Why Having Children is Morally Wrong

Think of the last day you did not suffer. A day where you felt no hunger or thirst, you didn’t feel too hot or too cold, or when you didn’t feel tired all day. Try to remember a week where you had no itches or allergies or any frustrations at all. Chances are, you’ve never had days like this.

Life is filled with this endless list of annoyances and micro-doses of suffering, and that’s just for those of us who are lucky. For the unfortunate, there are years of these small sufferings rather than mere hours. But even for the lucky, it still is quite a lot of suffering.

It is this endless suffering that is synonymous with life that is the basis for an anti-natalist argument. A rather pessimistic philosopher, Schopenhauer, lays out this argument and points out that any existence will increase the net suffering of the world simply by introducing a new creature who has to suffer.

And since it should be our goal to reduce suffering, it follows that it is morally wrong to have children.

But what about people who say life is good? According to the World Happiness Reports, most countries have above average ratings in terms of happiness. Another survey asks people whether they are “(i) very happy, (ii) rather happy, (iii) not very happy, or (iv) not at all happy,” and the percentage of the population who reports being happy has been trending upwards in many countries including Brazil, Germany, and Russia. Even countries that have gone down like Sweden are still well above the 90s.

When asked about this in an interview for The New Yorker, philosopher David Benatar believes that these people are mistaken. Benatar, coined by the article as “the world’s most pessimistic philosopher,” is an ardent anti-natalist who believes that life is so bad and painful that humans should stop having children simply for reasons of compassion.

He points out that the quality of human life is far worse than people think it is and is quite appalling. In his book “The Human Predicament,” he dedicates a whole chapter to examining the quality of human life and shows how even the best human lives are poor.

We are plagued with issues like sickness or allergies. And even in good health, most of your day is spent in discomfort. There are the physiological issues of hunger or thirst, and when you don’t have those you need to go to the washroom. Most times, you can find relief for these issues instantly, but on others, there isn’t much of an opportunity for that. And the case is even more so for thermal discomforts like feeling too hot or cold. Then there’s the issue of feeling weary and tired that persists throughout most of the day.

But the reason people still claim their lives are better than they are is because of several proven psychological traits shared by most humans, including optimism bias, adaptation to altered quality of life, and comparison with others when determining your own life.

If life is so bad, though, according to anti-natalists, then why not kill yourself? Why are we arguing to “never have been born” rather than just killing ourselves?

Benatar anticipates this challenge to his argument and responds that

“Life is bad, but so is death. Of course, life is not bad in every way. Neither is death bad in every way. However, both life and death are, in crucial respects, awful. Together, they constitute an existential vice— the wretched grip that enforces our predicament”

It would be better and simpler to not be in that situation in the first place. Instead of having to choose to live and create suffering, or die and create suffering, it would be better to never have existed at all. Instead of asking ‘is life worth living,’ Benatar asks ‘is life worth continuing’ and ‘is life worth starting.’

It would be better and simpler to not be in that situation in the first place. Instead of having to choose to live and create suffering, or die and create suffering, it would be better to never have existed at all. Instead of asking ‘is life worth living,’ Benatar asks ‘is life worth continuing’ and ‘is life worth starting.’

Many might still argue against this, though. People claim that, while life is filled with pain, without the existence of the person there would be no pleasure either, so we would be getting rid of all the good that comes with existence too.

The first issue with this counter-argument though is that there is far more pain in one’s life than there is pleasure. We always hear of “chronic pain” that persists but there’s no such thing as “chronic pleasure.” Pain is also a lot more powerful than pleasure; “would you trade five minutes of the worst pain imaginable for five minutes of the greatest pleasure?”

It also is the case that the lack of pleasure isn’t a bad thing when the person never existed. Consider a game of football, for example. If someone never tries to score, we don’t say they missed a goal. We just say they never shot. Similarly, we wouldn’t say someone’s missing out on pleasure because they were never conceived. We just say they don’t exist.

“For the existing person,” writes Benatar, “the presence of bad things is bad and the presence of good things is good. But compare that with a scenario in which that person never existed — then, the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn’t be bad, because there’d be nobody to be deprived of those good things.”

This unevenness in the arguments makes it so that we can get rid of all the pain and suffering with no real cost to the good side of things.

We see then that, in any situation, existence leads to more suffering. Parents try hard to lower the suffering of their child, dedicating years and years to doing that, and yet fail to realize that the best way to have reduced that suffering would be to have never had children at all.

Procreation appears then to be just a selfish act motivated by your need for personal joy or satisfaction in your life or just by some biological desires, because we are still animals, after all.

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This story was first published on Medium