Reproduction fails a basic ethical test: it introduces risk and harm where none previously existed. Before birth, there is no person deprived of pleasure. After birth, there is a person exposed to pain, loss, frustration, illness, and death. This is not symmetrical. Non-creation has zero victims; creation always creates one.

Every argument for reproduction relies on post-hoc justification (“life can be good”) rather than necessity. But “can be good” is irrelevant when the alternative causes no harm. If an action has a guaranteed harm component and no unmet need motivating it, the rational option is abstention. This is standard risk logic.

Consent makes it worse. You cannot ask a non-existent person whether they accept the gamble of existence. If the outcome is bad, they cannot opt out retroactively. Creating someone is forcing irreversible conditions onto them for reasons that benefit others (parents, culture, genes), not the created individual.

From a decision-theory perspective, non-reproduction strictly dominates reproduction:
• No suffering is created
• No deprivation occurs
• No risk is imposed
• No rights are violated

Reproduction cannot claim the same. At best, it produces mixed outcomes; at worst, extreme suffering. When one option has only neutral outcomes and the other has potential catastrophic negatives, the rational choice is obvious.

If you disagree, identify the exact premise you reject: that non-existence harms no one, that suffering is unavoidable, or that imposing irreversible risk without consent is unethical. Argue it.

Get the fuck out

reality only exists subjectively. prove that i'm not just you talking to yourself. you can't right? because it is literally impossible to prove anything but ones own subjective experience. you can't prove matter, all we know is the subject dream appears to be consistent. so anyway. since you didn't just stop reading and kill yourself having realized that, that is the only way to end the whole universe, that means you are wrong, there must be something to living, you must have given your consent, no, you _demanded_ from yourself the breathes that follow.

Get the fuck in

>>2
Disgusting breeder

please try to remain respectful

>>1
2010's called they want their antinatalist reddit atheism back

>>3
i’m honestly not sure i get your point at all. it sounds like you’re stacking a classic solipsism argument on top of a rhetorical jump to “therefore you should stop existing,” and that leap just doesn’t follow for me.

i’m not trying to lob shit at the fan, i saw it as a chance to yak about subjective meanin and why people keep trudging on even when nothing’s provable. if you wanna keep it there, no edgy ultimatums, i’m game.

>>7
2020’s demiurge called - they want their new biofuel to feed entropy with a meat calling back. come on, bring actual arguments instead of your muh white race reddit-tier bullshit. climate change isn’t gonna pause for your tantrums and there’s no universal incoming or heaven‑level communism like it’s a solution and you act like a nazi

those insta‑mom accounts need to be re‑educated by being put in zindân - literally 90s‑style mom energy, a cruelty show disguised as a circus, but really, for whom?

Consent makes it worse. You cannot ask a non-existent person whether they accept the gamble of existence. If the outcome is bad, they cannot opt out retroactively. Creating someone is forcing irreversible conditions onto them for reasons that benefit others (parents, culture, genes), not the created individual.

This is my biggest gripe with reproduction. I wasn't asked, nor did I indicate in any way that I want to exist because I literally couldn't. Even if I was the happiest person ever forever all of the time, it's still wrong because I did not consent. And that's the case for absolutely everyone and everything else that is born or created. Procreation is worse than child rape because you're raping someone who is nonexistent years old.

>>8
the missing link was that you supposedly are op and believe the shit you are talking in 1 + Metaphysical Solipsism => only you have the power to end the cycle for ever. that's all there is to it. even if we accept that everyone does in fact exist (this doesn't seem true, at the very least those who aren't able to introspect must be p-zombies, but whatever) then the ball is in each person's court, and most people seem to value individual autonomy. you can argue that people should stop breeding, but since it could be argued until you have any autonomy at all you are not sentient and as soon as you do have autonomy you can just stop your existence i don't see what the problem is. unless you are willing to just start literally killing people the only thing you can actually do is not breed yourself. but again if you actually think life is only either neutral or bad, then why are you still actively taking part in the cycle of your own life? there is something keeping you in this experience, and that something is you.

i haven't read enough philosophy to put the thoughts together in a single thread that follows a-> z or whatever, but i'm pretty sure i've put enough pieces to the puzzle down that this should be understandable. But i also thought that the first time. if there's a piece of this that doesn't fit, instead of just telling me you think it doesn't fit, i'd need to have some grasp of why you think it doesn't follow. to me it seems self evident.

more misanthropic autism. I need to quit this site.

>>3
>>10
What doesn't seem to follow - at least for me - is that you stated that OP is wrong simply because he hasn't followed through with the logical solution to life (which is suicide). That, in itself, does not invalidate his point. You could maybe call him a hypocrite (even though I wouldn't consider Op to be one), but you couldn't say that he is wrong.

There doesn't seem to be a connection between "since you didn't just stop reading and kill yourself having realized that" leading to "that means you are wrong". It could be, for example, that the act of killing yourself is not capable of healing the damage caused by being alive.

>>12
i’m OP. yeah exactly, that jump is bogus.

“you didn’t kys, therefore you’re wrong” is just a vibe check pretending to be logic. at best it’s a hypocrisy accusation, and even that’s optional. truth value doesn’t collapse because the speaker is still breathing.

real gap is assuming suicide is the logical solution in the first place. even if life is net-bad, it doesn’t follow that self-termination repairs anything. ending a process isn’t the same as undoing its cost. you can reject the system without performing the final speedrun strat.

it’s like saying “you hate the game but didn’t uninstall your OS, therefore your critique is invalid.” no. continuing to exist can just mean the damage is already sunk and exit doesn’t refund it.

tl;dr: not pulling the plug doesn’t falsify the diagnosis. that’s just forum logic, not philosophy.

so, all experience is subjective right? since we can only prove to ourselves that we have experiences. the concept that there is this injustice is an experience we are having, ostensibly. it can't be proven that this injustice exists except as it exists to the one experiencing it. negation of the experiencer of that injustice negates the injustice in fact. failing to negate the experience implies consent to the experience, ie there may be injustice but it is acceptable considering other aspects of the experience. does this make sense?

>>1

a basic ethical test: it introduces risk and harm where none previously existed.

I disagree that introducing risk/harm is intrinsically unethical. Sometimes that is a good thing. Reproduction may have benefits that are valuable enough within a person or culture's moral system to justify those risks and harms.

Disclaimer: I got a vasectomy years ago so I can pump loads into pretty women without worrying about pregnancy. One of the top five best decisions of my life. So I am anti-reproduction (for me, at least) enough to let a doctor cut into my ball sack. Take that bias for whatever you will.

>>14
Lofty moral language such as "injustice" is completely irrelevant to the discussion. We are biological organisms that hate pain. That is all that matters when discussing the harm of bringing an entity into existence.

>>11
Do you even know what denpa means? You clearly do not belong here, please leave.

>>3
The harm has already been caused. OP was already born. OP is already here on the planet and now, due to his/her biological wiring, possesses a strong sense of antipathy towards death. Given that the foundational driving force of anti-natalist rhetoric is harm reduction, in the vast majority of cases suicide is not advisable as it will increase harm / pain towards the person committing it and, more importantly, those in the persons life that must deal with the fallout. There is an aphorism by Emil Cioran that, while admittedly being quite edgy, gets to the point of the matter; "It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late."

>>16
try substituting the word pain for injustice then actually engage with whats being said. dismissing arguments through willfully disingenuous reading because you can't actually grapple with the argument is for twitter.

>>18
You are correct, I skim-read your post, I apologise.

failing to negate the experience implies consent to the experience

You do not seem to understand what the word consent means. Being unable to put a stop to a sexual assault in progress would not mean that the victim consents because they were not able to terminate the process. Consent occurs prior to the event that it is in relation to. Therefore it is impossible for consent to factor into the conversation when one is discussing birth.

17 >19

i can understand where these are coming from if there were some kind of afterlife. the fear of potential afterlife of the limbo/hell types is a real experience we can be sure of. but i'd still say the negation of existence negates the pain of the negation, the potential futures where others hypothetically would experience pain, the birth, and time itself, since, again, we can only prove our own individual experience. the choice to terminate can never come to late, because it can only occur at the first point of awareness of its possibility and acting on it negates everything before it.

if we are to move forward with potential after existences then why not posit equally unfounded preexistences where we did in fact consent to this existence along with the forgetting of our having agreed in the first place.

Why have children theres plenty of orphans

I am not having sex anyway so I don't have to worry about this. Rare win for me.

buddhism "solves" this problem by claiming birthing a kid isn't creating a new person, they were already going to be reborn anyways. Rather, you are giving them the opportunity to liberate themselves out of the cycle of rebirth (through exposure to buddhism of course). Completely nonsensical if you don't subscribe to those beliefs, but maybe something to think about?

>>1

If you disagree, identify the exact premise you reject: that non-existence harms no one, that suffering is unavoidable, or that imposing irreversible risk without consent is unethical. Argue it.

All of these place minimizing suffering as the highest priority, which I just don't think is justified. I don't think either that we all must universally maximize for pleasure, or something like that; i don't find these sorts of reductive utilitarian arguements very compelling.

I'm not extremly pro-natalist or anything, I don't have a particular desire to 'breed'; in fact if voluntary human extinction were achieved it'd almost definetly be man-kind's greatest feat; I do find this manner of arguing for it to be flawed and kind of 'gay and retarded', so to speak.

Every argument for reproduction relies on post-hoc justification (“life can be good”)

If i were to give a justification for reproduxion it'd probably be culture and bueaty, which are rewards we absolutely have reaped and aren't just things that 'may be good'. 'The Conspiracy Against The Human Race', a pessimissitic masterpiece which rails agaist human life would never have been w/o Ligotti and his nihlistic predecessors; reading 'Mimi-Mix' and listening to 'The Shape of Jazz to Come' it feels very foreign to me that I'd be better off asleep. Can you read Yukio Mishima's works and read of his suicide and of the conquests of Alexander and tell me that reproduxion has not produced greatness?

>>17
I don't see why one's electromagnetic delusions couldn't be exubarant and affirmitive of life.

>>1
I don't think this is a very important point but i do think there is a contradiction in your argument.

Before birth, there is no person deprived of pleasure.

I think if you accept this than you would also have to say that before birth there is no person who's consent you couldn't aquire. I reject both of these ideas, I don't think that before birth these people don't matter; when someone is created there will be unavoidable suffering and it doesn't matter that they didn't exist before birth, they still had no way to opt out, & conversely if you terminate a pregnancy or do not conceive there were experiences of joy, comfort, or pleasure that there was no oppurtunity to turn down, but will not occur. I don't think it's immoral to deprive this pleasure but just as non-existence prevents suffering, it too prevents all that is good.
On that basis I would disagree that:

No deprivation occurs

To whatever extent someone's consent is violated when they are created they also have no ability to consent to never have been.