True Left

Antinatalism is the philosophical belief that assigns a negative value to birth. Antinatalists believe that having children is morally wrong and that one shouldn’t do it. There are a variety of possible ethical arguments to make, but the general tone of the antinatalist position is that existence itself has a negative value. In other words, that it’s better to not exist at all. If non-existence is preferable to existence, then it follows that it’s morally wrong to create new life and doom another being to a life of suffering.

This video is not about antinatalism in general. Rather, we’re taking a look at Schopenhauer’s position on this question. There seems to be a great misconception regarding Schopenhauer’s views on procreation.

There is this idea that Schopenhauer was not a complete antinatalist. One philosophy magazine, for example, called Schopenhauer a “proto-antinatalist.” While it’s definitely true that Schopenhauer directly influenced those philosophers who are most famously associated with antinatalism today, like Emil Cioran, in this video we want to argue that there is nothing half-baked about Schopenhauer’s antinatalism. In other words, we want to argue that Schopenhauer was a full-fledged antinatalist, even if the term did not exist at the time.

The two arguments presented in this video take us to the origin of suffering an Schopenhauer's ethical recommendations.

We take some ideas from Arthur Schopenhauer's main work, The World as Will and Representation, and read between the lines a bit to find out Schopenhauer's reasons for his anti-natalist views.

Until the world is paradise and no evil upon it, I will not put kids on this slaughter house 🐑

I decided in my early teens that I wouldn't have children, the phrase I used was "the misery stops with me".   Nice to. have that sentiment dignified by a great philosopher.

Love your children enough not to create them!

I love my daughter very much, but look at the world right now? If you are a parent do you not feel a little guilty for bringing them into this absolute madness?

I had a decent childhood but realized that life began to suck towards the end of my youth and adulthood. Can’t bring myself to recycle all that pain again.

People always tell me that having a child is the most joyful thing they’ve ever done, and I won’t feel true joy until I’ve had a baby. They say that, yet I have done many things that have made me happy, like rescuing animals or helping others. So far, I think I have lived a good life without children and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything, but the people who constantly remind me that I don’t want kids keep trying to justify their decision to procreate. I have seen parents who wish death on their own children, or are depressed and almost suicidal and they still insist bringing a child into this world was a good idea. No thanks, I’d rather adopt someone who needs a home, or not have any at all.

A woman conceived through **** who campaigned for nine years to bring her father to justice has won a prestigious award.

The 45-year-old can only be referred to as Daisy to protect the identity of her birth mother, who was **** 46 years ago at the age of 13 by Carvel Bennett, now 74. He was convicted in July 2021 at Birmingham crown court and sentenced to 11 years in jail.

Daisy was awarded the Emma Humphreys memorial prize, which recognises women who make outstanding contributions towards ending male violence. She was announced as the winner on Sunday at conference in Portsmouth for FiLiA – a female-led volunteer organisation working for the liberation of women.

Daisy, who is black, believes that one of the reasons why it took so long to bring Bennett to justice was because of her and her birth mother’s skin colour. Although her birth mother named Bennett after she became pregnant with Daisy after the ****, no action was taken by the authorities to charge him. Daisy, who was adopted as a baby, spent nine years campaigning to get Bennett prosecuted after tracking him down herself.
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Police told Daisy that even though she described herself as “a walking crime scene”, as her DNA evidence confirmed Bennett as her father, it would not be possible to proceed with a case against him without her birth mother providing evidence.
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Daisy is now campaigning for a change in the law so that children conceived through **** can be recognised as secondary victims of the crime along with the primary victim, their mothers.
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“There is still so much silence on the issue of **** conception. It appears to be one of the last taboos in relation to violence against women and girls. For those of us who were ****-conceived, it’s a huge struggle to come to terms with your paternity and in turn one’s sense of self and identity. We are left to carry the shame and stigma of the act of violence that created us.”

Surviving members of his family include his widow, the mother of seven of eight biological children.

I would have preferred spending my childhood in isolation/quarantine over how I actually spent it: under tyranny.

Research has found that having children is terrible for quality of life—but the truth about what parenthood means for happiness is a lot more complicated.

Few choices are more important than whether to have children, and psychologists and other social scientists have worked to figure out what having kids means for happiness. Some of the most prominent scholars in the field have argued that if you want to be happy, it’s best to be childless. Others have pushed back, pointing out that a lot depends on who you are and where you live. But a bigger question is also at play: What if the rewards of having children are different from, and deeper than, happiness?

The early research is decisive: Having kids is bad for quality of life. In one study, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues asked about 900 employed women to report, at the end of each day, every one of their activities and how happy they were when they did them. They recalled being with their children as less enjoyable than many other activities, such as watching TV, shopping, or preparing food. Other studies find that when a child is born, parents experience a decrease in happiness that doesn’t go away for a long time, in addition to a drop in marital satisfaction that doesn’t usually recover until the children leave the house. As the Harvard professor Dan Gilbert puts it, “The only symptom of empty nest syndrome is nonstop smiling.”

After all, having children, particularly when they are young, involves financial struggle, sleep deprivation, and stress. For mothers, there is also in many cases the physical strain of pregnancy and breastfeeding. And children can turn a cheerful and loving romantic partnership into a zero-sum battle over who gets to sleep and work and who doesn’t. As the Atlantic staff writer Jennifer Senior notes in her book, All Joy and No Fun, children provoke a couple’s most frequent arguments—“more than money, more than work, more than in-laws, more than annoying personal habits, communication styles, leisure activities, commitment issues, bothersome friends, sex.” Someone who doesn’t understand this is welcome to spend a full day with an angry 2-year-old (or a sullen 15-year-old); they’ll find out what she means soon enough.

But, as often happens in psychology, although some research provided simple findings—in this case, “having children makes you unhappy”—other efforts arrived at more complicated conclusions. For one, the happiness hit is worse for some people than for others. One study finds that fathers ages 26 to 62 actually get a happiness boost, while young or single parents suffer the greatest loss. And crucially, there are geographic differences. A 2016 paper looking at the happiness levels of people with and without children in 22 countries found that the extent to which children make you happy is influenced by whether your country has child-care policies such as paid parental leave. Parents from Norway and Hungary, for instance, are happier than childless couples in those countries—but parents from Australia and Great Britain are less happy than their childless peers. The country with the greatest happiness drop after you have children? The United States.

Children make some happy and others miserable; the rest fall somewhere in between—it depends, among other factors, on how old you are, whether you are a mother or a father, and where you live. But a deep puzzle remains: Many people would have had happier lives and marriages had they chosen not to have kids—yet they still describe parenthood as the “best thing they’ve ever done.” Why don’t we regret having children more?

One possibility is a phenomenon called memory distortion. When we think about our past experiences, we tend to remember the peaks and forget the mundane awfulness in between. Senior frames it like this: “Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes—or napping, or shopping, or answering emails—to spending time with our kids … But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one—and nothing—provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it’s the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales.”

These are plausible-enough ideas, and I don’t reject them. But other theories about why people don’t regret parenthood actually have nothing to do with happiness—at least not in a simple sense.

One involves attachment. Most parents love their children, and it would seem terrible to admit that you would be better off if someone you loved didn’t exist. More than that, you genuinely prefer a world with your kids in it. This can put parents in the interesting predicament of desiring a state that doesn’t make them as happy as the alternative. In his book Midlife, the MIT professor Kieran Setiya expands on this point. Modifying an example from the philosopher Derek Parfit, he asks readers to imagine a situation in which, if you and your partner were to conceive a child before a certain time, the child would have a serious, though not fatal, medical problem, such as chronic joint pain. If you wait, the child will be healthy. For whatever reason, you choose not to wait. You love your child and, though he suffers, he is happy to be alive. Do you regret your decision?

That’s a complicated question. Of course it would have been easier to have a kid without this condition. But if you’d waited, you’d have a different child, and this baby (then boy, then man) whom you love wouldn’t exist. It was a mistake, yes, but perhaps a mistake that you don’t regret. The attachment we have to an individual can supersede an overall decrease in our quality of life, and so the love we usually have toward our children means that our choice to bring them into existence has value above and beyond whatever effect they have on our happiness.

This relates to a second point, which is that there’s more to life than happiness. When I say that raising my sons is the best thing I’ve ever done, I’m not saying that they gave me pleasure in any simple day-to-day sense, and I’m not saying that they were good for my marriage. I’m talking about something deeper, having to do with satisfaction, purpose, and meaning. It’s not just me. When you ask people about their life’s meaning and purpose, parents say that their lives have more meaning than those of nonparents. A study by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that the more time people spent taking care of children, the more meaningful they said their life was—even though they reported that their life was no happier.

Raising children, then, has an uncertain connection to pleasure but may connect to other aspects of a life well lived, satisfying our hunger for attachment, and for meaning and purpose. The writer Zadie Smith puts it better than I ever could, describing having a child as a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.” Smith, echoing the thoughts of everyone else who has seriously considered these issues, points out the risk of close attachments: “Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation?” But this annihilation reflects the extraordinary value of such attachments; as the author Julian Barnes writes of grief, quoting a friend, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.”

Section 71 If the offences as provided in Section 334 to Section 336, first paragraph, and Section 341 to Section 364 are committed by a husband against his wife, or by a wife against her husband, the offender shall not be punished.

If the aforesaid offences are committed by an ascendant against his descendant, or by a descendant against his ascendant, or by a brother or sister of the same parents against each other, the offences shall, even though not provided by the law as compoundable offences, be deemed as compoundable offences. Moreover, the Court may inflict less punishment to any extent than that provided by the law for such offences.

Section 289 Whoever commits murder on:

An ascendant;
An official in the exercise of his functions, or by reason of exercising or having exercised his functions;
A person who assists an official in the exercise of his functions, or by reason of the fact that such person will assist or has assisted the said official;
The other person by premeditation;
The other person by employing torture or acts of cruelty;
The other person for the purpose of preparing or facilitating the commission of the other offence; or
The other person for the purpose of securing the benefit obtained through the other offence, or concealing the other offence or escaping punishment for the other offence committed by him, shall be punished with death.

Lacking the courage to admit the painful truth that they are victims of initiated violence, they would rather reeanact on a new generation of victims what was done to themselves. Thus the cycle replicates itself and the total quantity of initiated violence and the total number of victims keeps growing. Yet somehow this is considered more acceptable than retaliatory violence, which is all it would take to break the cycle.