Description
Offering a defense of antinatalism, this book builds a case based fundamental moral principles of consent, responsibility, and harm.
While sharing its conclusion-that procreation is morally wrong in ordinary circumstances-with earlier antinatalist works, the book develops a distinctive and largely optimistic case grounded not in the claim that life is inherently harmful, but in fundamental moral principles.
Gerald K Harrison offers three arguments. The first is that it is ordinarily wrong to impose significant and morally unnecessary burdens on an innocent person without that person's consent. Procreation, necessarily, imposes such burdens on an individual who could not have agreed to bear them. The second argument appeals to moral desert. By freely and unnecessarily creating a person, procreators bring into existence an individual who deserves certain goods, benefits, and protections. Since neither parents nor society can reliably guarantee what innocent persons deserve, can it be morally permissible to create them? The third argument focuses on mortality. Human beings inevitably face death, a prospect that reason represents as a profound and unavoidable harm. If procreation predictably exposes an innocent person to the possibility of extreme or enduring suffering, we must critically reassess its moral status.
The book also engages extensively with contemporary debates in reproductive ethics. It challenges David Benatar's influential asymmetry argument while offering new treatments of the non-identity problem, evolutionary debunking arguments, and the relationship between antinatalism and the problem of evil. Additionally, it responds to a wide range of objections concerning human extinction, economic necessity, meaning in life, suicide, and theism.