Should We Stop Having Babies? | Antinatalism Explored

Antinatalism argues that bringing sentient life into existence is morally wrong because existence reliably brings serious harm—pain, deprivation, dissatisfaction, and ultimately death—while non-existence avoids those harms entirely. The central claim, associated most closely with philosopher David Benatar, is that coming into existence is always a “serious harm,” so preventing procreation is framed as the best way to spare potential children from suffering they cannot consent to or escape.

Benatar’s case hinges on a moral asymmetry between existence and non-existence. When someone exists, they experience both bad and good: pain and pleasure. When someone does not exist, there is no pain (which would have been bad) and no pleasure (which is not treated as bad in the same way). The asymmetry matters because “absence of pleasure” is only a deprivation if there is someone for whom it is missing; non-existent beings cannot be deprived. Benatar also supports the asymmetry with examples meant to show how people react differently to suffering versus non-existence: people feel sadness about suffering inhabitants in a foreign land, but they do not mourn the happy people who would have existed had an unpopulated place been populated. Likewise, people don’t grieve for potential Martians who never come into being, even though they would regret it if Martians existed and suffered.

The transcript then strengthens the pessimistic picture by drawing on Arthur Schopenhauer’s view that pain outweighs pleasure in lived experience. Life is portrayed as a cycle of intensified suffering and disappointment: pleasure is often less satisfying than expected, while pain is more intense. A thought experiment—one animal eating and another being eaten—serves to illustrate how the pain of loss can be more vivid than the pleasure of gain. Beyond dramatic harms, everyday existence is described as saturated with psychological and physical costs: trauma, illness, aging, fear of death, and existential confusion about one’s place in the world.

Still, the argument confronts a major objection: many people experience their lives as good and meaningful, and they would not want to miss out on love, beauty, or achievement. Benatar’s response is that people rely on a “Pollyanna Principle,” an optimism bias that overweights positive memories and underestimates how bad life would feel from a more objective standpoint. Adaptation and social comparison further distort self-assessment. The transcript links this to Buddhist ideas: enlightenment and nirvana are framed as escape from samsara, where suffering and dissatisfaction persist. In that view, desire itself functions like a debt—relief comes only when desires are satisfied, and dissatisfaction returns when they are not.

Finally, the transcript addresses what antinatalism does—and does not—recommend once people already exist. The position that non-existence would be better does not justify self-destruction or harming others; it distinguishes preventing creation from ending lives after the fact. Instead, it suggests a “second best” ethic: if birth cannot be undone, meaning can be found in reducing suffering for others. Antinatalism is presented as both misanthropic in its critique of harm and philanthropic in its compassion—arguing that since existence brings harm and inflicts harm, the most ethical route is to stop the cycle by not bringing new sentient beings into it.