3.9 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Antinatalism | 9/9 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:33:05.426199+00:00 | kb-cron |
"My pro-mortalism does not imply that it is obligatory or even permissible to kill other people without their consent, even painlessly and with good intent. There may be many reasons for this, such as autonomy and right to life." Hwang later died by suicide. The antinatalist and promortalist communities sympathisized with his choice while mourning his death as a loss.
=== Distinction to human extinction === Émile P. Torres argues that, contra Benatar, antinatalism need not entail human extinction. For example, if people were to develop radical life-extension technologies that enable them to live as long as the human species itself could survive, procreation could cease entirely without the global population dwindling to zero.
== Criticism ==
=== Positive value of human life ===
Criticism of antinatalism comes from those that see positive value in bringing humans into existence. David Wasserman has criticized David Benatar's asymmetry argument and the consent argument. Psychologist Geoffrey Miller has argued that "all the research on human well-being shows almost everyone across cultures is well above neutral on happiness. Benatar is just empirically wrong that life is dominated by suffering." Massimo Pigliucci argues that Benatar's essential premise that pleasure is the only true inherent good and pain the only inherent evil is a flawed argument and refutable within the philosophy of Stoicism, which regards pleasure and pain as merely indifferents, and that moral virtues and vices should be the only guide of human action.
=== Decrease in suffering === Brian Tomasik challenges the effectiveness of human antinatalism in reducing suffering by pointing out that humans appropriate the habitats of wild animals thereby sparing wild animals from being born into lives containing suffering.
== See also ==
== References ==
== Further reading ==
David Runciman, "Are we doomed?" (review of Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, The Risks of Global Depopulation and the Case for People, Bodley Head, July 2025, 307 pp., ISBN 978 1 84792 835 1; Paul Morland, No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children, Swift, March 2025, 264 pp., ISBN 978 1 80075 412 6; and Henry Gee, The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction, Picador, March 2025, 278 pp., ISBN 978 1 0350 3083 5), London Review of Books, vol. 47, no. 21 (20 November 2025), pp. 11-16. "[T]he depopulation problem bears a striking resemblance to the other great global challenge of our time: climate change. ... In the face of declining populations and growing strains on labour forces, rich countries will become more and more dependent on immigration to maintain numbers. At the same time, as those parts of the world with growing populations become less habitable because of climate change, the impetus to move from South to North will increase." (p. 11.) "Long life plus few children equals human extinction in the end." (p. 15.)
== External links ==
Anti-natalism, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy "Anti-natalism" section in "Parenthood and Procreation" on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Antinatalism.info — A collection of papers & books making arguments for antinatalism News articles
I wish I'd never been born: the rise of the anti-natalists, The Guardian, 14 November 2019 The Case for Not Being Born, The New Yorker, November 27, 2017 Anti-natalists: The people who want you to stop having babies, BBC News, 13 August 2019 Interviews
Interview with David Benatar for Cape Talk on Radio 702, about "Better Never to Have Been", 2009 Julio Cabrera's conference Birth as a bioethical problem: first steps towards a radical bioethics at the University of Brasília, 2018 Anti-Natalists Wish That No New Person Is Ever Born. Vice, December 23, 2024