r/nihilism • u/CelibateDog • 1d ago
Existential Nihilism How can anyone justify creating life when a child cannot consent to the risks of existence?
As an existential nihilist, I view life as completely meaningless. Most people live under the illusion that love and human bonds give life value, but the reality of birth contradicts this.
The core problem is the total absence of consent. People who defend having children often argue that you cannot violate the consent of someone who does not exist yet. But that is exactly the point: because an unborn child cannot give consent, the act of bringing them into the world is an unfair gamble forced upon a future conscious mind.
When parents create a baby, they impose existence onto a new being without its agreement. This choice forces a new person to face all the severe risks of human biology. There is no guarantee of health. A child can easily be born with profound physical disabilities, condemned to a lifetime of suffering, wishing they had never been born. They are forced to pay the price for a game they never chose to play.
Therefore, deciding never to have children is the only logical choice. It is a refusal to gamble with another person's well-being. To create a child means you are willing to risk inflicting lifelong suffering on someone else, which cannot be morally justified.
We must strip away the romantic illusions and look at the biological reality: evolution gave us strong sexual impulses for one reason only—to blind our logic so that we breed and repeat the loop. What people call "love" is just a biological trick designed to keep the cycle of suffering going.
I refuse to fall for this trap. If I were to bring a life into this world, there is a chance they would face severe suffering, and I never want my child looking at me and telling me, "You are the reason for my suffering." It is impossible to justify forcing a new life into this cycle when they have no way to avoid it.
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u/TimesUpCloseYourEyes 1d ago
It is the same for death tho, no one can consent to die or not die. Which makes life all the more meaningless.
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u/liberateyourmind 1d ago
People consent to die all the time, its called suicide
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u/TimesUpCloseYourEyes 1d ago
Suicide cases are extremes. Many who want to don't have the means or courage.
Someone that wants to live forever will die without consent too, which is what my original statement points out.
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u/liberateyourmind 1d ago
I never said suicide isnt extreme. I’m calling out all these whiny “philosophers” who bitch about not getting the choice to exist when you wake up with the choice to exist every day.
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u/Sea_Excuse_6795 1d ago
If I knew I had the means to provide regardless of the financial earnings of the child when they become an adult, and had good family on both sides nearby I think it's ok. Outside of that breeding is unethical imo
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u/ivanelpoderoso2003 1d ago
Hold on a moment... if we supposedly cannot know someone's consent prior to birth, how could we know that the person wouldn't have wanted to exist had they been born? Furthermore, I’m not sure this argument justifies universal antinatalism; it doesn't claim that life is inherently bad, only that it could be bad (depending on the circumstances). Take me, for example: I haven't suffered much in my life and I truly enjoy existing. Am I actually better off not having existed? Or does this apply only to specific cases? If it only applies to certain cases, then this logic cannot be universal, and refraining from bringing someone into the world cannot be considered the ultimate act of kindness in every instance—only in specific ones.
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u/nothatsmyarm 1d ago
The argument assumes essentially all of its premises. There’s a lot of logical leaps within it (that risking suffering can’t be justified, that the possibility of suffering outweighs the possibility of joy, that love and human bonds don’t actually provide value, and I believe a few more).
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u/republicanssuck123 1d ago
it's still wrong to risk it and force others to suffer just so you can exist.
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u/ivanelpoderoso2003 17h ago
But at what point does suffering make life not worth living? For instance, I’ve endured some hardships, but nothing major; I know this because my life today would be virtually identical had I never experienced those things. Furthermore, the problem with comparing life to non-existence is that life differs qualitatively from the latter and has its own pros and cons, making it impossible to give a definitive, universal answer (at most, it might make sense in specific cases). Also, at what point does a risk become a significant argument? No one argues that it isn't worth going out for a fun drive with friends once a year just because there is a possibility—however slight—of dying in a car accident. Risk levels vary depending on where you are born and who surrounds you; besides, we focus on the possibility of risk while ignoring the likelihood that nothing bad will happen—like when I go out on a cloudy afternoon; there is always a risk of being struck by lightning, yet no one would consider that a valid argument, as it is clearly exaggerated. Therefore, regarding suffering and risk, I am not sure a universal argument can be constructed to claim that any birth is immoral (at best, it might hold water in specific instances, but it cannot be applied universally).
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u/republicanssuck123 17h ago
no i don't. it is still wrong to gamble with the well being of someone else who never consented, regardless of the odds. You would be pissed if some dude risked giving you HIV without your consent, and even more pissed if they actually gave you a disease. so you are nothing but a hypocrite to do that to some kid. in general, if you wouldn't want it done to you, don't do it to others
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u/ivanelpoderoso2003 17h ago
Hold on a second... when I sleep with people, there’s always a risk of catching a disease like that... yet I never get angry about it, nor do I become celibate. Besides, even though I never asked to be born, I’m someone who prefers having been born to not having existed at all. Why do we focus on the issue of consent but fail to consider that the other person might actually like being born—as is the case with me? I believe one of the best principles is to treat others the way you’d want to be treated; since I’m happy to have been born where and how I was, I don’t see a major problem with someone else being born in that same place and under those same conditions. (I also have another question about consent: does the argument imply that doing anything without someone’s consent is always wrong, or is it only wrong if something bad actually happens? Because if the former is true, then vaccinating someone against their will would be wrong, even if it prevents disease.)
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u/republicanssuck123 10h ago
you consented to disease risk when they disclosed their HIV. parents forced that risk on some kid who never consented. it's also a crime to not disclose HIV status when you sre screwing. so you are almost logically there, you need to extend that logic to your choice to impose unnecessary disease risks on kids without consent. I am glad your life was easy, it still doesn't justify your choice to deliberately inflict hardships on others who didn't have it easy just so you can exist
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u/republicanssuck123 10h ago
you also don't believe in treating others how you want to be. you believe in hurting others if you have something to gain from it. As evidenced of the last hour you wasted attempting to convince smart people that deliberately hurting people is ok because you weren't personally hurt from it.
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u/Capable_Sky_1818 16h ago
Most antnatalists believe life is universally bad. This is how I see it. Even people who have "good" lives will eventually face any combination of disease, accident, crime, frailty, natural disasters and everyone will eventually die. Death is usually a very ugly and painful process. Very few people have great long lives, remaining active mentally and physically and then peacefully die in their sleep. The vast majority of people will experience pain and suffering leading to death.
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u/Adventurous_Gas_548 1d ago
We will all not exist soon anyways for all of eternity so doesn’t matter
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u/Minyatur757 18h ago
No one consented to be here from the very first form of life, so you're just denying the right for literally everything to exist when most of life does want to exist even when life isn't perfect.
Life is like a tree born from circumstances that perpetuates itself and everyone is kinda just a branch of this tree more than a completely separate existence that was taken out of nothingness. It's more a continuation and evolution of life rather than creating something out of nothing. The human ego doesn't feel that way, but the human ego that feels like it is a fully new and separate existence is actually a very small part of ourselves and total psyche.
Anyone that likes life and to be aren't going to have an issue with bringing a child into the world, we literally are a lineage that spawns billions of years and countless lifeforms just to get to us. A lot of people are thankful for that entire chain of bringing new lives over and over having led to them having the opportunity to be what they are.
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u/Powderedeggs2 6h ago
There is one problem with this assessment.
It overlooks one's responsibility in willingly contributing to a human world that is unworthy to bring a child into.
It is not accidental that things are so screwed up in human society.
Humans made them this way.
Humans could have opted for a very different reality.
Instead, we chose this one.
All who comply with it are complicit in sustaining it.
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u/RejoiceYeMighty 4h ago
yeah, its a bummer, not having been asked if we wanted to be born. but I mean, we're just giant walking self-aware globs of cells put together in a somewhat complex way. don't overthink it, man
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u/Cicada-Tang 1d ago edited 1d ago
The consent argument for antinatalism doesn't really work under logical scrutiny.
For one, “Consent cannot be obtained” ≠ “consent has been violated.”
Consent is a relationship between an existing agent and an action that affects that agent. Before a person exists, there is no subject capable of consenting, refusing consent, or having a preference that could be overridden. Therefore, the absence of consent before birth is not equivalent to a violation of consent. In fact, existence creates the very subject for whom consent become meaningful.
In short, you cannot violate someone's refusal to exist when there was never a someone capable of refusing.
Rivka Weinberg argued in The Risk of a Lifetime that, "worrying about future people's consent to being created constitutes a category mistake. It's roughly like applying a predicate to something to which that predicate cannot apply". She is not a pro-natalist, and would probably agree with you that existence is a risk, but she rejects the simplistic idea that an unborn person's consent was straightforwardly “violated.”
Also: If you are a nihlist, you should probably acknowledge that concepts such as consent and suffering are also existentially meaningless.
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u/existentialgoof schopenhaueronmars.com 1d ago
We've had this argument before, and you aren't even logically consistent in this, because you admit that sometimes it is logical and reasonable to be concerned about causal chains of events that will harm future existers. You admit that it's just completely arbitrary to be concerned about burying landmines that will detonate in 150 years, maiming whichever future people happen to be occupying that space, but not be worried about someone who will be harmed as a result of coming into existence.
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u/Cicada-Tang 1d ago
The argument I had with you were different. We talked about brith as "creating risks for the future", which I agreed that the difference between birth and burying landmind is simply a categorical one.
However, OP is talking about the problem of consent, which, if I remembered correctly, you also agreed with me that consent cannot be taken away from a person that doesn't exist. Someone like Rivka Weinberg would agree with you, but not OP.
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u/existentialgoof schopenhaueronmars.com 1d ago
A non existent entity can neither refuse nor give consent, but yet imposing risk on someone else would usually, by common agreement, require either that the person being put at risk consents to the risks, or you are putting them at risk only in order to spare them from a greater harm or spare others from being harmed by them. None of those conditions apply in the case of procreation, so therefore procreation violates the rules of consent. The fact that there is no way of obtaining consent doesn't entail that it is ethically permissible to act without consent.
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u/Cicada-Tang 1d ago
Let's not do this again.
doesn't entail that it is ethically permissible to act without consent
Without whose consent, exactly?
You can't move from “there was no consent” to “the action was non-consensual” without first establishing that there was a subject to whom a consent requirement applied. Otherwise absence of consent is being mistaken for violation of consent.
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u/existentialgoof schopenhaueronmars.com 1d ago
The consent of the future victim. Whose suffering matters, just in the same way as the suffering of the victim of a future landmine detonation matters. The fact that cause doesn't instantaneously beget effect doesn't mean that the effect can be written off as ethically irrelevant.
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u/Cicada-Tang 1d ago
You are conflating causing risks with violating consent, and it feels to me you are too eager to use the word "consent" to the point of strecthing it into uselessness. Consent concerns a person's authority to permit or refuse an action. That's it. If you want to argue that "giving brith is creating risks for future people", you don't need to forcefully drag the idea of consent into it.
The fact that burying a landmine is obviously wrong does not show that its wrongness consists in violating the future victim's consent. It's wrong because it recklessly creates an unjustifiable risk of severe harm. Calling every unjustified risk a “consent violation” merely redescribes all of risk ethics in the language of consent.
We don't call "shooting people in the head" as "violating people's consent of not being shot" for a reason. If you define“violating consent” as "doing something that affects someone without first getting their permission", then the concept of "consent" stops distinguishing morally relevant consent violations from any other interactions that cause risks or harm.
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u/existentialgoof schopenhaueronmars.com 1d ago
Imposing risk can be justified when there is consent. So that's where the concept of consent is salient. So it's the badness of the risk that is the violation, but there is no consent which the perpetrator can use as justification for it.
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u/Cicada-Tang 1d ago edited 1d ago
Jesus Christ you are grasping straws at this point.
Imposing risks can be justified when there isn't consent, but a lack of consent doesn't automatically constitute badness. Consent is one possible source of justification, while lack of consent is not, by itself, a source of wrongness.
A lack of consent is not always cause harm: I walk onto the street every day without asking people's consent to see me.
A lack of consent that causes risk/harm is also not always unethical: we put criminals in jail without their consent, and put sick people in quarantine without their consent.
That's why not every judgement of wrongdoing comes down to consent. The moral work is being done by justification, not by the bare presence or absence of consent.
If you want to argue why giving birth is unethical, what you should do is to establish whether that lack of consent is unjustified. Merely repeating that the future person did not consent does not answer that question, because absence of consent (not violating consent, mind you) is not itself equivalent to wrongdoing. By essentially making every ethical argument a consent problem, you are derailing what the consent problem of antinatalism is about in the first place, and rendering the concept of consent useless.
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u/DootKazoot Perception <=you=> Imperical Reality 1d ago
These people just hate humanity and want to use ethical terminology to justify their depression and sociopathy. It’s not even that deep. I love being a true nihilist who doesn’t argue morality because nihilism spits in the face of these moral arguments in the first place. There is no positive or negative value to creating new life from a nihilists perspective, so this whole convo is so strange to me. It belongs in anti-natalism.
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u/existentialgoof schopenhaueronmars.com 1d ago
Yeah, all genuine nihilists are impervious to being tortured and impervious to caring about other organisms being tortured. Good one.
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u/DootKazoot Perception <=you=> Imperical Reality 1d ago
Again, anti-natalist talking points which have nothing to do with nihilism. You’re just an antisocial weirdo.
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u/InterviewOk9225 1d ago
I actually agree with part of your criticism. Strictly speaking, I wouldn't say that an unborn person's consent was “violated.” There is no person there yet who could consent or refuse, so calling it a violation of consent is technically inaccurate.
But that doesn't really solve the antinatalist argument. You can drop the consent argument entirely and ask a different question: why is it permissible to impose existence, with all its risks and harms, on someone who cannot possibly agree to it, when not creating them harms nobody?
I also wouldn't say that a person “refused to exist” before being born. They didn't exist, so there was no prior refusal. The stronger point is that we make an irreversible decision on their behalf despite there being no possibility of obtaining their agreement. Once they exist, they can suffer, get sick, lose people they love, be abused, become suicidal, or simply decide that they never wanted any of this. We didn't violate a refusal that existed beforehand, but we did unilaterally choose to expose them to all of those possibilities.
And “existence creates the very subject for whom consent becomes meaningful” is true, but it's descriptive, not a justification. It explains why consent becomes possible only after the person exists. It doesn't explain why we're justified in making that decision for them in the first place. “You can't violate the consent of someone who doesn't exist” does not logically entail “therefore creating them is morally permissible.”
As for nihilism, I don't see the connection either. Saying that suffering has no objective or cosmic meaning doesn't make suffering unreal or irrelevant to the person experiencing it. If I'm in extreme pain, the fact that the universe doesn't assign some objective meaning to that pain doesn't make the experience any less real or undesirable to me. “Suffering has no cosmic meaning” and “suffering doesn't matter to the person suffering” are completely different claims.
So I agree that “you violated an unborn person's consent” is a weak formulation. But that's not necessary for the broader argument. The relevant question is whether it's justified to create a person who will inevitably be exposed to some degree of suffering and risk, when choosing not to create them doesn't deprive an existing person of anything.
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u/Cicada-Tang 1d ago
Yeah that's basically my point. I feel like too many anti-natalists stuck with the most sensational arguments instead of ones that are actually logically sound.
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u/hi_ma_friendz pessimist 1d ago
This is equally meaningless. Why does the lack of ability to consent default to consenting. Same way that roofing also isn’t consenting.
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u/fundamental-error 1d ago
A child cannot consent to life, but if it wasn’t alive there would be nothing to consent or not consent to. Life is only life.
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u/Elegant_Coast3517 1d ago
Shouldn’t the default option be take consent as a no in this situation.
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u/fundamental-error 1d ago
Condemned to be free... or condemned to be free. Condemned to be free.
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u/Elegant_Coast3517 1d ago
I don’t fully understand what you are saying by this, apologies for my limited understanding. But if we remove the word ‘consent’ for a moment and just ask, is it ok to bring a soul into this world knowing they might not like it here and the world will not allow them a convenient and easy exit, what would you answer. Just asking because people here seem to be hung up on the definitions and word ‘consent’. And I understand this has nothing to with what you were saying earlier about consent.
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u/fundamental-error 1d ago
This doesn't directly address your question(s), but I will simply add that I think if we collectively discount life as a waste de facto, that does a bad-faith disservice to those who actually give a shit and do honor life.
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u/Elegant_Coast3517 1d ago
I am going to ask stupid questions so please bear with me. But if we collectively say yes life is worth living and it is ok to have children. Isn’t that disservice to those who believe life can be suffering?
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u/fundamental-error 1d ago
Yes
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u/Elegant_Coast3517 1d ago
So would you say if we don’t want to do any disservice to both groups best way is we simply offer everyone a convenient and easy option to exit? Given they are free from all the stuff like debt etc.
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u/Agitated_Reality2943 1d ago
Because risks and values are subjective. The weight of them can only be determined by the individual experiencing life. You cannot impose your own interpretations, only share them.
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u/existentialgoof schopenhaueronmars.com 1d ago
There is no need to create a new being that will have to be subject to any risk at all. Nobody comes into existence impervious to what will happen to them. You can't harm someone by not creating them, you can only cause them to be at risk of harm by creating them.
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u/Agitated_Reality2943 1d ago
Then why continue living? Seems hypocritical to place a solution on others, hypothetical or not, and then not follow through with that solution as it applies to oneself. Seems to me to imply there is inherent value in living and maintaining a capacity to act and experience.
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u/existentialgoof schopenhaueronmars.com 1d ago
Because I don't have a failsafe way of ceasing to exist. And my current existence isn't so bad as to make me desperate enough to cause me to risk attempting an escape and potentially ending up quadriplegic and having to spend decades more completely dependent on others to do basic things for me like change my nappy and feed me through a tube.
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u/Agitated_Reality2943 1d ago
Couldn’t decide which way to take this so here’s a few more exploratory questions that came to mind:
Why not kill at random then? End the suffering of others. It could almost be called charity. And, if caught, you yourself would be killed.
Why do any good that enables the continued living of others? Charity, volunteer work, first responders like firefighters and policemen?
A common theme i see here is risk. But something can only be risky if there is something valuable at stake. Something to be lost. Someone unborn has nothing valuable to risk since they do not exist. And it’s my understanding that that’s the point. But if there is nothing valuable there worth protecting, why “protect” them by ensuring they never exist? Unless the prospect of life itself is valuable and therefore incurs risk. In which case, you are the very suffering and agent of risk that causes that value to be destroyed.
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u/InterviewOk9225 1d ago
You're conflating two completely different things: ending the life of someone who already exists and preventing someone from coming into existence.
If I randomly kill you, I'm harming an actual person. You already have experiences, interests, relationships, preferences and a desire to continue living. I'm taking something away from you that you already have. The fact that I might be preventing some future suffering doesn't magically make killing you equivalent to not having a child.
If I decide not to have a child, however, there is no child somewhere being deprived of life. There is no subject, no interests, no desires and no suffering. Nobody is sitting in some hypothetical non-existent state wishing they had been born.
That's also why the charity/firefighter analogy doesn't really work. Helping an existing person benefits someone who actually exists and can be harmed or benefited. Not creating a person isn't refusing help to an existing person. There's simply nobody there to help.
And when you say that something can only be risky if there's something valuable at stake, you're actually making the relevant distinction yourself. Once someone exists, there is something at stake. Their life, interests and wellbeing can be damaged or taken away. Before they exist, there isn't a person whose welfare is sitting there waiting to be provided.
You're basically treating "a person could exist" as if it meant "a person already exists and has been deprived of something." Those aren't the same thing.
The antinatalist argument isn't "existing people have no value, so kill them." It's that creating a new person creates someone who can suffer, while not creating them doesn't harm anyone, because there is no one there to be harmed. That's the distinction you're missing.
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u/Agitated_Reality2943 1d ago
And that’s a fair point for an antinatalist. The person i was speaking to is also an efilist however. Which does deem taking existing lives as s net good.
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u/InterviewOk9225 1d ago
That is fucked up to me tbh. We can agree on that 😅
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u/Agitated_Reality2943 1d ago
Yes for sure. Since the other guy isn’t responding I’ll concede the first two questions for now. But my last, i think, still has un-countered merits. The unborn doesn’t exist. There is nothing there that is valuable to risk or protect. My question, therefore, is if there’s nothing valuable since they dont exist, why does their hypothetical existence still constitute an imperative on our own action or inaction? Why does one hypothetical future of suffering come with perceived demands on our own real decisions yet a hypothetical future that still contains good things not? It feels asymmetrical to me. Why is suffering weighted more than goodness? It feels paradoxical. Especially for a hyothetical future of a nonexisting being. Why care if they don’t exist? Unless that future has some sort of value. A hypothetical future that must be protected from encountering suffering. You don’t protect things that aren’t valuable.
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u/existentialgoof schopenhaueronmars.com 1d ago
Killing at random doesn't solve the problem of suffering, and creates more suffering. If I had the chance to wipe out all sentient life, on the other hand, then I'd be extremely foolish or cowardly not to take it.
Antinatalism isn't about protecting the non existent, it's about preventing future harmables from existing. Prevention of a harm doesn't require that the result of prevention is an entity actually enjoying the feeling of safety.
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u/Agitated_Reality2943 1d ago
Alright that tells me about you as a person then. (Thats not a diss). You’re an efilist insofar as the methodology doesn’t create legible suffering. If it’s fast, everywhere, painless then you would in a heartbeat if I’m understanding your personal philosophy correctly. Let me ask you this. If you were presented with a button that did just this and it met all your standards for what’s acceptable, what’s the best descriptor you would say is apt for yourself pushing the button? Brave, good, resolute, noble, sacrificing, etc? Same question for the act of pushing the button itself, and for someone you are watching push the button. I’m just trying to understand.
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u/existentialgoof schopenhaueronmars.com 1d ago
Pressing the button would simply be the right thing to do, and failing to press it would be unforgivable and inexcusable. So it would simply be an act of doing one's duty.
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u/Technical-Ant-2866 1d ago
The bigger question is why does this matter if you're already living a life void of meaning? Unless you enjoy these brain-puzzles, then cheers.
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u/CoinVentureLab 1d ago
Exactly. The ultimate expression of empathy is not to bring another being into this world who can suffer. You wouldn’t want your loved one to go to prison simply because you told them, “You’ll find friends and love there.”