Last updated: November 3, 2026

Antinatalism is the philosophical view that bringing new people into existence is wrong, or at least never better than not doing so. Its best known defender, the South African philosopher David Benatar, argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm to the one who comes into existence. Other antinatalists argue from consent, since nobody can agree to being born, or from the sheer amount of suffering a human life contains. The position is about starting lives, not ending them: antinatalists do not, as a rule, claim that existing people would be better off dead.

The word itself is older than the philosophy. Demographers have long called policies that lower birth rates “antinatalist”, as the opposite of pronatalist policies that encourage them. Its use for an ethical thesis about procreation became common only in this century. It should also be kept apart from being childfree, which is a personal choice that needs no theory, and from misanthropy, which dislikes people rather than worrying on their behalf. An antinatalist can adore her nephews. She just thinks they were not done a favour.

Existing Is Strongly Prohibited

The meme above looks like a page from a school safety manual. Under a large WARNING sign, a classroom scene: a teacher at the front, a smiling girl at her desk, and next to her the dotted outline of a student with a raised hand, crossed out with a prohibition symbol. The caption reads: “Existing is strongly prohibited.”

The joke works because the rule is addressed to exactly the wrong audience. Everyone who can read the poster already exists and is therefore already in breach. The only beings who could obey it are those who never come into existence, and they are in no position to read anything. Antinatalism has the same structure, which is why it is so often misunderstood. It is not a rule for the living about whether to go on living. It is a claim about the decision the living make on behalf of people who do not yet exist, and it is addressed to the only people who can make that decision: would-be parents.

Not to Be Born Is Best: An Old Pessimism

The thought that it would be better never to have been is much older than its modern name. The Greek poet Theognis wrote in the sixth century BC that not to be born is best for mortals, and that the next best thing is to pass through the gates of death as quickly as possible. Sophocles gave the same lines to the chorus of Oedipus at Colonus, and Nietzsche retold the legend of King Midas, who caught the satyr Silenus and asked him what is best for human beings. The answer, after much reluctance: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing, and second best, to die soon. The Hebrew Bible has its own version in Ecclesiastes, where the Preacher, having watched the oppressions under the sun, declares that better than both the living and the dead is the one who has not yet been.

None of these texts is an argument against procreation. They are laments, and laments are compatible with having children. The step from lament to ethics was taken by Arthur Schopenhauer, for whom life is driven by a blind, insatiable will that produces far more suffering than satisfaction; we have explained his view, and its debt to Indian thought, in Buddha vs Schopenhauer. In an essay on the sufferings of the world he asks: “If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist?” Would we not rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence?

In 1933 the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe published “The Last Messiah”, an essay that reads like a diagnosis. Human consciousness, he argued, has overshot what a living creature needs: we see too much of our own mortality and of the indifference of the world. We survive only by four defence mechanisms, isolating disturbing thoughts, anchoring ourselves in God, family or nation, distracting ourselves, and turning our despair into art. His imagined messiah ends with an instruction: “Know yourselves, be infertile, and let the earth be silent after ye.” Forty years later the Romanian aphorist Emil Cioran called a whole book The Trouble with Being Born (1973), and summed up his attitude in a line that is hard to forget: we do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth.

Benatar’s Asymmetry

Lamenting is easy. The reason antinatalism is now discussed in academic journals is that David Benatar turned it into an argument, in Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2006). Its centre is an asymmetry between pain and pleasure. Benatar asks us to accept four claims. The presence of pain is bad. The presence of pleasure is good. The absence of pain is good, even if there is nobody who enjoys that good. But the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom that absence is a deprivation.

Now compare two scenarios, one in which a person exists and one in which she never does. If she exists, she will have pains, which are bad, and pleasures, which are good. If she never exists, the absence of her pains is good, and the absence of her pleasures is not bad, because there is nobody who misses them. Never existing therefore has an advantage over existing (the absent pains) and no corresponding disadvantage. However happy the life, coming into existence is a harm compared with never coming into existence. That is why Benatar’s conclusion applies to every procreation, not just to lives that go badly.

Why should we believe the asymmetry? Benatar argues that it explains judgements most of us already make. We think there is a strong duty not to create a child who will suffer terribly, but no duty to create a child just because she would be happy. We can regret having brought a miserable child into the world for her sake, but nobody regrets for the sake of a happy person that she was never conceived. We feel sorry for people suffering in distant lands, but we shed no tears for the happy people who do not exist on an uninhabited island. The asymmetry, he claims, is the simplest explanation of all four.

He adds a second, independent line of argument about quality of life. People rate their own lives as better than they are, a tendency psychologists call optimism bias and Benatar calls the Pollyanna principle. We adapt to bad conditions, compare ourselves with those worse off, and forget pain faster than pleasure. A sober audit of an ordinary life, he argues, would find far more hunger, fatigue, anxiety, illness, frustration and grief than we admit. Even someone who rejects the asymmetry might then conclude that most lives are worse than their owners think.

The Consent Argument and the Gold Bars

A second family of arguments starts not from pain but from consent. The philosopher Seana Shiffrin, in a much cited 1999 paper on wrongful life, asks us to imagine a wealthy eccentric who drops cubes of gold worth millions from an aeroplane onto the people of an island. He means well and most of them are delighted, but some are hit and break their arms. Has he wronged them? Shiffrin thinks he has: it is not enough that the benefit is large, because he imposed serious risks on people who could not agree to them, and the harms cannot be undone.

Procreation, she argues, has the same shape. A child is given an enormous benefit she did not ask for, together with burdens and risks she cannot escape, and she cannot be asked in advance. Shiffrin herself is not an antinatalist. Her conclusion is that procreation is morally fraught and that parents owe their children more, not that nobody should have them. But later antinatalists have pressed the argument further: if we may not impose serious, unconsented harms on others even for their benefit, how can we create a whole life that includes them?

The obvious reply is that parents impose things on children all the time, from vaccinations to school, and nobody calls this wrong. The antinatalist answer is that those impositions are justified by the interests of a child who already exists and cannot yet decide. Before conception there is no one whose interests could justify anything. Whether that answer works is one of the live questions in the debate.

Where Philosophers Push Back

Most philosophers who have written on Benatar reject his conclusion, and the objections are worth knowing in detail, because they are where the real philosophy happens.

The first objection targets the asymmetry itself. The absence of pain in a person who never exists is said to be good, yet good for nobody. Elizabeth Harman, in a critical study of the book, argued that Benatar slides between two senses of “good”: good for someone, and good impersonally. If the absent pain is good impersonally, then the absent pleasure looks bad impersonally too, and the asymmetry collapses. If it is good for someone, there is no one for it to be good for. Benatar has replied that the asymmetry is about comparisons between the two scenarios, not about benefits to a nonexistent person, and the exchange has continued for years.

The second objection comes from Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem. In Reasons and Persons (1984) Parfit observed that the person who exists could not have existed otherwise: had her parents waited a month, a different child would have been born. So it is hard to say that existence made her worse off than she would otherwise have been, because the alternative is not that she is better off but that she is not there at all. Benatar accepts this and builds his argument precisely on the comparison with never existing, which is why critics say he needs a notion of harm that most theories of harm do not supply.

The third objection is a reductio. If even the best lives are a harm, then a world with no sentient beings would be better than ours, and the quickest painless route there would be an improvement. The philosopher R. N. Smart used a similar point against negative utilitarianism in 1958: a theory that only counts the reduction of suffering seems to recommend a benevolent world-exploder. Benatar resists the parallel with a distinction between lives worth starting and lives worth continuing. Existing people have interests in going on living, and death harms them, so the standards are different. Whether the distinction is principled or merely convenient is a fair question to ask him.

Finally, there is the objection from the inside. Most people, asked whether they are glad to exist, say yes. Benatar treats this as Pollyanna bias, but critics point out that a theory which explains away almost everyone’s considered judgement about their own lives needs very strong support, and that the asymmetry is itself an intuition. It is intuition against intuition, and the antinatalist must explain why hers should win.

Philosophers of Antinatalism at a Glance

If you want to read further, these are the names that come up again and again. Not all of them are antinatalists in the strict sense; some are forerunners, one is a sympathetic critic.

One name in the table deserves more attention than it gets in English. Julio Cabrera, an Argentine philosopher who spent most of his career in Brazil, argues that what makes life bad is not the balance of particular pains and pleasures but its structure: every life is mortal from the start and has to be spent fighting decay, discomfort and discouragement. Procreation, on this view, is not wrong because a given child may be unlucky, but because it creates someone into that structure without any possibility of asking, for purposes that belong to the parents. It is a darker argument than Benatar’s, but also a more honest one about where the pessimism comes from.

Misanthropic and Environmental Antinatalism

Benatar has a second argument that does not depend on the asymmetry at all. In Debating Procreation (2015), written with his critic David Wasserman, he argues that human beings cause vast suffering to each other and to animals, so that creating a new human is creating a new source of harm. He calls this the misanthropic argument, and it is the bridge between philosophical antinatalism and the environmental version many people search for.

Environmental antinatalism holds that we should have fewer or no children because of what humans do to the planet. Its most famous expression is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, founded in 1991 by Les U. Knight, whose motto is “May we live long and die out.” Its most cited number comes from a 2017 study by Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas, which estimated that in rich countries having one fewer child saves far more emissions per year than giving up a car or flying. That figure is contested for a philosophical reason worth spelling out: it assigns to the parents a share of the emissions of all their descendants. Whether those emissions are the parents’ responsibility, or the descendants’ own, or the product of energy systems that may look very different in fifty years, is exactly the kind of question the numbers cannot answer.

It is also worth noticing that most environmental arguments are not antinatalist in Benatar’s sense. They say that fewer people would be better under present conditions, not that existence is a harm to the one who exists. Sarah Conly, in One Child: Do We Have a Right to More? (2016), argues for a one-child norm on environmental grounds while rejecting the idea that life is not worth living. Antinatalism proper is a claim about every possible birth, in any climate.

Starting a Life and Continuing One Are Different Questions

The most common misunderstanding of antinatalism is that it amounts to a judgement that existing lives are not worth living. Benatar is careful to deny this, and the distinction he draws is the philosophical heart of his position. A life worth starting and a life worth continuing are judged by different standards. Before someone exists, there is nobody who could be deprived of anything by not being created. Once someone exists, they have interests, plans, relationships and a strong interest in continuing to live, and ending a life frustrates all of that. So one can hold, consistently, that it would have been better never to have come into existence and that, having come into existence, a person has every reason to go on living and to make that life as good as possible.

Critics reply that the distinction is less stable than it looks: if most lives contain so much harm that starting them is wrong, why does the harm not count against continuing them too? Benatar’s answer turns on the asymmetry between beings who exist and possible beings who do not, which is exactly the point where his critics, from David DeGrazia to Elizabeth Harman, press hardest. Whatever one makes of the debate, it is a debate about procreation and population ethics, not about whether anyone’s present life should end. If reading about these arguments ever feels heavy rather than just interesting, that is a good moment to talk with someone you trust.

On the internet antinatalism has relatives. Efilism, a term coined online by spelling life backwards, extends the argument from humans to all sentient life and imagines the end of suffering through the end of sentient beings altogether. Most academic antinatalists do not follow it there, and it adds a utopian, even apocalyptic, ambition that the careful versions of the argument lack. The academic debate stays where Benatar put it: a question about whether we are entitled to create new people who cannot consent to the risks of existing.

What the Argument Asks of Us

It is easy to dismiss antinatalism as a mood dressed up as a theory, and the internet has done its best to support that reading. But the philosophical case deserves better. Benatar’s asymmetry is a real puzzle about the value of nonexistence, Shiffrin’s gold bars expose something odd about benefits nobody could ask for, and the question of whether we owe anything to people who do not yet exist is one of the hardest in ethics. Even philosophers who reject the conclusion often concede the more modest point: having a child is a decision that needs reasons, and “everyone does it” is not one.

There is also a question the meme raises without meaning to. For those of us who already exist, the poster has come too late. Epicurus argued that death is nothing to us, because where death is we are not; antinatalists say something similar about never having been born, which harms nobody because there is nobody to harm. What we do with the existence we were not consulted about is a different question, and it belongs to a different tradition. Camus thought the answer was revolt, not regret, which is why he could write that one must imagine Sisyphus happy. If you want the sceptical relative of antinatalism, try What Is Nihilism?; if you want the cosmic version, read Cosmic Nihilism and Entropy. And if all of this has left you in need of a membership card, the shirts below were made for exactly that.