possibility that someone might really be able to suffer empathically along with the world’s great mass of suffering beings and, consequently, denies also the legitimacy of someone’s postulating, in view of these experiences of suffering allegedly necessarily strange to him, that these beings would better never have existed or that it would be best not to beget, in future, any new beings at all. The argument, in other words, is that, in order to pass judgment on existence, the judging party must himself have undergone all the suffering which appears to him to provide the reason for denying the goodness of said existence.  

This imperative of “having suffered oneself” is a cynical attempt – “cynical” inasmuch as it is clearly made with the intention of increasing suffering – to discredit that moral doctrine of antinatalism which aspires to forego later suffering.

Parents proceed on the presumption that their child will affirm his or her own existence once he or she is in a position to take up any stance toward this existence at all. But contrary to this presumption of a “parental metaphysics” one may not in fact interpret such an affirmation as evidence in support of the view that it was morally correct to act in such a way that another human being began to exist. Because all self-affirmation is in the first place bionomically dictated and occurs without any contribution from rational reflection. It is only once the begotten individual concerned has become capable of, and has actually conducted, an enlightened nativistic >Reflection upon him- or herself – that is to say, a reflection distanced from the spell of bionomic imperatives – that the question can even be discussed of whether it was morally right that the beginning of an existence was brought about.

Whoever acts in such a way that progeny come to exist thereby imposes him- or herself on these progeny as a burden.  In the normal course of things ageing parents become a more or less onerous burden upon their children – and this remains indeed the normal course of things, regardless of how willing or unwilling these children prove to be to actually take this burden actively upon themselves.

Parental guilt is not an ahistorical constant. It varies depending on social position and historical circumstances. The easier the access to contraception and to information regarding the past, present and likely future of humanity, and the more self-determined the manner in which women are able to live their lives, the greater will be parental culpability for the neganthropic consequences of procreation

The degree of parental guilt must be assessed as especially high where the begetting of children is advocated despite a well-founded knowledge of a most likely problematical future for these latter. Thus, the French author Amin Maalouf states his belief that it is likely that already our children and grandchildren will feel the grave effects of climate change while pleading, nonetheless, for a persistence in “the adventure that is humanity”: “Despite my irritation and perturbation, I continue to be fascinated by the adventure that is humanity. I love it, I revere it, and I would not exchange it, for any price in the world, for life as an angel or as a beast.”[1]

The condition of possibility for a continuation of this “adventure that is humanity” is the engendering of new human beings – an activity to which Maalouf persists in exhorting even in the face of a catastrophe which he holds to be very likely imminent. Even if one were to offer him the form of existence of an angel which might preserve him from the coming climate catastrophe Maalouf (born in1949) would prefer existence as a suffering human being. And it is unequivocally clear from the lines cited above that he considers it reasonable to expect of all those born after him that they live in a world degraded by climatic catastrophe.

Contraceptive Culpability Index

The contraceptive culpability index is the product of the degree of women’s self-determination on the one hand and the accessibility of effective contraceptives on the other. Thus, for historical periods and regions of the world in which the contraceptive pill is freely available at no charge and women enjoy more or less equal rights with men, this contraceptive culpability index must clearly be set very high. Every birth, in such periods and regions, is a contraception that has been consciously forgone. Whoever, then, was born in any largely secularized industrial nation of the Western type may more justifiably raise against his parents the reproach: “why did you beget me?” than may, for example, someone whose parents – and most particularly whose mother – lived in a society or an era more thoroughly permeated by religious convictions. In industrial nations of the Western type the processes leading to the conception of a child are much less coercive and inevitable than they are in traditional cultures.

Abortion-Related Culpability Index

All that has been said above with reference to the contraceptive culpability index applies here as well: the more safely and less onerously (i.e. less painfully) both for the pregnant women and for the foetus an abortion can be carried out, the greater will be the moral weight of that reproach of any individual born into the world which has been articulated over and over again in the form of the “Mä phynai” and all its cultural successors. Here, however, the reproach takes on a form which has no such tradition behind it, namely: “why was I not, if circumstances were such that I had to be conceived, at least aborted before the conception could result in a birth?” For this particular reproach it will surely be difficult to find much evidence of literary-aesthetic articulation down the millennia of human culture, since the practice of preventing the birth of an already-conceived foetus was, for a very large part of human history, experienced as something far more perilous and threatening than the prevention of conception in the first place. In these remarks made on an online forum, however, we see just such a reproach directed, anonymously, to someone’s mother for having omitted to terminate her pregnancy: “Often, she left me alone for whole nights on end. If I came to her with a problem, she just yelled at me. Today, I suffer from anorexia and depression and wish that I had been aborted in the womb, so that I would not have to suffer as I do now.” As proof, however, of the invincible optimism of the human race we find another contributor to this discussion replying with the words: “Personally, I think you ought to be happy that your mother did not terminate her pregnancy. However many problems you have, life is the most beautiful thing. Keep your chin up, then. Most problems have a way of working themselves out and then life is usually even better than it was before the problem emerged.” (https://www.pro-leben.de/feed/forum_3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=22&view=previous, accessed on 26.5.2014)

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[1] „En dépit de mes irritations et de mes inquiétudes, je demeure fasciné par l’aventure humaine; je la chéris, je la vénère, et pour rien au monde je ne l’échangerais contre la vie des anges ou des bêtes.“ (Maalouf, o.c.)

Even the prime ontologist of the human race’s “obligation to be”, Hans Jonas, concedes that the begetting of new human beings is something laden with guilt. He does not, indeed, seek to eliminate this guilt – something he would consider to be guilt’s suspension – but rather to disperse throughout the supra-individual medium of the species. To arrive at an exculpation of those who procreate Jonas conceives of the species as itself a community of procreation. But in doing so he neglects the fact that said community has also been, for many millennia, a growing community of communication and one which, in recent centuries, has developed in ever greater degree the capacity to take up argument-backed stances either for or against procreation.  Human beings can the more easily refuse bionomic claims – “biological radicals” – the farther a culture, and its members capacity to “reflect themselves out of Nature”, have progressed. Jonas, therefore, writes:

“An element of impersonal guilt inheres in any causation of being (the most radical of all the forms of causation of which a subject is capable) and permeates all personal responsibility vis-à-vis the object of this causation, which was not asked beforehand whether it wished to be caused. But this guilt is shared by all, because the deed of the procreators was a generic one, not one thought up by themselves alone (indeed they might not even have known they were committing it) and the potential accusation of children and grandchildren to the effect that this deed was morally irresponsible – the most comprehensive and, in practice, pointless of all accusations – is one implicitly directed toward every person presently living. As, indeed, is any gratitude that might be expressed by these children and grandchildren.” (Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung)

It remains mysterious, however, why all presently-living human beings should be collectively guilty here, i.e. even those who take a position against the so-called “procreative drive” and do indeed refuse to procreate because it has become clear to them that no one can, in fact, live up to the responsibility involved in begetting a new human being. But perhaps Jonas only means: it is only those who have actually procreated that are collectively guilty. Then, however, the question arises of why, pointing to the “species nature” of the procreative act (“the deed of the procreators was a generic one”) he attempts to exculpate those who commit it without ever going into the issue that Man, being a cultural being, can always find ways and means of resisting “biological radicals”, or at least of sublimating them.

It is only at very few other points in Jonas’s work that one encounters a comparable degree of scepticism regarding procreation, i.e. a degree of scepticism that threatens to undermine Jonas’s own onto-ethics of a moral duty of humanity to exist. Instead of as the Summum bonum procreation now counts as objectively burdened with guilt. Burdened with guilt because it remains constantly questionable whether the responsibility that parents take upon themselves by procreating is a responsibility that can ever really be met. Both gratitude for existence and the imprecation cast upon existence can, Jonas frankly admits, be directed toward any one of us. Further clarification of Jonas’s puzzling text is provided by a footnote:

“The child cannot, indeed, actually ask his parents, reproachfully or otherwise: ‘why did you bring me into the world?’ because the parents in question cannot be said to have had any influence on the specific “thisness” of the “me” that is making this reproach to them; rather, he can only ask them: ‘why did you bring a child into the world?’ and the answer to this is the incurring of this guilt was itself an obligation – not, indeed, one vis-à-vis the not-yet-existing child (no such obligation exists) but rather vis-à-vis the morally binding cause of humanity as a whole. Of this we shall speak later.” (Das Prinzip Verantwortung) One seeks in vain, however, in Jonas’s book for this “later”.

Put very simply, there is opened up, with every birth, a credit and a debit column. It is incumbent upon the parents to fill up the credit column of their child’s life to such an extent that he is content with this life. Even Jonas concedes that this almost never occurs and that the >Saldo natale all too often is a negative one, signalling parents’ failure to meet their responsibility. But instead of simply admitting, at this point of maximum philosophical exposure, that human responsibility is here always and necessarily overstrained, so that his own pronatalism at this point ethically collapses, Jonas performs a veritable >Salto natale, extinguishing the guilt of the parents by adducing a barely argumentationally-supported “obligation” of these latter not to let humanity die out. Whatever meaning one may assign to the lines cited from Jonas above, the fact is hardly simply to be dismissed that he avows, at this point, that his “principle of responsibility” flips over here to become a principle of the irresponsibility of human procreation.

No human being can close himself off entirely to the pain of others. Not even the most ingenious form of emotional self-insulation that the human psyche is capable of can fully succeed in doing this. There is imposed upon each of us, through a birth occurring without our consent and with a view to benefiting people not ourselves, an inevitable co-experiencing of others’ suffering.

In his 1946 book The Question of German Guilt Karl Jaspers derives from the involuntary (!) testimony of each German contemporary some far-reaching moral consequences. His fourth category of guilt, the metaphysical, makes “every one of us co-responsible (…) for all that is not right and not correct in the world, and quite especially for crimes which occur in our presence or with our knowledge. If I do not do whatever I can to prevent them, then I share in the guilt.”  (Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage / The Question of German Guilt) To the extent that Jaspers’s reasoning holds true we may say that all parents make their children co-responsible for all the wrong and evil that they witness. Through his category of “metaphysical guilt” Jaspers illuminates the Conditio in/humana, albeit without drawing any antinatalistic conclusions therefrom. Since he has never protested against the indefinite prolongation of the chain of new births he implicitly imposes on billions of human beings a burden even greater than just that of their own existence. This inasmuch as his principle of  àCo-Responsibility demands openness and engagement with regard to the burdens of existence borne by others, burdens which every individual human being who is “open to the world” to the degree that Jaspers demands is obliged to collaborate in bearing. As an existentialist of deep moral insight who proves nonetheless not to be open to antinatalism Jaspers becomes an objective accomplice in the reasons for that very guilt which he imposes on all those born into this world.

Many are eager to point out that the pains undergone by living beings serve to protect the organism. When it is asked what pain is good for it is replied that feelings of pain prompt us to actions, or omissions of action, which preserve the organism from being harmed. What can be observed everywhere is a “living it up” of pain. To fulfil the function of a “warning sign” just a few strong bursts of pain would suffice. Instead, however, we see living beings twisting and writhing in long-enduring agonies, as in the case of the injuries caused by being bitten, stabbed, struck, crushed or burned. It is striking how we observe vis-a-vis this great temporal extension, or “dilatation”, of pain – something entirely unnecessary from the point of view of the preservation of the being feeling it – typically very much shorter temporal extensions in the cases of very pleasurable feelings.   

Philanthropic efforts have hitherto attempted to diminish or entirely to remove the suffering of already existing human beings. Antinatalist moral theory, however, makes an appeal to each individual to refrain from bringing into existence any further human beings, who will inevitably live lives of pain and suffering. With its humanistically motivated intervention in favour of a cessation of all procreation antinatalistic moral theory encounters resistance not just in the form of a traditional notion of procreation’s being a “natural” thing. Another reason, besides this, why antinatalism has difficulty getting a hearing is that there has always run, parallel to that strand in human history which has consisted in the struggle to diminish suffering, another strand which has consisted in a resistance to all measures tending precisely to this end. One very telling example is the following: Carl Ludwig Schleich – the inventor of local anaesthesia – remarks, in his memoirs, with great bitterness that he had had to suffer scorn and mockery at one medical congress attended by 800 of his colleagues simply because he had made available “something which later came to be absolutely recognized as a great good deed done for all those who suffer”  (Schleich, Besonnte Vergangenheit). Schleich was not alone in being made acquainted with this basic trait of human cultural history: a negative attitude to any progress made in the direction of lessening human pain. Millions or even billions of people have fallen victim to an attitude of merely looking away from human pain, while turning off all human empathy, which has extended even into the medical profession itself. What is it that sustains this attitude? It may be that there lies at the root of it some false idea that pain does people good, an idea rooted in its turn in certain ancient cultural and religious ideas.

It does not bode well for a future recognition of the truth of antinatalist moral theory that there is imbedded even in the medical profession a certain readiness to allow people to suffer in ways that might be avoided (for example, the practice of withholding their medication from them). Because such unrecognized atavistic ideals as that of “the benefits endowed by pain” tend to make people less receptive to the demand not to bring further human beings into the world, knowing that these latter will necessarily have to suffer much pain.

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Many parents, while recognizing the evil in the world, attempt nonetheless to justify their wish to procreate, or their actual deed of procreation, by telling themselves that their child, among all others, might become a doer of good things – or at least that they intend to educate him in such a way that this has the best chance of coming to pass.

One may say of such an undertaking that it wagers, in the first place, to such an extent on unknown factors (biological and social >Lottery) that it can hardly serve as a justifying reason for the begetting of a new human being. In the second place this attempt at legitimation fails to recognize the ground of badness which alone renders the doing of good things needful. That immeasurable demand for good deeds (without which it would not be possible for parents to imagine their child as some future doctor, crusading lawyer or brilliant researcher) exists precisely because the quantity and quality of evil in the world, anthropogenic or otherwise, is so immeasurable. Whoever wishes, through the begetting of a child, the best for both this child and the world thereby takes out, as it were, like all such begetters before him, a loan that can never be repaid and thus exposes his own child to the evils both of Nature and of society.

Whoever is tired or exhausted seeks out sleep and welcomes it. One would think, however, that anyone reflecting soberly on sleep and its nature should rather fear it, since, the deeper we slip into sleep the closer we draw to a zero-point of consciousness, with nothing existing for us any more. Indeed, at such a point we no longer even exist for ourselves. Whoever is sleeping deep and dreamlessly has no longer any consciousness either of himself, of others, or of other things. If it is true that we are, in essence, just the consciousness produced by our brain then it must also be true that, in phases of sleep without consciousness, we cease to exist. But is non-existence not precisely that which is most generally feared? Praise of sleep, then, is always at the same time a highly telling praise of non-existence!

That temporary non-existence that goes hand in hand with deep and dreamless sleep is relevant not just to post-existential non-existence (sleep as the brother of death) but also to the mindfulness of pre-existential non-existence (sleep as the sister of never-having-been).

Whoever propounds an antinatalist position, or comes close to doing so, must have succeeded in pulling off the not unimpressive trick of jumping over the shadow of his own existence. And whoever hopes to persuade others of the ethical superiority of this antinatalist position must be prepared for the fact that he will need also to teach this extremely difficult trick to those he wishes to convince. When someone meditates back before the start of his own existence, he is always pursued thereby, even in his meditations, by the actual lived time of this existence. This time before our own existence is really, for every one of us, “time out of mind”. All attempts to imagine states of the world without my presence in it, to envisage the world as it was without me and as it will be when I am no longer in it, necessarily fail. The world remains constantly under the meditative shadow of my own self. There can easily arise from this a certain nativistic fallacy: in my meditation I “roll back the film” to a time before my own existence and yet remain, nonetheless, somehow present in this world envisaged as existing before me, no matter how many subtractions I try to make thereby from my own self. Thus – and herein lies the fallacy – I must, in some “shadowy” way, all along have been “inherent” in this world as an entity that already half-existed, or “should by rights” have existed, or was “meant to exist”. 

The trick of jumping over the shadow of one’s own existence consists in arriving at the simple insight that, really, nobody and nothing was “there” that might be said to have been “deprived” of something (àDeprivation of Existence) if one had never begun to exist. People grateful for existence, however, do indeed conceive of themselves as having been such pre-existentially already àhalf-existent entities who were helped into full existence by their parents. – Or they conceive of themselves in terms of a “self-potentiality” that was somehow “activated” or “freed” through the actual beginning of existence. Thus, to be able to jump over the shadow cast by one’s own existence is a precondition that must be fulfilled if one is ever to embrace and affirm antinatalism.

Whoever does not wish to continue with his own existence is obliged to break a sort of “biological sound barrier”. The closer he comes, in considering such a course of action, to death, the greater becomes his fear of this latter.

A neganthropic version of the familiar “Golden Rule” – which runs “do not do to others what you would not wish to have done to you” – that grounds our Conditio in/humana.

It has rightly been objected to this rule that different people can willingly consent to very different things. One person may require no anaesthetic when they go to the dentist while for another person the very thought of having dental work done without one is terrifying. The “would not wish” contained in the “Golden Rule”, then, always implies also a dimension of tolerance, acceptance, “putting up with”. The things “that I would not wish to have done to me” are indeed things that I myself would not tolerate, accept or put up with. But there are also things that, while being tolerable for me, might possibly be absolutely intolerable and unbearable for someone else.

This transformation of the “would not wish” clause into a “personal tolerance” clause is only one of two transformations which the “Golden Rule” permits. There corresponds to the defensive ban on the inflicting of that which I, for my own person, refuse a second aspect of imposingly imputing, as reasonable, to others a tolerance of these very things. In other words, construed in this way, the Golden Rule states that I can reasonably impute to others a readiness to accept and put up with whatever I, for my own part, feel and consider to be tolerable. This transformation of the Golden Rule yields, then, the following:

“You may impute to others an obligation to put up with anything that you personally, for your own part, will put up with having done to you”! If one applies this “coercive imputation” version of the Golden Rule to the question of the begetting of progeny, the following maxim results: “If I myself hold to be tolerable the things that are done to me in and through my existence, this means I have the right to impose existence also on further human beings.”

With his Christmas play Bariona, or the Son of Thunder, composed in 1940 during his time as a prisoner of war, Sartre can be said to have become the author of a drama portraying the ebbing away of humanity. The senior Roman proconsul is making a tour of his region of the empire and arrives in a village in Roman-occupied Palestine where he sets about conducting a census. The census completed the village is found to contain 800 people and he announces that the taxes must, consequently, be raised. The head of the village, Bariona, decides: “We will pay the taxes so that our women will not suffer. But the village will bury itself with its own hands. We will beget no more children. I have spoken.” (Bariona)

This decision of the head of the village to the effect that his community will practice natal continence until its extinction is an allegory of world history. Within the framework of this Christmas play Sartre is exploring the question of whether the presence of (human) freedom – which is necessarily always also the freedom to make others unfree, to enslave, to do evil – is really worth the suffering that must go hand in hand with it. As had, of course, to be expected, Bariona’s command that no further children be conceived or born meets resistance and refusal. To this refusal he replies: “Do you really want to refresh the endless agony of this world through new human beings?”

Bariona does not except himself from his own command: he orders his own pregnant wife to undergo an abortion in terms that prove him to be indeed a representative of a philanthropic antinatalism: “This child that I have wished for so much and that you now bear within you – it is for this child’s own sake that I do not wish him to be born.” Bariona’s wife does not concur and declares herself ready to expose her child to all the sufferings of the world:  

“Even if I were sure that he would betray me, that he would die on the cross like the lowest thieves do and would curse me thereby, even then I would still bring him into the world.” Sarah proves herself, with these words, to be a >Damnator who is prepared to nail her own child to the cross of existence. But her husband replies once again in his capacity as philanthropic antinatalist:

“No one can undergo the sufferings of this child in its place; in suffering, in dying, each being is alone. Even if you knelt at the foot of the cross he was nailed to, he would still be alone with his terror of death. It is for your pleasure, not for his, that you want to bring him into the world. If you love him, take pity on him. Allow him to sleep the peaceful >Sleep of those who are never born.” (…)

Sarah: “I beg you, let a child be born; allow, once again, a chance of better things to come into the world.” […]

Bariona: The die are already cast. Misery, despair and death await this child at the crossroads.” What follows is Bariona’s great antinatalist discourse:  

“Woman, this child that you wish to bear is, as it were, a new edition of the world. Through it, the clouds and the waters and the sun and the houses and all the suffering of human beings will come to exist yet one more time. You will create the world anew; it will form itself like a thick black crust around a single terrified consciousness which will live therein, imprisoned in this crust like a worm. Do you comprehend how massively improper, how monstrously tactless it would be to create new copies of this failed world? To beget a child means to warmly and unconditionally approve Creation; it means to say, to the God who is tormenting us: ‘O Lord, all is good and I thank You for creating this world.’ Do you really wish to sing this hymn? Can you really take responsibility for saying: ‘if this world were to be made all over again, I would wish it to be remade just as it is’? Face the facts, my sweet Sarah, face the facts. Existence is a terrible leprosy that is eating away at us all and our parents are culpable for inflicting it on us (>Parental Guilt). Keep your hands clean of all this, Sarah; act in such a way that you can say, on the day of your death: ‘I am leaving no one behind who will perpetuate human suffering’”.

Although Bariona’s stance appears a fixed and firm one, he does in fact allow himself and his people a sort of postponement of sentence: “He turned to God and said to Him: ‘Give me, before daybreak, some sign; if You do not do so, I shall forbid all my men to have sexual commerce with their women.’ And Bariona does indeed receive his sign. An angel instructs Caiaphas to go to Bariona and say to him: “Peace on earth to all men of good will.” Bariona, however, simply scorns this sign: “O the good will of those soldiers whom one drives out to be massacred and who fight without knowing why! Why does your angel not come here and carry out the task he’s assigned you himself?”  “I will keep a careful record of my own sufferings and those of other human beings. I want to be the witness to the suffering of all and the balance in which this suffering is weighed. I shall gather it and preserve it in me like a blasphemy […] And even if the Eternal One had showed me His face from between the clouds I would still refuse to hear Him – because I am free, and even God is powerless against a free man.”

At this central point in his Christmas play Sartre’s existentialism manifests itself in what is surely the most radical of all its possible forms: a form which goes to the very root of human Being: not only how human beings exist is left to the discretion of these latter but whether human beings are to exist at all. – In other words: not only the individual’s own existence, which this latter can cancel out by suicide, but the existence of all individuals, since these individuals can collectively freely decide to forgo all posterity. Thence Bariola’s formulation, whereby the dignity of Man lies not in hope but rather in despair: “Look your misery directly in the eye because the hope of Man lies in his giving up hope.” For the gospel of Christ Bariona has only mocking contempt: “Say ‘thank you’, always ‘thank you’. ‘Thank you’ for a slap across the face, ‘thank you’ for a kick. Have children so that there are new behinds ready to receive new kicks. (..) Children who will be born, just like ourselves, explicitly to suffer.” Quite palpable here, although it is not explicitly articulated, is a sharp critique of the view that one must be grateful for life since it is a “gift one has received”.  

In the sixth scene of this Christmas play we find Bariona in Bethlehem. He has gone there with the intention of strangling the new-born Saviour in his crib. There he meets Balthasar, who informs him that Christ has a message also for him (Bariona):

“He came to tell you: let your child be born. The child, it is true, will suffer. But this does not concern you. Take no pity on his suffering; you do not have the right to take pity on it. His suffering will be his concern alone and he will do with it exactly what he will, because he will be a free being. Even if he is lame; even if he must go to war and loses there his arms or his legs… You said to me, before, that even God is powerless against a free man, and this is true. But how is it, then, that if, now, a new freedom rises into Heaven like a great iron pillar, you want to try to prevent this? […] You do not have the right to forgo the begetting of children. Because even for the blind, the unemployed, prisoners of war and cripples, joy still exists.”

With shocking failure of nerve, the play undergoes an apparent sudden conversion to pronatalism, the justification for which appears woefully insufficient and is doubtless owed in large part to the extraneous circumstances under which the play came to be composed. As Sartre tells us: “It was a question of agreeing, together with the priests who were also being held in captivity with us, on some subject-matter that could create, on that Christmas Eve, the maximum sense of commonality between Christians and non-Christians. For me, the most important thing about this experience was that it would allow me to go to other prisoners of war and talk with them about the problems we had in common.”

But who were these prisoners? Human beings whose existence had been brought about by the actions of other human beings.  This is the blind spot of Sartre’s existentialism. “Do you really want to refresh the endless agony of this world through new human beings?” Sartre has his Bariona ask. And Sartre’s existentialism replies “yes” to this question, even though in the Christmas play we have examined he casts a very bleak light upon the costs that go hand in hand with this affirmation of existence and with pronatalism in general. Nor is it possible to say that Sartre’s existentialism was ruined, during his captivity, by the priests. He was surely right in saying that there had simply been no question “of the direction of my thought having been altered even for a moment during my captivity.”

In fact, Sartre’s position even in his 1943 “Being and Nothingness” is still that of a “dictator of existence” who insists, almost scornfully, vis-à-vis human beings who have been begotten without having asked to be so that the responsibility for their continued existence, and for the world as a whole, is theirs alone, since they enjoy, after all, at every moment the freedom to quit this life through an act of suicide:

“What follows most essentially from what we have said above is that Man, as a being ‘condemned to be free’, bears the whole weight of the world upon his shoulders; he is responsible both for the world and for himself as a ‘way of being’.” (Being and Nothingness)[1] “If I am called up to fight a war, this war is my war; it is a war according to my image and I deserve it. I deserve it in the first place because I always have the possibility of extracting myself from it, be it by suicide or by desertion.” (Being and Nothingness) This degree of >Suicide Cynicism can hardly be surpassed. The only thing that can be said in Sartre’s defence is that he could not, at that time, have known that in German concentration camps suicide itself was being forbidden to the inmates through maintaining them, by means of highly perfected methods, in such a state that they were too weak to put an end to their own lives.

Sartre, however, states: “From the moment of my emerging into being on, I bear the weight of the world for myself alone, without anything or anyone else being able to lighten this burden for me. But this responsibility is of a very special sort. It will certainly be objected: ‘But I did not ask to be born’, which is simply a naïve way of emphasizing our facticity. I am indeed responsible for everything, except for my responsibility itself because I am not the founder of my own being. Everything is as if I had been compelled to be responsible.” (Being and Nothingness) “In the end, I always bump up solely against my own responsibility; for this reason, I cannot ask: ‘why was I born?’, cannot curse the day of my birth and cannot declare that I did not ask to come into the world.” (Being and Nothingness)

Sartre attempts here to unburden parents of that responsibility and  >Parental Guilt with which, in Kant’s philosophy, they remain at least partially burdened. But his existentialism fails because he closes his eyes to the bionomic hurdle that everyone who becomes tired of living has nonetheless to clear: IT wishes to live even if I MYSELF desire to die!

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[1] One might see in Sartre‘s famous formulation that “Man is condemned to be free” his own way of working through the  àKantian Natal Theorem: We never enjoyed the freedom either to accept or reject existence as a free being.

Antinatalists are adherents to a moral theory which àon the one hand prescribes that actions should be omitted the consequence of which will be that human beings begin to exist while on the other hand considering that it would have been preferable if none of the presently living human beings had ever been begotten. This part of antinatalistic moral theory runs a constant risk of being misunderstood as a kind of moral-logical death-leap, namely in the following manner: Since the antinatalist prefers a state of the world in which I would not have existed, this means he must – since I do in fact exist – be for my ceasing to be. That is to say, the antinatalist must either positively demand it, or at least condone it, that I either kill myself, be killed or perish in some way or other.

The unease manifested here with respect to antinatalist moral theory or its representatives is unjustified inasmuch as the concern of antinatalism in fact consists in nothing more than this: that no further human beings susceptible of feeling pain and suffering should come into being.

A “salto esistenziale” is committed by anyone who, in speaking of someone’s being harmed or benefited by non-existence, necessarily makes reference to an indeed non-existent, that is to say, entirely imaginary “person”. Günther Anders, for example, can be said to be speaking in this way when he speaks of his own good fortune of being admitted into this world, a good fortune that falls to the lot of only a few. The “salto esistenziale” is here, as it were, a self-subreption. (>Gratitude for Existence >Günther Anders).

We see especially egregious cases of “salto esistenziale” where arguments are built upon a supposed state (!) of non-existence in which one has no right to “leave” unborn children.  Often, non-existence is conceived of as a deep sleep or a darkness from which children need to be freed or awoken through their begetting. Frank Wedekind (1864–1918) draws our attention to such a “salto esistentiale” in his drama Spring Awakening: “We see parents bring children into the world simply in order to be able to exclaim to them: ‘how fortunate you are to have parents like us!’ – and then we see the children go and do the same thing.”

The “saldo natale” indicates, in some imaginary existential bookkeeping, the disparity between the credit and the debit side of a human existence.  On the debit side there are entered all the things that parents wish for their children from these latter’s birth on: happiness, health, long life, intelligence, beauty. Also entered on this debit side are all that the United Nations, for example, have listed as the minimum standards that need to be met if there is to be any sense in speaking of a human being’s having “a good life”.  In the credit side, on the other hand, there is entered whatever has actually been fulfilled at the end of a human life.

An indication of the fact that the “saldo natale” always leaves behind itself a certain “debit” is, for example, Martha Nussbaum’s contention that no life can be spoken of as a truly successful one that if even a single one of the points on a 10-point list drawn up by her has failed to be met and satisfied[1]. In terms of the “existential bookkeeping” proposed by Nussbaum the general balance of all births will, considered as a whole, always turn out to be a negative one. The irony is that, although Nussbaum is, judging by her own criteria, fully aware of the extreme precarity and fragility of any kind of “success” in life, she still counts a right of the individual to reproduce as one of said individual’s inalienable opportunities for self-realization – apparently oblivious to the fact that through the very according of such a right the foundation stone is laid for the creation of new human existences which will then, in their turn, surely fail to meet Nussbaum’s own criteria of “successful existence”. Through her explicit inclusion of procreation within a catalogue of all that which characterizes “the good life” Nussbaum thus becomes, precisely as an ethicist of a “good life” so conceived, an objective accomplice of future suffering and failed and ruined existences.

Saldo natale as Current Account for Reincarnation Purposes

In cultures which have been marked by doctrines of karmically-determined reincarnation the “saldo natale” is a kind of bank account of personal merit.  Whoever was reborn into a relatively favourable incarnation, be it as a human being or even as a god, will tend to gradually empty out, as he proceeds through this present existence, this “personal-merit account” – that is, in the case where he does not maintain its balance, or increase it, by his good deeds. Max Weber explains this “saldo natale” as follows: “All the (ritually or ethically acquired) merits and demerits of the individual go to form a kind of ‘current account’, the ‘balance’ of which then inevitably determines the further fate of  the soul upon rebirth, and this precisely proportionately to the degree of debt or credit shown by the one side of the ‘account’ or the other.” (Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie)

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[1] „… we can argue, by imagining a life without the capability in question, that such a life is not a life worthy of human dignity.“ (Nussbaum, Frontiers of justice, Pos. 929)

As a doctor and a friend to animals the great merits of Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) seem impossible to contest. Schweitzer’s writings, however, tend to be reduced, nowadays, to just two ideas. “Reverence before life”[1] is the most universally known of them; but often cited also is his formulation: “I am life that wishes to live and that finds itself in the midst of life that wishes to live.” But, as is so often the case, Schweitzer’s ideas repay a second and closer look, and an examination of whether these fine-sounding ideas do in fact concord with other statements of Schweitzer’s and whether they do in fact promote the welfare of animals.

I am life that wishes to live and that finds itself in the midst of life that wishes to live.

Schweitzer calls this proposition “the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness” and thus the proposition from which all philosophy must necessarily proceed.  What he overlooks here is that the following proposition also holds true:

I am life in the midst of life that HAS to live.

No human being and no animal was ever in a position to say “yes” or “no” to the beginning of its own life.   Each was obliged to live because his or her parents wanted it so or, in the case of animals, because these latter are simply driven by Nature to procreate. Whereas human beings who have become unwilling to go on living have, in principle, the option to put an end to their own existence, an animal, even if it is gravely ill or seriously injured, must go on existing until the bitter end, since an animal has no free will and is unable to distance itself from itself sufficiently to commit an act of suicide. This diktat of life applies particularly to our farm and working animals. Above all in a livestock compound it would be entirely reprehensible to raise such a claim as “I am life that wishes to live and that finds itself in the midst of life that wishes to live”. The only appropriate thing to say in such a place would be: “I am a human being in the midst of creatures that must live because they have been bred and raised to live in order that someone can make money from their living.” Here one might object that, in speaking of “life that wants to live”, Schweitzer had not been thinking of livestock animals but rather of animals living in that oft-evoked “freedom of the wild”. Schweitzer, however, himself makes mention of the fact, in his publication Culture and Ethics, that the lives of countless animals “in the wild” is likewise plagued by distress, sickness and pain. Schweitzer wishes, nonetheless, that as many living beings as possible should come to exist. He mounts a plea in favour of “there being as many wills-to-life as possible upon the earth” and writes that “it is a good thing to preserve and promote life and an evil thing to destroy or to hinder it.” (Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik) This is Albert Schweitzer’s imperative to “go forth and multiply”.

On the topic of “reverence for life” Schweitzer says: “This reverence bids us to look out, together, for opportunities to bring succour to animals in the midst of all the suffering that human beings inflict upon them, in order that, even if only for a moment, they might step outside of the incomprehensible horror of existence.” He himself cared, as a doctor, not only for human beings but also for sick animals. Schweitzer, then, recognizes both: an imperative for all creatures to “go forth and multiply” and the horror of creaturely existence. It is for this reasons that his ethics are deeply problematical. On the one hand, he wishes that as many new living beings as possible should come to exist. To hinder this counts, for him, as “evil”. On the other hand, however, his ethics of reverence for life is required so as to mitigate the horror of creaturely existence. By affirming the numerical increase of all living beings he also affirms, as its unconscious accomplice, that very horror which he wishes, through his ethics of reverence for life, to limit and oppose. First to wish that a maximum possible number of animals, be they living in the wild or kept as livestock, should enter into a horrific existence, and then to offer succour and support to them on the specious basis of an “ethics of reverence for life” – this is an unconscious and involuntary sadism.

[1] The expression “reverence for life” was not coined by Schweitzer but rather, already in 1902, by the important animal rights activist  Magnus Schwantje (1877–1959).

In response to the question of how God could have set about the work of creation at all, W. D. Schnurre said: “Creation can only arise out of guilt. Because the creator must be ruthless.” (Der Schattenfotograf) “Generative ruthlessness” designates the fact that the huge majority of human beings tend to welcome the creation of new human beings quite regardless of the conditions under which these latter are going to have to live. In everyday life this “generative ruthlessness” is confirmed by such placatory pronouncements as “Children cry, it’s natural!”, uttered in response to any worried enquiry from another adult about what has upset a child. To the child, meanwhile, there are directed such >paternihilistic dicta as “Just put up with it!”

A philosophy of natality is sometimes praised as an antidote to a supposedly death-dominated philosophical existentialism, represented above all by the Heideggerian version of this latter which, so it is said, places life in the shadow of our eventual ceasing-to-be. The way to proceed, so it is argued, is rather to conceive of existence from the perspective of its beginning with a birth, instead of thinking of being as a “being-toward-death”. But a philosophy of natality can only become an antidote to the irrevocable necessity of dying if it questions back before the beginning of a person’s life. Such a flashback to before the start of my own existence serves to make it clear to me that it was not necessary for me to come to be at all. If being-toward-death places life in the shadow of no-longer-being-existent, this flashback to before the start of one’s life illuminates one’s own existence as something that, together with my own having-to-die and that of those near and dear to me, did not necessarily have to be. Every “existence as being-toward-death” appears superfluous and contingent. Because every “existence on the way to death” is at the same time an “existence from the beginning of a life” and this “beginning of life” is something that, with the progressive loosening of the grip of tradition on our culture and the increasing autonomy of women, passes more and more unequivocally into the sphere of what we can either do or leave undone – that is to say, into the sphere of responsibility of freely-choosing persons. The ->egofugal “flashback” before the respective beginning of each person’s life can be considered as a core element of a philosophy of non-natality.  

If one understands the philosophy of natality as a thought which “flashes back” before the beginning of a person’s life, the positive character of this thought becomes clear: It is no longer in thrall to death inasmuch as its ethical imperative now runs: do not burden others with having to live a life in the shadow of one’s own having-to-die or of the having-to-die of one’s near and dear ones.

The true homme revolté is not Camus’ anti-hero, who confronts the absurd with a cry of “nonetheless!”, but rather that person who, by means of natal continence, rises up against bionomic and socionomic imperatives and thereby sees to it that no more humans are exposed to the absurdity of being-in-the-world. If there only develops out of Camus’ individual “revolt” a truly all-encompassing revolution, then “the absurd” will vanish with the vanishing of Man himself.  

Let us imagine that medicine makes a sudden enormous leap forward in its diagnostic capacities, so that parents are able to receive a diagnostic report on the entire future health of their children as soon as these children are 15 years old. Parents who take advantage of this offer would be informed of the specific organic failings from which their children would eventually die and they would also receive photos of the children in question’s faces as they grew older, at intervals of around 15 years, right up to extreme old age. Would we then see, in these parents, the emergence of something like a nativistic remorse?

In the face of death even a utopian spirit such as Ernst Bloch gives up all hope and formulates the notion of a retrojective devaluation of existence along with all its aspirations: “The jaws of death grind all and the maw of decomposition gulps down all teleology; death is the great dispatcher of the organic world – but to this latter’s catastrophe.” [>Catastrophe of Death] “The grave, darkness, decomposition and worms once had and still have, when the awareness of them is not suppressed, a kind of retrospectively devaluing force.” (Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung) For Bloch “death, considered as the axe of nothingness, is the hardest of all non-utopias.” (Prinzip Hoffnung) The only strange thing here is that Bloch does not trace out further all the consequences of that foundering of the “principle of hope” upon the àHardness of Reality which he here admits does take place.

Expressed succinctly, what a >Perpetrator of Existence retroactively confirms is:

– that it is a good thing to be thrust into the world without one’s consent;

– that the world into which he was thrust is a sufficiently good one that one may, with a good conscience, bring further human beings into it;  

– that he himself has turned out sufficiently well mentally and physically, and is sufficiently well suited to the task of raising and educating, that it is a good thing that he should allow parts of his genetic heritage to take on form and substance in a new human being and should set about educationally moulding this new human being with the means at his disposal.

A non-explicit attitude discovered by G. Kohlbecher that, paradoxically, connects the thought of one’s own past non-existence with a threatening prenatal annihilation.  

Retrojected (Backward-Facing) Longing for Death

Volker Jehle, the author of a comprehensive history of the work of Wolfgang Hildesheimer, identifies as one of this latter’s most fundamental thoughts that of “never having been born, a backward-facing longing for death…” (Volker Jehle: Wolfgang Hildesheimer. Werkgeschichte. Found  by: GK) That this backward-facing wanting-never-to-have-been is classified by a reflective person as “death”, much like a forward-facing wanting-no-longer-to-be, is something that is far from standing to reason; on the contrary, it prompts to serious reflection. That even the longing for never-having-been tends to be judged by the measure of our death – i.e. of our future no-longer-being – is in fact astonishing and leads one to expect that the most basic propositions of antinatalism – “it would have been best if no one had ever come to exist at all” and “it is morally reprehensible to act in such a way that someone begins to exist” – may in fact be interpreted by certain addressees as if their own lives were thereby being placed in question and their deaths demanded. 

[>Antinatalist Imposition and Resistance to Antinatalism, >Preconceptive-Retrojective Symbolic Suicide (also: Symbolic Retrojective Suicide)]

Constitutive of religion in the broadest sense is human beings’ dissatisfaction with the quality and the finitude of their existence. When the human being hungry for bread or the human being hungry for meaning in all times and regions of the world creates religions and post-mortal paradises for himself as post-mortal compensation-institutions and begins to believe in these latter, he declares thereby the insufficiency of the reality into which his begetting has brought him and into which, equipped with religious power of attorney, he nonetheless brings children himself. Religions, with their paradises, are the hedged claims to that which is owed to every person begotten without consent as compensation for their own  >Givenness.

The more diligently a person, a group or a sect aspires to Paradise, the more marked will be their subliminal protest against having been called against their will into this existence: if existence at all, then only a paradise-like existence with one’s claim to happiness guaranteed.

Reincarnation is a complicated topic because we most often have great difficulty expressing just what we mean by the term. Because, if it is really “me” who is reborn in such a case, would this not mean that I would have to be able to recall my previous existence? On the other hand, however, we have no doubt that, in the case where we should develop grave senile dementia, it would still be “we ourselves” and no one else who would continue to exist, even though we would no longer be able to remember anything. If we were able here and now to take certain measures which would bring it about that in such a condition of senile dementia we would not have also to suffer certain further pains, we would, it must be supposed, indeed take such measures; we would not say: what happens to me some decades from now is a matter of indifference, if the “I” that exists then will have no memory and will, consequently, be a different person from me. This phenomenon of grave senile dementia is clear evidence that our continued existence is not necessarily linked to the ability to remember. With a little imagination, then, one can envisage how a “second existence” (after one or another form of reincarnation or rebirth) might likewise not necessarily have to involve any memory of the past. For this reason, it would seem not to be entirely unreasonable to try to develop a “reincarnation test” for the purpose of testing nativistic theses and beliefs.

 

Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906)

One interesting model for such a “reincarnation test” was developed by Eduard von Hartmann in his “Philosophy of the Unconscious”. This involved taking away all his memories from the test subject, without said subject ceasing thereby to be himself (a phenomenon which we do indeed encounter in the most serious cases of senile dementia):

“Imagine a man who, though no genius, is nonetheless a man of up-to-date general culture, equipped with all the material goods of someone in an enviable social position, in the prime of life, and fully aware of the advantages he enjoys over the members of the lower classes, the inhabitants of more primitive nations, and the subjects of more savage times, and who in no way envies the man placed above him who is tormented by all the discomforts that he himself has been spared – a man, in short, who has neither been worn out and made blasé by excessive pleasures nor been oppressed by any especially heavy blows of fate.

Now imagine Death stepping up to this man and speaking as follows: “The time allotted to you has run out and in this very hour you shall fall prey to annihilation. But it is up to you to decide in this moment whether or not, after completely forgetting all that has hitherto transpired, you live through once again, in exactly the same way, this life of yours which is just now coming to an end. Now choose!”

I doubt that the man in question will prefer, to non-being, this repetition of all that has already played out once before – assuming that he considers the matter quietly and without intimidation and that he has not lived his life in a way so lacking in thought or reflection that, unable to perform any brief critique of his own life-experiences, his answer will give expression only to the will to live at any price or his judgment will be entirely distorted thereby. How much more, then, would this man have to prefer simple non-being to a re-entry into a life which would not guarantee to him those favourable conditions that his former life had and which would, on the contrary, leave it entirely up to chance what new conditions of life he might find himself entering into – that is to say, would, with a probability verging on certainty, provide him only with worse life-conditions than those that he had just scorned.

But the unconscious would itself be in the same position as this man at every moment of a new birth, assuming it really had the possibility of making such a choice.”  (Eduard v. Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten)

Even a generally contented man, Hartmann supposes, would not cherish the wish to be reborn in the sense of having, after having forgotten his past life, to live this life through once again.  All the more, then, would a contented man decline to accept his own rebirth under altered conditions: namely, if it were left up to chance (>the Lottery) or to the unconscious just which social or biological condition he would be reborn in. Against the background of the necessity that ethical principles be universalizable we must now ask: if I decline to accept that in my own case my life should be lived through again – let alone that the journey through life should be made anew under biological and social conditions that remain unknown to me – how I can reasonably impose such a life-journey on someone else by begetting him and surrendering him up to the unknown?  Were that “unconscious” (which in Hartmann’s philosophy is blind) endowed with foresight, it would flinch back in horror from every such begetting. We ourselves, however, do possess such foresight, for which reason – and this is the logical antinatalist conclusion of Hartmann’s own exposition, a conclusion he does not share – we should not act in such a way that new human beings begin to exist.

The right to beget one’s own progeny is generally held to be a part of the basic right to the free development of one’s personality. The notion of such a basic right is flawed already by reason of the fact that it is not clear why or how the expansion of one personality would be compatible with the generation of a second personality (the child). However broadly one individual (something “un-dividable” by definition) might develop himself, this does not imply any second person.

But if the right to progeny is, nonetheless, still after all considered as a part of our basic right to the development of our own personality, then this means: I am to have the right, with a view to the free development of my own personality, to instrumentalize another personality (one which is unable to adopt an attitude either of affirmation or of refusal vis-à-vis my progenerative behaviour or which, in other words, is unfree with regard to the start of its existence) in such a way that I cause it to begin to be. But there follows in turn from this: whenever any of my progeny find themselves unsatisfied with a state or a phase of their life I need to face the fact that I have practiced the free development of my personality at their expense. My right to progeny of my own as part of a basic right to the free development of my personality results in wrong done to some other person in every case where the basic rights of this person, instrumentalized by me, are not respected. These latter basic rights have been collected and recorded in the UN Convention on Children’s Rights; they relate to health, free time and play, upbringing, education and training without violence, and parental care.

Where we pay attention to the words, which are hardly casually to be dismissed, of the author Friedrich Spielhagen who writes that “no human being has ever seen the light of day for whom there did not come an hour in which he wished he had not been born” (>Spielhagens Sentence) it becomes clear that, by the exercising of my “right to progeny of my own as part of a basic right to the free development of my personality”, I am bringing it about, in an irresponsible way (i.e. in a way that indicates I am only concerned about myself) that someone else gets repeatedly into serious physical and/or mental difficulties. My supposed basic right conflicts in an absolutely non-negotiable way with the equally fundamental imperative to forgo all actions which bring it about that human beings land up in existentially intolerable situations of need and distress. But even where such a situation of existential distress arises, neither the UN’s Children’s Rights Convention nor any other human-rights convention or institution can currently function as a court of appeal before which the persons suffering harm can lay claim to compensation for those harms that these conventions and institutions supposedly exist to defend against. This being the case, Article 2, Paragraph 1 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany certainly requires some supplementation. Currently, the text runs:

“Every person shall have the right to the free development of his personality insofar as he does not violate the rights of others or offend against the constitutional order or the moral law.”

We propose supplementing this as follows:

Nobody shall have the right to freely develop his personality in such a manner that in the course of such a free development a person shall begin to exist whose rights shall sooner or later be infringed.

Memoirs claiming to be those of Alexander von Humboldt were published in 1861 by a hitherto unknown author. We cite below, from this supposed forgery[1], an antinatalist passage: “I was not made to be the father of a family. What is more, I consider marriage to be a sin and the begetting of children to be a crime. I am also of the belief that that man is a fool, and still more a sinner, who takes the yoke of marriage upon himself. A fool because he thereby throws his freedom away without receiving any fitting compensation; a sinner because he gives life to children without being able to give them the certainty of happiness. I despise human beings in all their various strata; I foresee our posterity being much more unhappy than us – ; would I not be a sinner, then, if, despite seeing things this way, acted in such a way that progeny, that is, more unhappy people, came to be?–

Life in its entirety is the most utter nonsense. (…) If we just knew, at least, why we are here on this earth. But everything is and remains an enigma to the thinking man and the greatest of all good fortunes is to be born shallow and stupid.” (Quoted in: Philipp Mainländer, Die Philosophie der Erlösung. Erster Band) Interestingly, the French philosopher Rémi Brague says of this passage that it is, in the end, a matter of no importance whether the text is a forgery or not, since nihilism was, at that period, a very widely-held view. (see Brague, Les Ancres dans le ciel). In fact, however, we have to do here with antinatalistic formulations of a very emphatic nature which cannot have been widely subscribed to even in nihilistic circles – although it is certainly true that so-called nihilistic currents of thought may have promoted the emergence of just such an emphatic antinatalism such as that which we encounter in >Kurnig.

[1] The decisive role in this discovery was played by Kurt-R. Biermann: Die „Memoiren Alexander von Humboldt’s“, in: ders.: Miscellanea Humboldtiana. Berlin 1990, p. 257 – 264 (Beiträge zur Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung 15).

Before “I” was, there was “it”: the consciousness-less, functioning, embryonic organism, generated either in vitro or directly by the parents, which succeeded in forming for itself a nervous system and a brain which then, at some point, brought forth indeed a consciousness, through which “I” began to exist. When might this have been? We will surely never be able to measure it nor indeed to learn anything precise about it at all. Perhaps we can agree on the fact that a certain knot of nerves, or a brain, is an indispensable precondition for a larva or an embryo’s acquiring a basic consciousness or awareness. A good candidate for the point marking this transition both in human beings and in the higher animals is perhaps that stage of development that is designated by the word “foetus”. When the embryo developed this minimal consciousness or “proto-self” and became a “foetus”, at this point “my” existence began. Had that still-consciousness-less embryo which came later in fact to constitute ME been destroyed before this occurred, then “I” would not have been killed thereby (since “I” did not yet exist). What was destroyed would rather have been an inanimate embryo, although this destruction would have prevented a killable “I” (an “I” capable of dying) from beginning to exist (>Abortion).

Where one takes into account this pre-natal “proto-self”, that “new beginning” so celebrated by advocates of natality (and so vehemently insisted upon against a supposed “stream of death” in philosophy – not just at the point of our birth but already some months prior to this. We can clearly see from this that the attempt to oppose, to the supposedly death-obsessed philosophy so far produced by Man a “philosophy of natality” suffers ab ovo from a certain important flaw. If we begin, in fact, to live already some months before our birth – namely, as soon as a “proto-self” emerges from a merely embryonal “it” – then what ought to give occasion to celebration is this initial constitution of “I-ness” and not the birth occurring several months later.

If one is to draw a distinction between ethics and morality, then one may say that ethics is a philosophical questioning of the presuppositions of morality with a view to grounding and justifying this latter; or, in other words, ethics is a theory of morality. For this reason, it is to be expected of an ethics that it take up a distanced and reflectively examined perspective upon those moral notions that count as “self-evident” for a society, or for an era, or for humanity as a whole. It is all the more astonishing, then, that, with the exception of Utilitarianism (more precisely: negative Utilitarianism) no system of ethics has ever thought even to address the question of whether there ought to exist at all those human beings the moral rightness of whose actions then go on to form the objects of ethical debate. Instead of beginning, in a distanced and reflective manner, with this most basic question of whether subjects susceptible of doing good and having good done to them, and of suffering evil, should exist in the world at all, traditional ethics concerns itself with how all the other ideas we have about morality – excepting this question about whether the subjects of ethics should exist at all – can be rationally justified. An example: When Peter Singer writes that there should be chosen “that course of action which, when the books are finally balanced, has the best consequences for all concerned” (Praktische Ethik, S. 24) there remains as a “blind spot” in the reasoning leading to this proposition the issue of whether there should exist people “concerned” by our deeds and misdeeds at all. But an ethics that fails in this way to reflect, besides upon the problems it is aware of, also upon its own “blind spots” is justifiably to be described as “unmindful”.  This, indeed, is what we may call “the unmindfulness of ethics”. Any ethics which fails to take up into its questioning the question of whether there ought to be a human race at all (and which therefore offers no anthropodicy, be it implicit or explicit) necessarily becomes objectively an accomplice in all those misdeeds that those freely-acting subjects, the existence of which such an ethics simply presupposes, are capable of committing. An “unmindful” ethics in the sense we have described implicitly surrenders human beings over to all these terrible misdeeds. All systems of ethics justify (albeit mostly merely implicitly) the facilitation of the contravention of their own norms in ways likely to occasion suffering inasmuch as they are obliged to posit as their highest value a freedom which is also a freedom to infringe values. They are subject, therefore, to the same accusation – in the form of the pointing out of their lack of an anthropodicy – as God is subject to in the form of the pointing out of a lacking theodicy, i.e. of the pointing out that God Himself must somehow be complicit in the existence of Evil.

Inasmuch as our ethical systems have proven so rarely capable of distancing themselves from, and of reflecting upon, our traditional notions of morality to a degree sufficient for the desirability or otherwise of the engendering of new human beings to enter into the field of their considerations (have proven, in other words, so rarely capable of rising into the sphere of meta-ethics) the suspicion must necessarily arise that a certain “biological radical” – namely, the life-instinct driving toward procreation – may have remained spared by all reflection and that there may have occurred, as yet, little or no pushback against its imperatives. In this case, then, we would have to reckon with a biologically-anchored pronatal fatalism in all systems of ethics. In contrast to this, anything deserving of the name of “human dignity” would consist precisely in a reflective self-distantiation from all biological imperatives.

It may serve, perhaps, as an encouragement for some pronatalist to compose a handbook on pronatalism if we briefly review the ideas of several convinced pronatalists:

Holtug, Nils

Holtug attempted to establish a pronatalist position. In his essay “ON THE VALUE OF COMING INTO EXISTENCE” he propounds the “Value of Existence View”. According to this view the beginning of a person’s existence can either benefit or harm said person and it can be better (or worse) for this latter to exist than not to exist. Holtung thus defends the bold idea that someone can be harmed by reason of their having never come to exist. He is indeed aware that these claims of his must immediately raise the question of how one can possibly either harm or benefit some non-existent “something” by bringing about an existence paradoxically said to be “its” (“something” and “its” are placed in inverted commas here so as to indicate that that neither term really has any ontic referent to which anything could really be done – i.e. they are not referents at all in the strict sense). Holtug appears to understand, then, that the beginning of an entity’s existence is not something that happens to said entity but rather a precondition that must already obtain if anything is ever to happen to said entity at all. It is clearly against this background that he explains his notion that a person can be harmed or benefited by beginning to exist. He does so as follows:

“The thought is that a person is benefited by coming into existence if, on balance, his life is worth living, and harmed if, on balance, it is worth not living.” In this light we can see that what we are meant to understand here by a benefit/harm ensuing from the beginning of an existence is not at all that which one tends, irresistibly, to think of but rather something else entirely. The “benefit” or “harm” in question here corresponds to the answer given by an already-existing person to the question of whether their life Is worth living or not (or to the judgment of the value of the life of such a person by others).

Holtug attempts to “smuggle in” a certain harmful or beneficial quality of existence’s beginning by means of a sort of trick which illegitimately presupposes a continuity between non-existence and existence, as if “I” were to pass out of the state of non-existence into that of existence just as I pass from a state of illness into one of health. Thus, for Holtug, the fact that a certain Jeremy prefers his own existence to his potential non-existence suffices to prove the proposition that he has benefited from the beginning of the former: “Since, then, Jeremy prefers existing to never existing, he has benefited from coming into existence. Had he preferred never to exist, he would have been harmed instead.”

We may be said to have to do with a metaphysical “smuggling in” here inasmuch as Holtug decides to give to the results of a survey taken of already-existing human beings the final deciding word regarding the question of whether “someone” is harmed or benefitted by the beginning of their own existence. Holtug omits to consider here the fact that, if someone consents post festum to his own existence, he does not thereby make any meaningful enunciation regarding whether HE has benefitted or not through the beginning of this existence.  Holtug levels the problem down to the question of whether someone is glad to exist or not and leaves out of account the fact that the question of whether SOMEONE is harmed or benefitted by the beginning of his own existence is really a question without sense.

As regards the moral imperative to create more human beings Holtug argues as follows: Because it is the case that it may benefit human beings to begin to exist there exists a certain moral obligation to bring human beings into the world, provided only that it is to be expected that there will fall to the lot of these human beings a life that is worth living. But since it will never be possible to establish in advance whether such a coming into the world will benefit or harm a human being, Holtug’s pronatalism would have an extremely weak foundation even if one saw no problem with the deliberate misrepresentation at its base.

Parfit, Derek (1942–2017)

After detailed discussion of “never having been”, and of the starting and the ceasing of existence,  Parfit sums up, in his book “Reasons and Persons”, as follows: “I have suggested that, of these, starting to exist should be classed with ceasing to exist. Unlike never existing, starting to exist and ceasing to exist both happen to actual people. This is why we can claim that they can be either good or bad for these people.” „We can similarly claim that causing someone to exist who will have a life worth living, gives this person a peculiar benefit.“

But clearly Parfit is in error here: everything that happens to me presupposes my existence; for this reason, the start of my existence cannot be an event which befalls me. For me myself, therefore, the start of my existence can neither be a good thing nor a bad thing; as long as I have not yet begun to exist, no “I’ is there for whom beginning to exist could be “good” or “bad”; but if I exist, then the beginning of my existence already lies in the past and the question can then only be: “Is it good for me to exist?” The start of my existence can only be something good or bad for that which enfolds and comprises my existence in its entirety. This we express through the impersonal term > “it”. We can say: “it” was good or bad that I began to exist. That the start of my existence cannot be good (just as it cannot be bad) for me becomes clear as soon as we pose the question of what the actual point of commencement is for that action which brings about the effect of a new human being’s beginning to exist. This point of commencement is not the human being him- or herself but rather the entire structure linking humanity and the world that was there already before his/her existence.

 

Singer, Peter (*1946)

Like other metaphysical >Damnators Singer would prefer – had he the choice – a world with beings susceptible both of suffering and of happiness over a world without sentient beings. He points to supposedly imminent improvements in the human condition which he believes confirm him in his choice: “I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe. In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living. Even if that is not yet the case, I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now.“ (https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/) Singer does not consider the notion of a >Trial Period of the human species to be worth even wasting a thought on.

 

McMahan, Jeff (*1954)

McMahan dismisses out of hand the very idea of an ebbing away of humanity: “My own view, though I won’t argue for it here, is that the extinction of human beings would be the worst event that could possibly occur.“ (https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/predators-a-response/)

We might name, as examples of pronatalists among contemporary philosophers, such figures as Dieter Birnbacher, Vittorio Hösle, Hans Jonas, and Saul Smilansky.

There may arise in the mind of someone reading this handbook on antinatalism the question of why we have not presented the pronatalist position in stronger terms. Instead of making any great effort to justify ourselves here, we prefer simply to urge that someone undertake to author a correspondent handbook on pronatalism.

 

Pronatalism Argument

There appears prima facie to be a watertight argument for pronatalism in a world containing   àLiving Beings whose constitution would permit only positively evaluated experiences. Would it not, in such a world, be a bad thing not to call into being further so-constituted beings? But initial appearances are deceptive here. It is surely a good thing not to beget beings susceptible of suffering (in this case there will be suffering beings); but it is not a bad thing to refrain from begetting beings that are susceptible exclusively of happiness and pleasure (in this case there will be no suffering beings).

According to an insight of Jonathan Swift’s the sole reason why humanity has not yet died out is because God on the one hand equipped this rational being, Man, who forms the crown of His creation with a certain pronatal rational “blind spot” and on the other hand implanted in him a certain centrifugal force with respect to death which causes him to feel his life to be so precious:

„Although reason were intended by Providence to govern our passions; yet it seems that in two points of the greatest moment to the being and continuance of the world, God has intended our passions to prevail over reason. The first is, the propagation of our species; since no wise man ever married from the dictates of reason. The other is, the love of life; which, from the dictates of reason, every man would despise, and wish it at an end, or that it never had a beginning.“

Of one thing, it seems, we can be certain: the “trial period” of the human species is by now fully elapsed. Elapsed because we have not yet shown ourselves able to find a way of applying all those intellectual and material riches which – along with all the suffering – our millennia-long species-history has accumulated in a way which is useful and beneficial to all. Matters may be expressed as follows:

With the Russian and Chinese revolutions and their countless millions of victims, with Auschwitz and the Gulag, with the World Wars and the Congo Wars, with the genocide perpetrated on the Armenians and that perpetrated on his own people by Pol Pot, along with that further genocide, which might so easily have been prevented by the global community, perpetrated on the Tutsis in Rwanda, humanity’s “probation period” has plainly run its course. The experiment “continuation of humanity’s history” – in which many billions of human beings have been involved – has proven a failure too many times (in the form of these civilizational ruptures) for it to be reasonable to push on with it. And whoever advocates, in view of the course of history up to the present day, that this experiment be indeed pushed on with necessarily accepts and condones that the past and present which have been, for billions of human beings, of unbearable pain and horror, should be extended on into the future.

The assessment that we must today, after the elapse of this probation period, ourselves accord to ourselves runs as follows: let us retire, in mutual agreement, from the course of the world; let us quit our >Service to the Species and send a human-being-less existence on its way with all our best wishes that it should never again bring forth such failures as ourselves.

All men are mortal but not all men are necessarily “natal”.

Attempts to elevate human natality into the same metaphysical rank as human mortality must necessarily fail because natality is not an indispensable or structural factor in existence. Many foetuses die, unborn, in utero. And what woman will, after the invention of an artificial uterus – and after the ebbing away of an initial wave of worldwide protest against this latter – want still to take upon herself the pain and effort of pregnancy and giving birth?

That there should be, and will be, in future a human race is the absolute priority, which is almost never questioned or examined, of all ethics and of all sketching out of scenarios of the future. Even where it appears certain that future generations will have to suffer from the actions and omissions of past and present human beings, this “priority of humanity” continues to be held sacrosanct.

This “priority of humanity” is thrown sharply into relief by the so-called “greenhouse effect”, of which Amin Maalouf writes as follows: “We know already that the existence of our children and our grandchildren will be dramatically affected by it; it is probable that the generations born in the second half of the 20^th century will still have, if I may put it like this, the time to suffer from it themselves.” (Amin Maalouf, Le Dérèglement du monde) We must note here the total absence of any notion that natal continence might be the appropriate means of preventing further human beings from having to suffer the consequences of climate change.

For many people the notion of “wanting never to have been at all” seems comprehensible only in terms of a “wanting no longer to be”: that is to say, as a painful dying rather than as an anticipated wish to have never become a being capable of death in the first place. For anyone for whom their non-being appears conceivable solely and exclusively in terms of a no-LONGER-being (death), all touching on the idea of “not having been born” necessarily presents itself as an implicit threat of murder. Thus, resistance to the ebbing-away of humanity draws no insignificant part of its impetus from something that might be called “symbolically pre-conceptive suicide”.

*(Concept outlined first by Guido Kohlbecher)

Georges Poulet was perhaps the first to show that the bringing forth of new human beings fulfils the defining conditions of a criminal offence.

In Poulet’s novel Rien n’est… that traditional topos of an imprecation cast upon existence, which recurs again and again throughout European intellectual history, achieves a literary culmination and takes on new form: that of an accusation against being directed specifically against one’s own parents.

Poulet, then, is most likely the first to transcend, in his 1913 Bildungsroman (not yet translated into English) Rien n’est…, the topoi of a hitherto rather impotent and ineffective imprecation upon, and reproach to, existence and to outline that personalisation of the accusation against existence (i.e. an accusation juridified and levelled against one’s own progenitors) which, in former years, allowed secular courts to deal with that metaphysical question of a “right to non-existence” which lies, still today, outside the ambit of the law  (àUnwished-for/Unasked Existence.

In his novel – highly praised in its day by the Nobel-Prize-winning Belgian author Maeterlinck – Poulet demonstrates how the substantial basis for such an accusation can be acquired by following out the logic of the French Code Civil. Turning his back on all “gratitude for existence” – that gratitude which most human beings imbibe with their mothers’ milk (insofar as they do not count among the millions of children who have, since time immemorial, died every year of hunger or of easily avoidable infections) – Poulet draws, as it were, a cork from the bottle of the Napoleonic Code Civil. The genie that thereby escaped from the bottle plainly failed, however, to exert any influence on the forma mentis of humanity during Poulet’s lifetime. Despite the praise received from Maeterlinck it is only in our own day that the idea sketched out by Poulet – that of a juridification and personalization of the ancient imprecation cast upon existence – is beginning to gain some resonance. Certain individuals suffering from serious disabilities – people conceived and borne, necessarily, without their having asked to be and existing without any request on their part to do so –  are now beginning to understand themselves as victims of a misdeed and are, in some cases, setting about defending themselves against those who initiated these existences or against the medical misdiagnoses that contributed thereto (e.g. pre-implantation or ultrasound diagnoses which overlooked serious illness or malformations) using means which already lay, in rudimentary form, to hand in the French Code Civil.
Where it is read and interpreted in the light of Poulet’s analyses and considerations the significant modern legal corpus that is the Code Civil might serve as a model and driving force for those formal “accusations of existence” which are finally, in our present day, being mounted. In other words: precisely within one of the most determinant modern “immunity systems”, through which a civilized future for humanity was intended to be guaranteed, Poulet discovers, under the auspices of “liberty, equality and fraternity, a key weak point in our otherwise barely-questioned social synthesis – a weak point which makes it possible for each individual to legitimately bring a juridical charge against the initiators of his or her existence. Thus, for a humanity the component individuals of which have been enlightened regarding the coercive nature of their existence, there is opened up a legal-metaphysical perspective which promises nothing less than a great wave of such juridical charges – a prospect which should serve to prompt couples thinking of indeed engaging in such existence-initiating action to take some distance from such decisions and thereby contribute to ebbing-away of human existence on this earth.

The progress from the traditional “imprecation cast upon existence”, traceable back to deepest antiquity, to the modern juridical charge against existence can be observed in the following passage, in which the young Andoche attacks his father Galipat (and which we give here both in the French original and in English translation):  

Je sais bien que j’ai l’air de dire une bêtise quand je déclare que je n’ai pas demandé à naître. C’est cependant vrai. Connais-tu l’article 1382 du Code civil? – Non, fis-je, surpris de l’arrivée de Code civil dans cette histoire. – L’article 1382 dit textuellement: «Tout fait quelconque de l’homme, qui cause à autrui un dommage, oblige celui par la faute duquel il est arrivé à le réparer.» Eh! bien, Galipiat a pu prendre un certain plaisir, le jour où ma mère a consenti à le distraire; mais c’est moi qui ai payé la casse, si j’ose ainsi parler. Il y a eu de sa part dommage causé à ma personne, puisqu’il m’a transmis la vie et, avec cette servitude douloureuse, toutes les maladies que lui, sa femme et leurs ascendants à l’un et à l’autre ont recueillies et collectionnées au cours de leurs débauches, de / leurs aventures et de leurs fatigues, sans compter celles que je vais gagner moi-même dans mes propres excès et mes catastrophes personnelles.

I know that I must sound very stupid when I declare that I never asked to be born. But such is in fact the case. Are you familiar with Article 1382 of the Code Civil? – No, I said, surprised that the Code Civil entered into this matter at all. – Article 1382 states quite explicitly: “Every human action, of whatever kind, obliges, in the case where said action causes harm to another human being, the person responsible for this harm to compensate the person harmed.”  Galipat, then, may have had a certain pleasure in my mother’s consenting to entertain him. But it was me, if I may say so, who suffered the harm ensuing therefrom. He is the agent of a damage inflicted upon my person, since he passed on life to me and, with this painful servitude, all the sicknesses that he, his wife and their forebears have acquired in the course of their debaucheries, their adventures and their exertions, not to mention those that I am going to acquire myself in the course of my own debaucheries and personal catastrophes.

With this passage Poulet makes a plea for a truly consistent application of penal law, in the sense that all progeny, not just those who turn out to suffer from some serious disability, should be allowed to legally prosecute their progenitors. Poulet has his Andoche defend the idea – which has re-emerged in present-day antinatalist philosophy – that our being brought into being is a harm inflicted on us. My progenitor is taken to count as the “person responsible for a harm done” to me. Should one directly accept the logic of this line of argument, the compensation for the damage done here (the imposition of life being considered here to constitute a “damage”) could only consist in life being taken away again from the person who has thereby suffered damage. But as is evident, life can neither be “given to someone” nor can “someone” be “deprived” of it. In order to form a clearer picture here let us think of an “elementary particle” (rather in the original sense of this term drawn from physics than in the metaphorical sense given to it by Houellebecq) which is resistant, indeed, to all ethical considerations, since, although it is impossible to either improve or cause to deteriorate the condition of such a “particle” but only to alter its position in space, there can nonetheless validly be applied to it that more general notion of “being affected”. Is such an elementary particle “affected” by entering into existence? Not at all. Analogously, “giving the gift of something” to someone presupposes that the “someone” in question already exists. Consequently, an action the effect of which consists precisely in bringing someone into existence cannot be said to be an action that “gives the gift” of anything to anyone at all. And to take something away from someone likewise presupposes that the “someone” in question continues to exist; an action the effect of which consisted in the person affected by it’s ceasing to exist would “take nothing away” from this latter.

Attempts, therefore, to legally prosecute one’s own parents by reason of the fact that they caused one harm or damage by begetting one are ultimately bound to fail due to their lack of rational underpinning: we find ourselves, as a result of our being “called into existence” (though it would be more correct, of course, to say that “one acted in such a way that we arose”) no worse off than if “we” had remained unbegotten. There surely can, however, by tracing out the logic of Poulet’s remarks, be postulated a duty to desist from begetting new human beings for so long as it is not yet guaranteed that these latter will be spared sorrows, hardships, and torments ending in a miserable death-rattle.

The “momentum of positivity” is constitutive for nativistic àSystematic Self-Blinding. By this phrase we mean on the one hand the tendency for negative events and experiences to undergo, in retrospect, “positivization” and to be evaluated and described as less negative than they were lived as being when first experienced. A locus classicus for this insight is Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, in which he explains the “momentum of positivity” to be the result both of the obscuring effect of  >The Spectacles of Memory when looking back at the past and a certain instinct of hope that constantly optimistically anticipates the future.  Also contributing to this “momentum of positivity” is the finding – albeit a disputed one among researchers – that it is generally easier to recall positive things than negative ones.[1]

 

Pollyanna Hypothesis and Principle

Boucher und Osgood (1969) use the phrase “Pollyanna Hypothesis” to introduce their observation that people have a natural inclination to form positive ideas and draw positive conclusions. Boucher und Osgood remark that “there is a universal human tendency to use evaluatively positive (E+) words more frequently… than evaluatively negative words (E-).” (quoted from Baumeister et al.). Across all languages, “good” appears to be the most frequently applied evaluating term (see Rozin/Royzman).

In their 1978 study “The Pollyanna Principle: Selectivity in language, memory, and thought” Matlin and Stang argued that positive information can be more easily called up out of the memory than negative. It was this that they called “the Pollyanna Principle”.

For what reason are negative events or experiences more difficult to recall than positive ones? The reason lies, perhaps, not in the fact that negative things imprint themselves on the mind less firmly than positive ones; rather, this phenomenon seems to be traceable back to the fact that negative experiences are, over the course of time, at least neutralized, where they are not actually transformed into something positive. àWorking-Through of the Negative.

 

The Novel “Pollyanna”

The notion of a “Pollyanna Principle” is inspired by certain views expressed by the eponymous heroine of a novel written by Eleanor Hodgman Porter (1868–1920). The best example of this “principle” is the scene in the novel in which the young girl Pollyanna discovers, in the forest, a man with a broken leg and tells him that she is happy. Happy about what? Well, she explains, that only one and not both of his legs are broken. Pollyanna calls this attitude to things the “game” that she has learned from her now-deceased father: “’Oh, yes; the game was to just find something about everything to be glad about—no matter what ’twas,’ rejoined Pollyanna, earnestly.“ (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pollyanna/Chapter_5) In fact, Pollyanna finds herself prompted very often, in the course of the novel, to play this “game”. And life itself plays such nasty tricks on her that her ability to maintain this “playful” attitude is put to a very hard test.

The aunt with whom Pollyanna lives gives an explanation, very much in antinatalist spirit, of why Pollyanna is obliged to undertake all those attempts to compensate for daily experiences of suffering that are recommended by adepts of positive thinking and other pronatalists:  “…just because I happened to have a sister who was silly enough to marry and bring unnecessary children into a world that was already quite full enough…” (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pollyanna/Chapter_1). It remains unclear, however, whether the stance expressed here is a matter simply of a demographic-political antinatalism or rather of a breakthrough to an actual moral-theoretical antinatalism.

What Pollyanna calls “the game” is a competence in mastering existence which children early on acquire through practice or – in the case where they do not succeed in doing this themselves “by imitation” – is “beaten into them” by others. Whoever declines to participate in this “game” of fending off all negativity and refuses to don the >Spectacles of Memory is regularly accused of being a “spoilsport”.

[1] Baumeister et al. (2001) arrive, in their study of memory performance, at the conclusion of a certain dominance of the negative; Shelley E. Taylor (1991) and Rozin/Royzman (2001), however, assume a dominance of the positive.

Whoever acts in such a way as to bring about, or contribute to bringing about, the coming into existence of a human being, is also acting in such a way that a being begins to exist whose states of happiness dissolve and dissipate much more quickly than his states of misery.

All religion, so argues Marx, contains a critique of our earthly “vale of tears”. Against this background we may say that philosophy is the brain of religion: in the form of antinatalistic moral theory philosophy points the way to the abolition of this earthly “vale of tears”.

Opponents of antinatalism might advance the argument that there cannot be ascribed to this latter’s intended object – a universe without beings susceptible of suffering – the predicate “morally good”, since in such a universe there would no longer be present any being for whom anything might be “good” or “bad”. Such a universe, so runs the argument, would be ethically neutralized. But the conclusion that an ethically neutral universe is a better one does, therefore, indeed result from a comparison between this universe and ours. We may indeed say: a world in which there are no beings susceptible of suffering is better than a world in which there are such beings.

Whoever advances the claim that it is impossible to definitively reflexively justify a position thereby asserts the very thing that his argument purports to deny: it is once and for all established (so might one reformulate what he is saying here) that nothing can be established finally and once and for all.   

But besides this reflexive form of definitive justification there must also be considered a definitive justification in resultative or performative mode. The ebbing-away of humanity is the definitive onto-logical justification of certain ethical principles (i.e. of negative >Utilitarianism or antinatalism). We may look, for clarification of this resultative form of definitive justification, to Hans Schafgans’s “Der letzte Mann von Paris”:

“For centuries, the whole Western world was struggling over the right path to salvation and we continued, deep into modernity, to deal with the legacy of these struggles. Today, however, paths are no longer important because there is no more ‘going’.” (Schafgans) A definitive performative justification is achieved where the last human beings capable of procreation remain without posterity and judge that “it is good that it should be so!”

Parents force their children to bear not just the little package of weights and burdens that result from family life but also to carry out, above and beyond these, an immense number of socially allotted tasks.

A certain protest, albeit a seemingly impotent one, against the compulsion to perform all these tasks is to be found in the work of Hugo Ball: “But we are not, in the end, on a treadmill! One is not in the world simply in order to sweat and strain oneself to death!” (Hugo Ball, Flametti oder Vom Dandysmus der Armen). The protest seems impotent because the guilty parties here are not named by their actual name.

No one ever consented, or could possibly have consented, to the beginning of their own existence.  Many antinatalists derive from this fact the proposition that existing human beings had their existence “imposed” on them when they were “taken out of the state of non-existence” and brought into existence. Such an “imposition of existence” (so it is claimed) clearly reveals the moral reprehensibility of procreation.

Conversely to this, however, one might seek to establish the reprehensibility of the omission to procreate by claiming that, where procreation does not occur, existence is being withheld from certain not-yet-existent individuals. The pronatalist wants to persuade us of the moral superiority of procreation and therefore speaks of àDeprivation of Existence and of the >Gift of Life; the antinatalist, by contrast, points to the moral questionability of procreation and speaks, therefore, of the >Diktat of Birth. Ontologically considered, both positions are fundamentally flawed, since there was in fact no one on whom life was imposed just as it is impossible to identify anyone who might either have been “deprived” of existence or to whom the “gift” of existence could be given. Existence is not one attribute among others but rather the precondition of all attribution. In order to refuse or to lack something, or to have something imposed on one, one must already exist.

If the proposition has hitherto sometimes been advanced in antinatalist literature that “no one” ever wished to be begotten, one might just as easily say that “no one” ever wished not to be begotten.  Talk, then, of a “Diktat of existence”, or of a “deprivation” of this latter, leads into a checkmate situation which can be traced back to an onto-ethical fallacy.  When antinatalists say that someone was compelled to exist they are committing an onto-ethical fallacy inasmuch as originally there was no one there who could possibly have been “compelled” to anything. Likewise, however, pronatalists are committing an onto-ethical fallacy when they contend that someone has had existence “withheld” from them through their not having been begotten, because there is likewise no one there of whom such things might truly be said. “Diktat of existence” and “gift of life”: the two expressions appear to convey diametrically opposed ideas and yet, when it comes down to what is most essential, they have something in common. Or rather, what they have in common is what both essentially lack. Both lack a referent, a subject to which their enunciations could actually apply.

Given the >Thanatality that is the fate of all human beings as well as the inevitability of experiences of the deaths of near and dear ones along with our own powerlessness in the face of these deaths, parents can be said to surrender up their children – partially blinded by parental joy, perhaps, but certainly not entirely blind to what they are doing – to terribly negative experiences and finally to absolute nothingness.