I have noticed that several distinct positions tend to be collapsed into two positions, “pro-natalism” and “anti-natalism”. I think discussions about natalism would work better if people made more distinctions.
When I searched for information on it I found that people had previously made a distinction between global and local anti-natalism, where local anti-natalism holds that at least some people shouldn’t reproduce and global anti-natalism holds that everyone shouldn’t reproduce. I feel this is not a very satisfactory division; for one thing, I’m not sure if there is anyone who isn’t a local anti-natalist by this taxonomy.
So here are my proposed replacements:
Very strong anti-natalism. It is morally wrong to have children. The human race should slowly go extinct. For example: Human beings cause irreversible harm to the biosphere, which is intrinsically valuable. It is possible to harm a person by creating them but not to benefit them (nonexistent people are not harmed by being deprived of good things), so bringing people into existence is always a great harm to them.
Strong anti-natalism. In general, people should not have children; there are a very few exceptions. For example: Most human lives, even in the developed world, are not worth living and unless you have a strong reason to suspect your child’s life would be worth living, it is wrong to have a child.
Weak anti-natalism. People should err on the side of having children less than they currently do. For example: Raising children is a waste of resources that are better spent improving the lives of already existing people. Most people don’t enjoy interacting with children, and having children tends to worsen marriages and make people more stressed and unhappy (please note that while the first few chapters of this book are anti-natalist, overall the book comes to a pro-natalist conclusion). It would be easier to solve environmental problems if there were fewer humans.
Natalism neutrality. It is difficult to make general conclusions about whether people should have children. Some people should err on the side of having more children than they currently are, while other people should err on the side of having fewer children. For example: many traits are genetic and only people with desirable traits should have children. Many people who would be good parents have few or no children, while many people who are really crappy parents have children anyway.
Weak pro-natalism. People should err on the side of having children more than they currently do. For example: the effort of parenting is upfront while the good parts are later in life, and many people parent in a way that makes them stressed and unhappy and thus have an inaccurate idea of how pleasant parenting can be. We need more people to support our aging population; the more people there are, the fewer taxes people have to pay to provide public goods such as scientific research, weather forecasting, and military defense (which do not increase in cost when the population increases), and all else equal the lower the per capita national debt.
Strong pro-natalism. In general, people should have children; it is morally wrong not to do so. For example: most people’s lives are happy, and creating happy people is a great good, one of the greatest benefits you can provide a person. The purpose of human life from an evolutionary perspective is to reproduce, and people should obey their evolutionary imperatives.
Very strong pro-natalism. It is morally wrong not to have children (except perhaps in a handful of extreme cases). For example: Some Quiverfull belief systems. A philosophy in which prospective people with net-positive lives are harmed by not being created and therefore we should create as many of them as possible. Some variants of total utilitarianism.
I am personally natalism neutral, although weakly pro-natalism for people sufficiently similar to me, and strongly anti-natalist for farmed animals. (I do not think there is sufficient evidence to be anything but agnostic on wild animal natalism.)
Thing of Things 
Somewhere between strong and very strong anti-natalism: it is morally wrong to have children *now*. There are possible futures where this may no longer be the case. The calculus of how many human lives are worth it to try to make it to one of those futures is… difficult.
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I’m not sure how helpful grading things from “weak” to “strong” is. I don’t think this is a way of labelling things that usefully gets at the actual differences. If I had to classify such things I’d probably break things down by the following questions:
1. Should humanity (or their successors) go extinct? (Yes; yes to humanity but no to hypothetical successors of humanity should they arrive; neutral; no)
2. What’s the moral status of having children? (Bad; bad except to the extent necessary to keep humanity going; neutral; good but supererogatory; obligatory to have at least a certain number when possible; obligatory to have as many as possible).
Not all combinations of these two make sense, of course; I’d say you only get around 11 combinations here that make sense. But those looks like more useful questions to me than a single combined “strength of pro/anti-natalism” axis.
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Hm. I guess I’m weakly pro-natalist; I think existence is a good and so, having benefited from it oneself, it’s good to pass it on to someone else — especially since you can’t keep yours going forever. There should, in general, be people; it doesn’t have to be as many people as we have today.
But I also think that we don’t need to worry about people who don’t want to have kids or try to guilt them for their choices. Children are difficult to raise; it’s okay to decide it’s not a job you want to do. There are other people on the planet who do want to have children, and some of them want more than two, so it all balances out.
Speaking of which, I have four kids, so if anybody believes in replacing oneself but also feels like not having kids, go ahead and give yourself permission. I replaced you for you. You’re welcome.
I did not have four kids because of any sort of natalist position. I did it because of a lack of access to birth control, mainly. Luckily I really enjoy being with kids; I think they’re super fun, doubly so when they’re your kids so you know them really well. Some people adamantly don’t want them and shouldn’t have them. Better no kids than kids who know you don’t like being around them.
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While Benatar is a very strong antinatalist, it’s worth noting that the first part of this position doesn’t imply the second, or very strong antinatalism in general. One reason is that there may be a net benefit for the world even if the new person is harmed. As Benatar writes:
A major part of his argument is that the capacity to feel pain makes it wrong to create life, which sets a very low threshold for harm, and if we choose a higher one (e.g. more pleasure than pain), we can accept the asymmetry between existence and nonexistence while avoiding very strong antinatalism.
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I thought he admitted that choosing a metric of “more pleasure than pain” allowed you to avoid strong antinatalism in theory, but argued that in practice lives are overwhelmingly more pain than pleasure (and that perception otherwise was basically the result of psychological biases). Not sure I’m recalling that correctly, though, it’s been a long time since I read that book.
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He makes two separate arguments. In Chapter 2 he makes his theoretical argument where he uses the capacity to feel pain as the feature that grounds antinatalism, and in Chapter 3 he argues that even if you reject that, life contains more pain than pleasure. His theoretical argument seems to be much more famous, so that when people discuss Benatar’s antinatalism, that part is probably what they’re talking about.
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If a couple was on the fence, I’m all for putting off having kids well into your 30’s. There’s no reason you must have a kid as soon as possible and even though it’s different for everyone people generally tend to be more stable and settled later in life.
There’s some downsides though. The biggest one for me is my parents both died before my son was born. Thinking about it a decade later and it still stings…
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> I am personally natalism neutral, although weakly pro-natalism for people sufficiently similar to me
Can you clarify the “similar to me” bit? Do you think people who are similar to you should have more children that people who are different from you? Or are you just more confident about people similar to you because you know more about them? Does “similar” refer to skin color, personality type, neuro-type, socio-economic situation or everything?
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In what way is “very strong anti-natalism” different from “pro-genoicide?” Other than the self-evaluation of the adherents of course?
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It doesn’t imply that anyone should be killed.
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They’re not going to actually pull the lever, but they’d be much happier if the trolley goes down the five-person track than the one-person..
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“It’s wrong to bring people into existence” by itself doesn’t imply anything about what to do about those who already exist. While it was wrong to create the lives that currently exist, it’s too late to change that, and given that they already exist, their lives should be made as good as possible (within the constraint of not creating new people). Murder would be contrary to that.
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The very strong antinatalism category encompasses very different ideologies- strong misanthropic environmentalism, and strong philosophical antinatalism.
The latter does not necessarily endorse killing existing people, merely not having children- though in our current mortal state this would involve killing a ton of people as society eventually collapsed with age.
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Very strong anti-natalism. It is morally wrong to have children. The human race should slowly go extinct.
That “should” indicates at least a desirability if not an imperative. It is an urge for the deaths of (all of the) people. Saying that you’re only in favor of death by decrepitude instead of death by bullet seems special pleading-y to me. Would mass deaths by naturally occurring bird flu be just fine while a bioengineered version not? Shouldn’t this indicate a drive for the elimination of vaccines, the cease of public funding of medical services, sanitation or the like? Any expenditure of resources delaying the ultimate goal of human genocide would be inflicting all these evils that the continuation of humanity entails.
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In the absence of immortality, if no one has children, humans will eventually go extinct. The very strong antinatalist isn’t necessarily committed to evaluating extinction as good, but only as less bad than continuing to have children. If you say that when current humans die, they shouldn’t be replaced, you’re not indicating that anyone’s death is desirable. It’s even compatible with a desire for healthy immorality for current humans.
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*immortality
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Three things:
1. You’ve gone from “should” to “will.” Saying that [judgement withheld] foreseeable result B of desired policy A is completely different from saying that result B is a desirable thing in and of itself. At the very least, it is saying that B is preferable to the status quo.
2. The position outlined in the abstract is not logically impossible, but it is sufficiently removed from any justification that is ceasing to represent anything outside of the ponderer’s inner life. It’s not impossible that someone has universal childlessness as a terminal value without other justification. But it’s rather more likely that there is a reason why they think universal childlessness is a good thing.
3. Immortality, in addition to being impossible by the current understanding of physics, is an epicycle to the argument. I am highly in favor of healthy immorality though.
This is my emotional reaction, but I find it… outrageous that someone is willing to doublethink that “being in favor of extinction of a subset of humanity = nazi” and “being in favor of complete extinction of humanity = deep, serious thinker.”
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I do think there is an asymmetry between nonprocreation and murder. It is wrong to kill my son, but if I had chosen never to have children in the first place I would not be doing a harm to him. It is very very wrong to kill everyone with Tay-Sachs, but it is not at all wrong to encourage Tay-Sachs carriers to marry noncarriers. For this reason, “we should eliminate humanity or a subset of humanity through convincing them using rational argument that procreation is wrong” is very different ethically from “we should eliminate humanity or a subset of humanity through murder” (or, for that matter, “we should eliminate humanity or a subset of humanity through forcible sterilization”).
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It is wrong to kill my son,
Under some (many? most?) of the arguments used to justify human extinction it would not be wrong, as long as the euthanasia was carried out in a painless way. If your son was born with sufficiently severe defects, Peter Singer would say it is wrong NOT to kill your son.
There is something akin to the tabooed technique going on here with regard to levels of abstraction and with timescales. Claiming a goal (human extinction) isn’t abhorrent because of the means “convincing them using rational argument” opens those means to examination. And in this case the means will never work to achieve the goal. Procreation is only partially rational at best. It would be justifying fracking because we’d be using new technology based on the Power of Heart. Impossible concrete steps can’t be used to justify an abstract argument.
Noble means to achieve a less-than-noble goal is hardly a new thing. It is common to believe that voting to raise taxes on someone so that tax monies may be distributed to oneself is fundamentally different than robbing someone directly. But if the goal is the same, and the foreseeable consequences are the same, then I’m not sure the steps along the path matter.
There is an asymmetry between nonprocreation and murder — on a small scale. On a global scale though, I don’t think there is, for the simple fact that only one of those two paths is possible.
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There are some very strong antinatalists in favor of (voluntary) extinction in itself, but it can also make sense to say that humanity should go extinct because it’s the consequence of the correct policy of not having children (while still not committing to extinction being good). If B is the certain consequence of A, and I think A is good, then it makes sense for me to say that B should happen, and it doesn’t mean that I think B is good – only that the consequences of A are good overall.
The relevance of healthy immortality is that very strong antinatalism isn’t committed to ending life per se, only the creation of new lives. Given that a life exists, it should be as good as possible, and murder would typically be contrary to that, but it would’ve been better to prevent that existence to begin with. While there are many lives worth continuing, there are no lives worth starting (to use Benatar’s argument), because existing people suffer from the negative aspects of life, but non-existent people don’t miss out on its positive aspects.
As for the Nazis, they were more than in favor of the extinction of the Jews. They rounded them up and killed them – that’s the objectionable part. If they went no further than trying to persuade the Jews to not have children, there would’ve been much less of a problem.
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Well, yeah, if your ONLY moral principle is less people more good, you’ll be for genocide, but who only has one moral principle? That’s like saying Alice wants to raise the minimum wage, therefore she wants all money to go to minimum wage earners.
Plus, anti-natalism is a moral judgement on whether being born is net positive or negative, and nothing else. Certainly not whether existing people should live or die.
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Your axis seems fine, but I think that I am not on it, because I’m not thinking at the individual level. I think that if a society-level intervention not specifically targeted at reducing the number of children born does so, that’s prima facie evidence that it’s harmful in a bunch of ways, though the odds ratio is finite and can be overcome by other evidence. I mainly care about cultures that are likely to do good things in the far future, and any culture that doesn’t try to stay alive and perpetuate itself is doomed. This doesn’t necessarily mean making babies – the Shakers apparently did OK up until the foster care system effectively sterilized them (h/t Julia Wise) – but it’s the usual way.
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Yeah, I think that that’s a weird fit for the pronatalism/antinatalism axis. One can imagine (for example) a belief that most people should not have children, but that cultures that have this meme are harmful in lots of different ways.
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A weakly anti-natalist position that doesn’t appear in your list of examples: “Current human population (or population of X region) is too high (but a nonzero population is not a bad thing), and the ethical way to draw down a population is to have children at below-replacement rates for a generation or two.”
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Here be average utilitarians.
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The mean utility curve is not a line with slope of negative one!
:p
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your very strong definition is too anthropocentric. Antinatalism as suggested by Benatar is a view against procreation of beings irrespective of their species. It almost resembles rejectionism where the whole idea of continuation of life as we know it is rejected.
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Nonconsensual torture ought to be prevented even at the expense of other goods; human extinction would prevent space colonization and therefore astronomical amounts of nonconsensual torture. Therefore, human extinction is ethically desirable despite its huge cost in other goods. Local antinatalism is only relevant insofar it affects the total number of nonconsensual torture victims.
If evil aliens existed or space colonization were impossible or David Pearce’s abolition project succeeded, this consideration would go away. Right now it unfortunately looks like any increase in human extinction probability is ethically desirable since it correlates with strong reduction of nonconsensual torture and victimization.
Even if you factor in pleasure or other goods, nonconsensual torture is both severe and common enough that increases in total sentience are ethically undesirable unless huge technological shifts in average quality happen.
Interestingly, the desirability of human extinction comes from space colonization scenarios. Were we to remain on Earth, where we displace other suffering violent life-forms, there would be little moral harm in humanity existing for another billion years, as long as we don’t torture too much.
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Hmm, I agree with those saying that this is a good start but doesn’t go far enough. My own position is something like “humans as they exist are not yet adequately equipped to decide whether to create additional humans-as-they-exist, but I’d guess it’s slightly wrong to do so on average. People should consider it far more carefully than they do currently. People who pressure other people to have more children are doing a substantial wrong; the opposite is only slightly wrong.”
So there are at least four different questions here. Is having children right? Can we answer that question, and if not, could we ever? How much effort should people spend trying to answer it? What social pressures should be more or less acceptable to exert on people given the above?
Still, even a one-dimensional spectrum is leagues better than skub vs anti-skub: now with bigger emotional investment. Thank-you for this post!
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This also reaaaaally needs a distinction between “replacement rate reproduction” and population growth.
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I like these distinctions
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I have talked to at least one (1) person who is extremely adamant that anyone who believe that some people shouldn’t reproduce must be an eugenicist, even if they strongly oppose eugenicist policies.
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Did you ask that person whether they accepted that this stance means accepting the suffering of children born to abusive and/or incompetent parents?
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I don’t think I did, but I can guess that she would have answered that this isn’t the same because this is selecting parents qua parents, not selecting parents in order to select children.
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