Parents Cannot "Do No Harm"

Or "The Anti-Natalists are Right [But]"

Pro-natalism is fundamentally incompatible with a desire to avoid causing suffering, and we’d be better off if we could be clearer about that. Or perhaps not, having babies is a complex, many-levered process and no one knows how to make it happen more.

A really common and even admirable response to pain is to resolve to protect yourself from it, permanently, to never let something like that happen again. An almost equally common response globalizes that - starts using the distress and powerlessness you likely felt in experiencing pain to make a plan for how you could build a world where no one experienced the pain you just did, ever again.

And I will be as cautious as my somehow-still-sick-after-three-weeks-brain knows how to be: that impulse to improve the world by reducing suffering is deeply good. It has produced a lot of significant, positive outcomes, sometimes for billions of people. Applying human brainpower to making fewer people go through a smaller and smaller number of life mangles can be considered a major subset of our great achievements as a species.

It’s a wonderful toolkit in a vast moral toolbox that humanity has generated over our several-hundred-thousand-year stay on this planet. I think we would be worse off if we tried to dispense with it. What then needs to be analyzed about it, criticized about it, at all? The problem is that it makes for a flimsy, cowardly values system, if unaccompanied by other principles.

Because, if you’re paying attention, you will start to notice that by far the safest and most guaranteed way to reduce suffering is to reduce the number of people, specifically by not giving birth to any of them.

Obviously killing extant people increases suffering, so you would never go there unless you’re feeling Swiftian.

But birthing people, well, that is a morally weighty decision that is genuinely guaranteed to cause pain, distress, and suffering of all kinds - mental, physical, emotional.

And people, to their credit, notice this. And it tends to even make them angry, when they’re met with pro-natalists who seem desperately to want to pretend otherwise.

The pro-natalists are correct of course to say that people are good, on the whole (funny as it may be to hear this from people who think John Locke’s tabula rasa was a jejune view of humanity, to say nothing of Rousseau’s theory of natural goodness). They’re correct to note that having children has brought meaning to the vast majority of our ancestors for millennia, and that the average person is more likely than not to find the same joy, meaning, and satisfaction in having children of their own.

The problem is that the pro-natalists want *that* to be the end of the story. Look at the good, they say, and don’t worry your pretty, silly head about this “bad” They keep telling you is out there.

It’s not hard to see how anti-natalism and some of its cousins (I’m not even sure if I believe people are *solely* abstaining from pregnancy on the basis of climate change but I’ve been told they are) arose around a sense that the information environment was not being forthcoming, even outright lying, about the inherent nature of suffering in human life.

And I’m here to say now, in public, that the anti-natalists are right. There is no way to create a human life without creating more suffering. Not for the mother, not for the child. I confess that I’m (and have been for years) instantly turned off by pro-natalist rhetoric that tries to turn the human project into a bouquet of sunbeams and rainbows. It’s so alien as to be magnetically repulsive, a grinning skull beckoning you to vertiginous drop while encouraging you to think of the refreshing pool at the bottom.

To do anything of note, I think, is usually to risk contributing to human suffering. It’s rare to do something good that couldn’t branch off at a thousand splintering joints into something harmful. That is a difficult pill to swallow, i think, and for good reason. We should not be excusing our negligence, our oversights, our flaws by saying all good things require the risk of bad, pointing at our omelettes when asked to account for our broken eggs.

It remains a truth to be navigated nonetheless. There is minimal good you can do while only hoping to avoid harm. If that’s the only moral good you care about, you can easily justify doing less of this and less of that, shrinking your sphere of influence until it hardly touches the mosquitoes that raise itchy bumps on your arms. I may be scratching, moral hippocrates within you says, but I am good.

There are a few paths that are navigated by most of us in one way or another that hold more moral weight than most. What we do for our jobs, which is another way to say what we spend most of our time doing. Whether and Whom we marry. Whether we have children, and How many.

Each of these will almost definitely result in suffering for other people, even under the best of circumstances, with the best of intentions, and making the best choices with the best information you had at the time.

Sometimes, even the best of decisions will result in painful losses that could not have been predicted or avoided.

This is the nature of life, and it’s a reality we are asked to deal with over and over again, even when we have rare advantages (and more frequently when we do not).

Why do life at all, then.

A disclaimer: you do not have to. You can choose to die, and you can choose to go without children, and I would never try to tell you that I know better than you do about those decisions - they weigh too much for me to take them out of your hands.

If you are *interested* in why people feel differently - indeed, if you’re one of the many, many people who is in fact begging the world to give you a reason to Do Life At All Despite The Suffering - I have answers for you, albeit answers that will only be disappointing if you currently feel the need to ask this question.

There are greater moral values than avoiding suffering. Creating good is better than avoiding pain. Writing a beautiful song is better than never making an unattractive sound on a musical instrument. Making a friendship is better than never looking stupid in front of another person. Falling in love - and I had a hard, hard time with this one so I won’t blame you at all if you don’t believe me - is better than avoiding the pain that love’s counterfeits will steal from you.

There’s a pattern here that I am unsubtly setting up. The good usually lies beyond the suffering, and in many cases the good and the suffering are hopelessly braided together.

Avoiding suffering is a good starter watchword, but I think a better replacement is to Make Your Suffering Count.

Because suffering cannot be avoided writ large, you should - wherever you can - choose suffering, upfront, that pays dividends you want later. Make the hideous sounds on your violin so that you can make the beautiful ones. Look like a fool in front of friends so you can one day soothe a loved one in need. And yes, if you feel called to it, have a child, a whole universe of both good and suffering, that they can be part of creating good out of suffering with you.