Antinatalism v. pronatalism: is depopulation good or a bad?

If you don’t have time to read further, please look at the recent article “The Case Against Children” in Harper’s by Elizabeth Barber, and watch Stephen J Shaw’s well-made documentary Birthgap to get the gist of what is at stake.

Since ancient times, the odd thinker or philosopher has remarked that fewer – or even the complete disappearance of – people on earth would be a good thing. The immediate response to the likelihood question has usually been “fat chance.” But, lately, the debate, not about the likelihood but about the desirability, has become heated. Inconceivable as it might have been a few decades ago, depopulation is happening. And it’s difficult to imagine what could stop or reverse the trend. Will people suddenly start having more children because they become aware that within one human lifetime there will be a severe shortage of working age people paying taxes to support a burgeoning legion of elderly people? And the situation will only worsen until all those older people die off. If it hasn’t already in some parts of the world, there will come a time in the next few decades when

1. either older, unproductive, people will be encouraged and/or pressured to die,
2. or younger people will be forced to bear children and live lives more impoverished than their expectations were primed for – before many of them, too, will be encouraged or pressured to die,
3. or, most likely, both.

There will be pain and suffering on a scale, and of a kind, unknown historically, as standards of living and quality of life for all but a fortunate few* plummet.

The ethically motivated antinatalist is not unhappy with the idea of depopulation but most must be given pause at the speed with which it is happening. Philosopher David Benatar, for example, when he published his infamous book Better Never to Have Been in 2006 didn’t have any illusions about procreation stopping in its tracks because a philosopher said it should. (We first broached antinatalism topic in 2016 in the wake of Benatar’s revival of the ancient debate.) And he was right to the extent that depopulation is happening, as it appears it is, it is not because people are suddenly listening to philosophers. Though explicit antinatalist thinking has spread rapidly and surprisingly in the almost two decades since Benatar’s book, most people have little understanding of the force of his, or any, antinatalist argument. The recognition of the enormity of suffering vis-à-vis its opposite, happiness, and the reduction – then elimination – of suffering was always his end. But he had in mind a deliberate and graceful extinction.

The proximate causes of actual depopulation are many and complex but philosophy isn’t one of them. If some have sought out philosophical theory to buttress their extra-philosophical conviction that bringing more babies into the world is not a good idea now, that’s not the same as the philosophical antinatalist’s position that it was never a good idea. People are starting not to have children en masse for the same reason they used to have them: it served, or serves, some interest of theirs – not for ethical reasons.

We will aim to get clearer on the different and confusing concerns motivating the debate about whether depopulation is good or bad...

The full writeup is here.

* Those who get rich before they get old. But even these will only have the wherewithal to delay suffering. What good is money when no one is making anything to buy because buyers are dwindling? Can capitalism or any economic system survive a sudden shrinking market?