The person who lets someone into a concert hall — Terrapin Station

Having a child is not letting someone in. It is starting a cycle of inevitable experiences. The parent is not like a taxi driver or doorman but is literally creating a new existence and a new sentience. There is nothing trivial about it.
This is why antinatalists exists because they recognize the onus and burden and profundity of creating someone. This can also be a reason for getting sterilized, using contraceptive or having an abortion.

Then why wouldn't you accept that for some people, there's no good reason to doubt the nature of consciousness, whether Gods exist, whether there's an afterlife, etc.? — Terrapin Station

I think other peoples reasons can be considered false. I don't think reason is subjective. This is why I differentiate between belief and knowledge.

Anyone can believe anything and have all manner of grounds for believing it but I don't think we can know something unless we are to a big degree certain.

Believing the earth is flat might be reasonable if you live in the Australian outback without access to modern education because that might be what experience tells you. But it is contextually reasonable but can easily be falsified by new information.

Not "anything happening to them." It has to be an action upon them by another agent, or performed by them in conjunction with another agent. — Terrapin Station

Having a child is acting to impose experiences on someone else.

I think consent is a moral issue. Anyone can ignore consent if they want to. The idea we should respect other peoples consent is a moral claim.

But considering the non consensual nature of existence it would be hypocritical to demand consent in some areas and ignore it in others.

Consent is an issue when:

(a) we're talking about a particular action that one is an actor in--either via performing actions on another or having actions performed upon by another — Terrapin Station

After someone is born and is old enough to understand or express consent then any thing happening to them has not being explicitly consented to unless they explicitly consent.

And once you start having experiences you didn't consent to these and cannot give retrospective consent. Usually consent comes before an event but experiences just happen continuously til we die.

So unless someone starts to give consent to x y and z all their experiences are non consensual. In my case I was forced to go to school and church my entire childhood without being asked about my preferences.

So what definition of certainty are you using? — Terrapin Station

Having no good reason to doubt something.

Then we wouldn't be able to make any empirical claim, including things as simple as "I know where I parked my car," — Terrapin Station

I don't see how this follows. You can be certain about where you parked you car. You don't know of your car has been stolen but that is statistically unlikely. You can know where you parked your car without knowing if it is still there.

I think the problem arises in cases such as when your car is stolen and prior knowledge and beliefs become irrelevant.

There is not just one argument or reason to be opposed to reproduction. If it was just one argument it probably would not be too compelling.

So among reasons given together are:

Harm (this involves wide range of issues from mental illness to the issues below and illness)
Consent
Exploitation and inequality
Pointlessness and meaninglessness
War, famine, genocide and slavery
Work stresses and other survival issues
Death
Facts (statistical probabilities about life outcomes and historical facts)
Negligent parenting
Religious and moral claims
Preference

The problem of consent arises after someone is born because they did not consent to anything.

After you have created someone you cannot claim they consented to any aspect of their existence.

Your position seems unbelievable because we can discuss consent in the abstract. For example almost no one would consent to have there hand thrust in boiling water. Someone does not need to exist before you assess the probability of someone consenting to X. Preexisting humans give a good indication of what people may or may not consent to.

However even if someone does consent to X that doesn't make X good. And we don't know what kind of life someone is going to have to assess whether they would consent to it. So people are claiming life is great people are happy to exist so it is reasonable to gamble with someones welfare. However life is only great for lucky people it is not a guarantee and there are lots of counter examples.

The same actual person will also experience good--quite possibly much more good than suffering. — Bitter Crank

Suffering and pleasure are often in different people and one person's pleasure does not cancel out another person pain.

This is like a utilitarian ad absurdum. You could have a million people being tortured but then if you create a Billion Blissfully happy people that apparently balances out the cosmos.

I think even without if one is not an antinatalist there is a case for reducing the number of people to reduce the amount of suffering.

A child can reject life legitimately because it is their life and they know how they feel about it. That is when they feel imposed upon by their parents.

I think someone that overall enjoying life might struggle to understand this sense of imposition. There are experiences you have which you would not want anyone else to go through.

I don't think I have ever met anyone who is religious or a theist because God filled in the gaps in knowledge — Coben

I wasn't claiming that I was saying that we could propose a deity based on gaps in our knowledge.

If there were no gaps in our knowledge there might be no room for gods.

For example if I baked a cake I know what happened and have no need to propose the involvement of God directly.
The reason for my agnosticism is explanatory gaps and first cause issues.

I think some atheist have tried to rule out God by minimizing the kind of gaps a god might fill to the extent that they would propose a Universe from Nothing like Lawrence Krauss. That kind of atheism seems to be based on the notion there is no room or need for God in reality but I am not convinced of that position.

The nature of consciousness is a scientific question - a matter of fact. People are working on it and have had success. Consciousness is no great mystery. — T Clark

What kind of success do you believe consciousness studies have had?

Knowing something doesn't imply that you know it with certainty or that it's provable. — Terrapin Station

I think if you know something then it has to be certain.

I believe the Moon exists because I have experienced it. My experience might be an illusion however I can be certain that I had that experience.

I think knowledge without provability is belief. uncertainty can be a healthy skepticism.

I am most interested here in the value of unknowns.

As I mentioned in my first post the number of grains of sand appears to be an unimportant unknown but other unknowns could be life changing or mind changing.

There are reasons not to believe in mainstream religions because of problems with their scriptures such as contradiction, incoherence etc.
I am not devaluing experience. I have personally never had a religious experience or encountered God and I spent my whole childhood in a religious environment.

I am not ruling out the idea that some experiences may be spiritual or linked to a god. However from my experience this would have to be an indirect connection because I have no reason to attribute any experiences to gods but I can speculate about causality.

If I personal encountered God tomorrow I wouldn't be able to prove this to anyone probably, so I could not use this to convince anyone else of God's existence.

I think it possible to believe in some kind of deist version of God by reason alone if you feel there are substantial gaps in our knowledge or explanation that might need filling by a deity. I believe this kind of thought led Famous atheist philosopher Antony Flew to a form of Deism.

But I think consciousness is the most challenging phenomena because we know things through consciousness but don't understand the consciousness that is the basis of our knowledge so it has led to extreme forms of skepticism.

I don't know if gods are an important unknown. It would probably depend on your notion of a god.

Certain's notions of gods would be less plausible or clearly non existent. I think the most valid reason to invoke a god is due to gaps in explanation such as a first cause.

I think the nature of consciousness and the afterlife are more important unknowns. I think the nature of consciousness would rule an after life in or out.

On a more immediate level there is the issue of promoting positive thinking. People have said "don't worry it might never happen" but what is the probability of things happening to you such as losing a job, getting cancer, finding a romantic partner etc. To some extent in the face of not knowing the future we have to have some kind of faith or blind optimism.

But it certainly seems dogmatism is not good, creating immovable dichotomies and in flexibility. Personally I have found it hard to get a secure anchor on reality.

I think the only things that are impossible are logical contradictions.

There are things that will probably never happen but are not ruled out by the current laws of physics.

A square circle is definitionally impossible. But a a massive square is not impossible but may be physically implausible

It seems impossible to find an ultimate ingredient of reality.

Atoms were thought to be primary and indivisible but that was confounded by the discovery of quarks.

Idealism posits that everything is simply mind which is a solution that seems to satisfy Ockham's razor in my opinion but then you have the primary question of what is mind.

I think there is always going to be the problem of infinite regress about the constituents of reality.

Religion has offered some kind of solace by claiming that the gods know and when you meet them they will reveal the answer. This is what I believed as a child. Maybe the problem is the limitations of our intelligence?

I think unintended consequences are a serious problem for having children.

Take extreme examples like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pot etc. Were all there ancestors terrible? That's unlikely. Did any of there ancestors consider that one of there descendants could be a mass murderer?

Once you replicate your genes there is an extent to which it is out of your control. Having these terrible descendants is statistically unlikely but still you can give rise to a huge amount of descendants with all sorts of issues out of your control or concern. So it is not just a parent child issue.

Also your children are part of an exploitative economic system where they will cause and or be victims of exploitation of others such as sweat shop factory workers

And personal responsibility is just a social construct — Forgottenticket

I think that social constructs need to reflect reality more.

Personally I think we do have free will and I don't understand people who say we don't have free will but then act like they have free will and can't come up with a coherent societal system that reflects that we allegedly don't have free will.

For example they will say Judges should be more lenient because criminals don't have free will. But if judges don't have free will either how can they choose to be more lenient?

But If we can somehow change society and create better social constructs then they should reflect the essential primary lack of consent. So for example in the criminal case we have mitigating circumstances. I think not having consented to anything is a mitigating circumstance.

I think death is a big problem for having children. I think death is the most inevitable of harms.

I think death can only be perceived as a benefit when one is in great suffering. But that is not a positive thing because the goodness of death in this scenario is reliant on the badness of life.

Nevertheless I believe no one knows what happens when we die. So anything could happen after death from personal oblivion to any kind of afterlife.

I think if someone ceases to exist after death then that is no benefit to them as they don't exist to benefit from it and it also makes their life pointless because they won't even know it happened.

I think it is continuing to exist (as we all are now being able to type on here) that brings any value to life. I don't value events that I can't remember and things can only effect me when i am alive.

If like many religious parents have believed there is a hell, then the awfulness of the afterlife would overwhelm whatever positive experience a person had. And my parents for one literally believe in hell and a lake of fire. People that believe in hell yet create children still in my mind are probably irrational/stupid but also sadistic.

Also I don't think reproducing is any kind of immortality because you and your offspring will die and infinitum. Most people want to die before their children but that means that you won't know exactly how your child died and they could have a horrible end. And ironically parents dying before their children has left millions of young orphans who have to fend for themselves.

I do not think you can have a coherent moral system which allows having children to be acceptable.

It undermines issues like not to harm and to respect consent.

My old brother has had over twenty years of debilitating illness that has left him paralysed and he has to communicate by blinking or slightly moving his head. It doesn't matter that parents did not intend this to happen. Illness and disability is always a risk and death is inevitable. I have also had a lifetime of problems

Parents can cause more harm, through their children having misfortune and illness, than your average criminal can,as well as through acceptable or hidden abuse.(For example my parents where abusive but will never be prosecuted for this)

It seems to be that most parents do not see themselves as responsible of the outcome of their child's life or of the state of the world.

What about the people who really want to have children? Aren't they affected by not having them? — Terrapin Station

There is no situation in which no person is harmed. But there is a situation in which harm is minimized and ceased altogether for humans.

The pain people may feel by not having children can easily by topped by the pain created by having children. One couple having children can lead to generations of harm to people and, animals etc.

The point I am trying to make is that we do not did not consent to anything.

There is no consent implied by simply existing so that social institutions and norms are problematic until you ascertain that someone does consent to them.

But if they don't consent to them there are not grounds to justify imposing them on someone.

It is false to assume people have some kind of human responsibilities due to just existing.

The answer is "yes," if you were in power, you would prevent other people from having children. And that is the difference between an idea that is misguided and one that is evil. — T Clark

I don't think it is at all evil to prevent someone having children. You are problem imagining some scenario like selective eugenics and genocide.

Lots of people have their children taken off them after they are born because they are unfit parents. There is not just one scenario where people intervene in reproduction.

If you were king of the forest, would you put restrictions on when and if other people could choose to have children? If yes, what restriction — T Clark

There is absolutely no reason to have children

We all have to confront our own death.

In my opinion creating children is malicious. It is like if you were dying but started a fire to kill lot of other people rather than confront your own death and see what happens. Instead you left trails of continuing destruction (the random propagation of your genes) as an act of defiance.

We know for a fact we, you and all your children , grandchildren, and great grand children are going to die. For what conceivable reason?

There is no real immortality in leaving behind partial replicas of your genes to eventual go extinct.

In a sense I feel cowardly for not dying and seeing what life was about.
But the inevitability of death means you just have to sit and wait for the inevitable and creating children is not a pastime that would ameliorate this.

All of life? Who's reality? Yours or the unborn fetus? — Wallows

What facts about life for you think are irrelevant when creating a new life?

Avoiding being burnt is relevant to all life. I am really puzzled how issues life war, genocide and famine would have no impact on someones decision to have children.

It seems like a lack of sensitivity and rationality.

Even if you are not at all antinatalist there are numerous factors you could consider before creating a child. But no one has to or no one is expected to consider anything other than their own desires before creating someone else.

I have not heard anyone accusing Richard Dawkins of being depressed after he wrote this:

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

Yes, these are all terrible things; but, is this really an unbiased analysis of the world? — Wallows

I don't comprehend your notion of bias.

The fact that sticking my hand in fire will hurt does not create a bias in me. It is a factual piece of information about what reality is like.

I cannot think of a rational humane world view that can incorporate and justify famine, slavery and genocide etc.

I think that the majority of European Jews before WW2 imagined a genocide would happen but now we know this is a real crazy possibility. If they were more negative maybe they would have been more prepared. But now we have mountains of historical evidence to inform decisions.

I was depressed before I became an antinatalist it did not automatically make me antinatalist.

The depression creates antinatalism is merely an ad hominem. But it is not surprising the antinatalism would be associated with depressions because it is not a ringing endorsement of reality.

I said that her prospective parents provide that consent, — T Clark

you cannot consent on behalf of someone else. That is not their consent, wishes or desires.

The child comes to exist what ever crazy desires those might be. unfortunately most people, try and make their child agree with their beliefs and values rather than finding out the child's perspective.

is that a consent issue — Terrapin Station

I think your notion of consent issues is arbitrary.

The point is that most humans can withhold consent at some stage in their lives.

Your position seems almost evil in exploiting the fact that at some stage people can't give informed consent.

In the issue of child sexual abuse. The adult is prosecuted not vindicated because the child can't give informed consent.

But the overall issue is that at some stage most humans can withhold their consent from anything. Your position apparently relies on a complete failure of your imagination so that you cannot imagine that anyone other than yourself could have differing desires and values.

If I ever did hypothetical have a child I would have no problem understanding that they are not me and will have separate and individual desires. I would not expect them to endorse any of my values or consider me an expert in anything simply because I had a reproductive capacity.

where you have an option to stick your hand in a fire and choose to, or where someone is offering a fire to you to stick your hand in — Terrapin Station

This is a bizarre notion of consent issues.

A unconscious person can not express their consent on whether they would like their hand stuck in a fire. Unconscious people can never express an opinion so this period of inability to voice consent does not entail any rights or justifications for someone else to do something to them

Your positions entails that as soon as someone is unconscious or asleep then their inability to consent justifies whatever you do to them.

Their are facts such as facts about the pain of burns that can be conceptually generalized to future humans

What facts? — Wallows

The facts of depression suicide, millions of people dying in war and slavery and genocides.

I'm not making this up. It's history Syrian civil war ISIS,North Korea,Iran etc

Antinatalism in my opinion is also an enlightened view on the true nature and connotations of creating life.
— Andrew4Handel

What do you mean by that? — Wallows

I have not met any antinatalist who has reached the position in a fit of temper or angst. People in the community are often the most healthily skeptical about social norms and not just conformist followers.

OK, so is this depression and anxiety speaking or an unbiased and 'objective' analysis of the current state of affairs in the world? — Wallows

How is reading about the holocaust and other mass murders and tortures depression and not just an acceptance of harsh brutal facts?

I think I became antinatalist at 11/12 when I watched "Escape from Sobibor" about the Holocaust and I wasn't depressed then. Ironical I was being bullied by class mates who had watched the film, directly after in the changing rooms.

I see no reason why experience should not be a deterrent or ethical inhibition to having children. I know that several of the people that bullied me and watched that film have gone on to have children whilst leaving me with long term trauma.

it's not an action directly performed on someone by some other agent. Consent is only an issue for that in my opinion. — Terrapin Station

I find your position unbelievable and implausible.

I don't to need to stick my hand in a fire to know i would not consent to having my hand stuck in a fire. the future is speculation and doesn't exist but it is easy to assess what we might desire in the future.

If people have a genetically transmittable illness they can assess whether or not future offspring might want to inherit that disease and this happens and people use contraceptives or have abortions.

There is a lot of evidence against your position such as contraception and any other means of birth prevention. People successfully try and prevent births due to future connotations.

In my own experience antinatalism is based on the reality of suffering.

Depression,anxiety, schizophrenia, two world wars, the holocaust slavery, cancer. MS etc . Noone has a right to inflict this on anyone or expose them to it and also to shore up gross global inequality.

I am am impressed that the Antinatalism Reddit now has 32 thousand subscribers.

Antinatalism in my opinion is also an enlightened view on the true nature and connotations of creating life.

Okay, but you can't really be selective about it. If you're going to argue that kids need to consent to their situation, you're opening up the door to consent about everything. — Terrapin Station

My position is that none consented to being born and after coming to exist they did not consent to anything unless they explicitly consent to it.

To me that withholds legitimacy from any social, familial or political structure that someone withholds their consent from.

My older brother has had MS in its severe form for 20 years that has left him helpless and paralyzed. I can't imagine anyone consenting to that.

I think the case of what people might consent to is highly speculative a deeply problematic.

This is true of any species — Possibility

I think the only species capable of reflecting on the ramifications of having children (and we have consistently failed to do this) is humans.

There are many different models of reproduction with varying proposed levels of sentience.

Before we might have children we have a huge amount of information to refer to before we make that decision. People act like having children is inevitable when it certainly isn't.

If you bring children into a negative situation (most people do) then you have already failed in my opinion to prove some kind of parental authority/responsibility regardless of the lack of capacities of children.

Despite the limits of children it is adults that are causing the most violence, mayhem and prejudice etc.