Birth, Absurdity, and the Existential Verdict
Existentialists like Camus and Sartre affirmed life in the face of meaninglessness, but their core premises about absurdity and freedom can be read to support a more pessimistic, even antinatalist, conclusion.
- ## Introduction
The fundamental question of reproductive ethics is not *how* to have children, but *if*. Is the act of bringing a new, conscious being into the world a neutral act, a moral good, or a justifiable harm? While contemporary antinatalist philosophy, most famously articulated by David Benatar, has given this question a rigorous modern vocabulary, its conceptual roots run deep into the soil of 20th-century existentialism. Thinkers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre stared into the abyss of a meaningless universe and, in doing so, provided a powerful, if unintentional, vocabulary for questioning the very act of creation.
We are, in Martin Heidegger’s memorable term, “thrown” into existence—a non-consensual entry into a state of being we did not request. For the atheistic existentialists, this “thrownness” is not into the hands of a benevolent God, but into a silent, indifferent cosmos. This is the stage for the human drama: a desperate search for meaning in a world that offers none. Camus and Sartre, observing this condition, famously prescribed a life of heroic rebellion and self-creation. They diagnosed the disease of meaninglessness but championed a cure of defiant affirmation.
This essay will argue that the existentialist’s diagnosis of the human condition is more compelling than their prescribed cure, particularly when applied to the question of procreation. While Camus and Sartre ultimately affirmed existence, their core premises—the absurdity of the human condition, the crushing burden of freedom, the non-consensual nature of birth—provide a formidable argument *against* the creation of new existents. By reading them against a more consistently pessimistic thinker like Emil Cioran, we can see how the existentialist framework, when its implications are followed unflinchingly, leads not to a celebration of life, but to a profound skepticism about the morality of imposing it.
Core Argument
The central tension within existentialist thought, as it pertains to birth, lies between its description of our predicament and its proposed solution. The predicament is dire: existence precedes essence, meaning we are born without a predetermined purpose. We are thrust into a world devoid of intrinsic meaning and value, a confrontation Camus memorably termed “the absurd.” We are, in Sartre’s words, “condemned to be free,” burdened with the total responsibility of inventing a meaning for ourselves, a project that is fraught with anxiety (“Angst”) and doomed to terminate in the ultimate meaninglessness of death.
The existentialist solution, however, is one of radical affirmation. Camus’s absurd hero, Sisyphus, finds happiness in scorning his fate and embracing the struggle itself. Sartre’s authentic individual escapes “bad faith” by courageously creating their own essence through projects and commitments. They answer the question “Is life worth living?” with a resounding “Yes,” precisely *because* of the freedom that its meaninglessness affords.
Our core argument is that this pivot to affirmation, while perhaps a necessary psychological strategy for one already existing, fails to serve as a justification for *imposing* that existence on another. If the baseline of the human condition is an absurd struggle and a burdensome freedom, the act of forcing this condition upon a non-consenting being requires a powerful moral justification. The joy Camus’s Sisyphus finds is a coping mechanism for an unjust punishment. Was it ethical for the gods to sentence him in the first place? The existentialist heroes, Camus and Sartre, largely ignore this question of the gods—the progenitors. By focusing on the prisoner’s response, they sidestep the ethics of the imprisonment. When we re-center the question on the act of procreation, the existentialist’s own tools—their powerful descriptions of alienation, absurdity, and dread—become compelling evidence for the antinatalist case. Cioran represents the consequence of this logical follow-through, viewing the affirmation of Camus and Sartre not as heroic, but as a failure to accept the calamitous implications of their own diagnosis.
Historical Background
The existentialist preoccupation with meaninglessness did not emerge from a vacuum. It was the product of a specific historical and philosophical moment in post-war Europe. The horrors of two World Wars, the collapse of colonial empires, and the erosion of religious authority had shattered the 19th-century’s faith in progress and divine providence. The traditional answers to life’s meaning—God, nation, universal morality—no longer seemed tenable. Into this void stepped the existentialists, offering a framework for living in a world “disenchanted,” to use Max Weber’s term.
However, the philosophical groundwork for this disenchantment was laid much earlier. Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in the early 19th century, is the great forefather of modern philosophical pessimism. In *The World as Will and Representation*, he argued that the driving force of the universe is the Will—a blind, insatiable, non-rational striving. For conscious beings, this manifests as a constant state of desire and want, a cycle of fleeting satisfaction followed immediately by new desire and boredom. For Schopenhauer, suffering is the positive, default state of existence, while happiness is merely the negative, temporary cessation of suffering. He concluded that it would have been better not to exist at all and saw the denial of the Will-to-live as the path to salvation. This Schopenhauerian pessimism is the unacknowledged ancestor of the existentialist’s diagnosis, stripping away the metaphysical “Will” but retaining the vision of life as a relentless, often painful, striving.
In contrast to Schopenhauer’s pessimism stood Søren Kierkegaard, the father of religious existentialism. He too recognized the anxiety and despair inherent in human freedom, but his solution was a “leap of faith” into a belief in God. The atheistic existentialists, such as Sartre and Camus, rejected this solution. They accepted the despair but refused the religious consolation. Their project was to find a justification for life within the confines of a purely secular, material universe. This historical context is crucial: existentialism is an attempt to build a humanistic ethics on the ruins of metaphysics and religion. The question is whether the foundation they chose can support the weight of creating new life.
Supporting Evidence
A closer look at the key texts of existentialism reveals concepts that, while intended to inspire affirmation, can be powerfully repurposed to support a pessimistic or antinatalist critique.
**Albert Camus and the Unasked Question:** In *The Myth of Sisyphus*, Camus defines the Absurd as the confrontation between humanity’s rational demand for meaning and the “unreasonable silence of the world.” His opening line is famous: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” He asks whether life is worth living in the face of the absurd. He ultimately rejects suicide, framing it as a resignation, not a rebellion. Instead, he champions his “absurd hero”—the man who lives fully, conscious of life’s meaninglessness, and rebels against it through passion and experience. Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity only to watch it roll back down, is the ultimate absurd hero. His rebellion lies in his consciousness of his fate. Camus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
But this conclusion, while poetically compelling, sidesteps the ethical question of origins. Sisyphus’s happiness is a defiant adaptation to a state of eternal, futile labor. It does not forgive the gods who condemned him. Applying this metaphor to birth, we can celebrate an individual who finds joy in the face of life’s inherent struggles, but this does not, in itself, ethically justify the act of the progenitors who thrust them into that struggle. We can imagine the created person happy, but we must first question the act of creation.
**Jean-Paul Sartre and the Condemnation of Freedom:** Sartre’s famous dictum, “existence precedes essence,” places a radical and terrifying burden on the individual. In *Existentialism is a Humanism*, he explains that we are born as a blank slate, a “nothingness” (*néant*), and are subsequently responsible for creating our own nature—our “essence.” This freedom is absolute and inescapable. “We are condemned to be free,” he writes. This condemnation entails total responsibility for our lives, a realization that leads to profound anxiety (*angoisse*). To flee this anxiety by pretending we are not free—by blaming our circumstances or conforming to a pre-defined social role—is to live in “bad faith.”
The language Sartre uses—“condemned,” “abandoned,” “despair”—is telling. Freedom is not a gift, but a sentence. While Sartre intends for us to courageously accept this sentence and build an authentic life, the antinatalist question looms: why is it moral to impose such a condemnation on a new person? If being is a source of perpetual anxiety and a crushing burden of responsibility, initiating a new being into this state appears to be a questionable act. The Sartrean project of self-creation is a response to the problem of being; it is not a justification for causing the problem.
**Emil Cioran and the Trouble with Being Born:** Cioran is the thinker who takes the existentialist diagnosis to its logical, pessimistic conclusion. While not a systematic philosopher like Sartre, his aphoristic style in works like *The Trouble with Being Born* directly confronts the question his French contemporaries avoid. Cioran sees birth not as a gift, but as a “calamity.” He writes, “Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one’s reach.”
For Cioran, the existentialist’s talk of “heroic rebellion” is a naive romanticism. The consciousness that Sartre and Camus see as a tool for creating meaning is, for Cioran, the very source of our torment. It is the awareness of our mortality, our fragility, and our ultimate insignificance. He directly attacks the progenitors: “The culprits are not ourselves, but our parents. It is because they were unconscious that they have brought us into the world.” His work is a sustained meditation on the mistake of existence. He occupies the space left vacant by Camus and Sartre, applying their premises about a meaningless world with a consistency that leads directly to an antinatalist conclusion.
**Modern Antinatalism:** These existentialist themes resonate strongly with modern, analytic antinatalism. David Benatar’s asymmetry argument states that 1) the presence of pain is bad, and 2) the presence of pleasure is good, but that 3) the absence of pain is good, while 4) the absence of pleasure is not bad (unless someone exists to be deprived of it). Because any life, no matter how good, contains some pain, and because non-existence contains no pain, the absence of pain in non-existence is a guaranteed good. Creating a life, therefore, always causes gratuitous harm. The existentialist’s “struggle,” “dread,” and “burden of freedom” are all forms of harm that fall under Benatar’s calculus. Similarly, the horror-inflected pessimism of Thomas Ligotti, who describes consciousness as a "malignantly useless" trait, echoes Cioran’s lamentations about the tragedy of self-awareness in a purposeless universe.
Counterarguments
The most significant counterargument comes from within existentialism itself: the doctrine of affirmation. For Camus and Sartre, to refuse life because of its inherent meaninglessness and suffering is the ultimate act of bad faith or philosophical suicide. The value of life is not something to be discovered, but something to be *created*. The struggle is what forges heroism. To prevent a life from occurring is to deny that potential being the chance to engage in the noble, meaning-creating struggle. It is to prioritize the absence of pain over the possibility of joy, love, and authentically created purpose. From this perspective, antinatalism is a philosophy of fear, a pre-emptive surrender.
A second, more analytical counterargument targets the perceived harm of being born. Drawing on a line of reasoning related to Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem, this view holds that it is incoherent to speak of sparing a person from suffering by not creating them. The alternative to a specific person’s existence is not a pleasant, pain-free void for that same person, but simply non-existence. That individual is not “better off” not existing, because there is no “they” to be better off. The choice is between this particular life (with its mix of joy and suffering) and no life at all. As long as the life is likely to be “worth living” on the whole, the act of creating it is not a harm.
Finally, a pragmatic counterargument rests on empirical reality. Most people, when surveyed, report being satisfied with their lives. The existential portrait of unceasing dread and anguish, while philosophically potent, may be an inaccurate description of the average human experience. For most, the daily joys, relationships, and accomplishments—the pleasures Benatar’s asymmetry discounts—are more than sufficient to outweigh the suffering. Procreation, from this viewpoint, is a reasonable gamble that the resulting life will be, like most lives, a net positive for the person who lives it.
Rebuttals
These counterarguments, while significant, are not unassailable. The rebuttal to the existentialist affirmation is that it conflates the duties of the existing with the ethics of creation. For a person who is already alive, choosing to create meaning and affirm life is a courageous and psychologically necessary act. However, this individual duty does not generate a moral permission slip for the creator. The fact that a prisoner can learn to find happiness in their cell does not justify the act of imprisonment. The antinatalist argues that creating the need for a “heroic struggle” is precisely the harm.
The rebuttal to the non-identity counterargument involves shifting the ethical focus. The argument is not about the welfare of a non-existent entity. It is about the foreseeable consequences of the act of creation, judged by the creator. A prospective parent can reliably predict that their child will experience harms: pain, disappointment, anxiety, illness, and ultimately, death. They can also predict the child may experience joys. The antinatalist position, as articulated by Benatar, is that there is a crucial moral asymmetry: the guaranteed prevention of harm (by not creating the child) has moral precedence over providing the mere potential for joy. It is a question of risk management, and from the antinatalist view, the risk of severe suffering and death is never a justifiable one to impose on another for the sake of potential pleasure.
Finally, the rebuttal to the “good enough life” argument is twofold. First, it relies on subjective self-reporting, which is notoriously influenced by cognitive biases like the Pollyanna principle (the tendency to remember positive events more than negative ones) and adaptation (the tendency for our happiness to return to a baseline level despite major life events). Schopenhauer’s claim that happiness is merely a fleeting interruption of the default state of striving and suffering remains a powerful critique. Second, even the best lives contain immense suffering and always end in the ultimate harm of death. The question is not whether a life is “mostly good,” but whether the guaranteed harms, including annihilation, can ever be justified by the creator. For the pessimist, no amount of pleasure can ethically compensate for the imposition of suffering and mortality.
Conclusion
The great thinkers of atheistic existentialism—Camus, Sartre, and their contemporaries—bequeathed to us a profound and unsettling diagnosis of the human condition. They depicted humanity as abandoned in a silent universe, burdened with a freedom that is both our glory and our terror. They saw life as an absurd struggle against an indifferent cosmos. In response to this bleak diagnosis, they championed a humanism of defiance, urging us to create our own meaning and live with passionate, rebellious affirmation.
However, a chasm lies between the diagnosis and the cure. While their affirmation may be a necessary manual for those already thrown into being, it fails as a justification for the act of throwing. The very tools they forged to describe our predicament—the concepts of absurdity, condemnation, and thrownness—serve as the sharpest instruments for dissecting the ethics of procreation. When we turn our gaze from the existing individual’s struggle to the creator’s choice, the existentialist framework lends powerful support to the pessimistic conclusions of Cioran and the systematic antinatalism of Benatar.
Existentialism forces us to confront the reality that there is no pre-written script, no cosmic guarantor of value. From there, Camus and Sartre argued that we must write our own play. The antinatalist asks a more fundamental question: is it ethical to force another actor onto this empty stage, to bear the burden of a script that always ends in tragedy? By the existentialists’ own light, the justification for doing so remains terrifyingly, perhaps impossibly, elusive.