Coates - Anti-Natalism: rejectionist philosophy from Buddhism to Benatar

Human beings are the only creatures conscious of their own existence. Other living beings do not know that they exist. They cannot help going on living - reproducing and continuing the species - as programmed by nature. Humans alone have the capacity to interrogate their own existence. Since the dawn of consciousness human beings have found themselves confronting an existence they did not choose and which puts them through a great deal of pain and suffering physical and mental - leading eventually to death.

To make life with all its multifarious evils acceptable and meaningful humans have invented religion, a supernatural system of beliefs, which, among other things, seeks to justify and legitimize existence. Yet even religions have not found it easy to endorse life with all its evils man-made and natural and have sought ways of emancipation from it1. For example Hinduism and Buddhism, with their concepts of Moksha and Nirvana respectively (Koller 1982, 67; Snelling 1998, 54-5) point a way of transcending the phenomenal world with its recurring cycle of births and deaths. In addition, secular philosophies which consider existence to be a bad rather than a good have their own views about the evil of existence and the way out.

Modern - mid-20th century onwards - secular philosophies see anti-natalism, i.e. refraining from procreation, as the way to liberation2. Besides expressing compassion for the unborn the decision not to reproduce is also a way of saying no to human existence. What these religious and secular philosophies have in common is the view that life in general and human life in particular is inherently flawed and that overcoming it would be a good thing. While other creatures cannot escape their bondage to nature human beings can. They have the capacity to free themselves from the yoke of nature and to end their entrapment. And so they should. Broadly, the religious approach is based on freeing oneself from the will-to-live and the bondage to worldly desires whereas modern secular philosophies see anti-natalism as the key to emancipation.

But surely the prescription of anti-natalism is counter-intuitive? Our instincts make us want to live and to reproduce. The sex drive is one of the strongest physical urges and, in the absence of contraception, results naturally in reproduction. True, as anti-natalists remind us, the coming of contraception has sundered the natural bond between coitus and conception. Celibacy is no longer necessary in order to prevent reproduction. The sex urge need not be denied to avoid conception. And as far as an instinct to reproduce is concerned this remains a somewhat dubious proposition at least as far as humans are concerned.

However, a more important objection against these philosophies is that they are unduly pessimistic and one-sided. They seem to turn a blind eye to all that is positive about life. For if there is much pain and suffering there is also pleasure, joy, love, beauty, creativity and the like. In short, life comes as a package deal, with good and evil inextricably mixed together. How can one separate them? Why dwell on the negativities of existence alone forgetting the other side? These are weighty arguments and they have to be taken seriously. They raise important philosophical issues which will be considered later (Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 6). At this stage we would like to spell out the rationale for looking at these anti-existential viewpoints.