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Comment by abellerose | Hacker News Reader

It's completely unethical to have kids and like another commenter has said brings a great disadvantage economically. I would suggest to anyone to not follow your advice.

edit: I won't be further commenting on the topic because the same people asking everyone "when are you going to have kids like me?" are just going to downvote. Yes, I rather see an end to humankind because that ends suffering. Less suffering in a universe is better than a universe that experienced more. Yes, nobody cares about the ones that wish they never had been born because of whatever reason that was inflicted upon them.

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The antinatalist point of view is incredibly damaging to the long term progress of our species.

Seeing as a big chuck of what someone believes is culturally inherited from their parents, and thus hypothesizing that meme* survival partially follows parent-child relationships, I'd say that that's a problem that will end up self-correcting :)

* In the original Richard Dawkins sense, not in the funny gif sense.

You would think this is the case. But yet, they keep on reproducing while complaining bitterly about it.

Above commenter will likely have children very shortly.

Amusingly we have a case study for this: the Shakers.

"They practice a celibate and communal lifestyle, pacifism, uniform charismatic worship, and their model of equality of the sexes, which they institutionalized in their society in the 1780s."

Needless to say there's only 2 left.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers

I'm not intimately familiar with all the different strains of antinatalism, but I think that's kinda the point? an antinatalist would not consider funding existing people's retirements or possibly even the survival of the species to be sufficient justification for creating new conscious beings who cannot consent to their creation.

At which point that philosophy has completely jumped the shark.

The premise that the universe is somehow "better" with no conscious life is just silly sophistry.

> The premise that the universe is somehow "better" with no conscious life is just silly sophistry.

meh, no more than all the other moral philosophies. some are more practical than others, but none are more "true" than others.

> brings a great disadvantage economically

yeah but you forgot about my platinum, enterprise-grade DNA. really good for the economy as a whole.

Other people are going to have kids, their kids will encounter hardships and need problem solvers among the pack. Its unethical to deprive their posterity of my web-scale® DNA.

This could work as Tinder bio. It’s unethical to deprive future generations of my DNA.

That's what the corporations want you to believe because they want you to spend as much time and energy as possible being a cog in their machine and source the next generation of workers from the lowest bidder on the global scale.

What impact do you foresee any economic gains from childlessness having in 100 years, if your advice is followed universally? Who will inherit those gains?

I believe the context for the advice is directed to whoever is capable of having children. So, economic gains are meaningless to them when they're dead in 100 years.

Put another way: let's say everyone who is capable of children follows your advice. To whom are these economic gains meaningful in 100 years? Who would their parents be?

What you're implying is meaningless to the ones that are dead. So maybe you can now realize why I wrote my response and it was directed towards anyone considering conceiving a child.

OK, from a pure hedonistic view - let's say at some time in the future, there are no more humans left. Why would it make sense to invest anything into economic gain in the time before that happens? You'd rather run the economy into the ground to extract as much value as you could from it, before the end of human existence. You - or else someone else who is the last human alive - are "leaving something on the table", so to speak. Otherwise they are just leaving value around for wildlife.

In other words there would be a time, maybe dependent on the rate at which remaining humans can unwind the human economy, past which any effort at collective economic gain wouldn't be worth it.

I think of this as a non-issue; either my partner, or a friend, or a charity of choice will inherit my gains if I don't spend them all enjoying life first.

It's unethical to have kids? I don't follow.

You might find the following interesting: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/choosing-children-ethical... I, for one, would never bring another life into this world and while so much suffering occurs. It's ethical to adopt contrary to conceive children.

I am certain your parents had same ideas. Until they decided to have babies. Having kids is powerful natural drive after finding suitable enough mates.

Statistically, you will have children in future, if you’re under 30 right now.

statistically, you will be attracted to women, if you're a man right now. and yet...

Attractive men and women will find each other and make babies, as they have done for thousands of years.

Instagram, Raya, Tinder make it much easier for attractive people to find each other efficiently.

That was my interpretation. There are some antinatalists out there.

Can I just say we should really stop using these 'turf' labels, the flat-earthers, the anti-vaxxers, now this 'antinatilist' label.

It makes it seem like a binomial thing, you are either in my group or in the other. Discussion stops being about the ideas and more adversarial, focused on taking sides.

Also it creates a group identity which in my opinion makes it harder for people to change their minds based on discussion or new info.

If my aunt tells me vaccines are bad I might trust her. But if there is whole group of 'anti-vaxxer' people who make me feel good about myself then I suppose I am now an anti-vaxxer and that becomes an identity more so than an opinion which would be more fluid and mutable.

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