Mortality as the horizon of every life. Essays on death, dying, and what acknowledging finitude does to the way we live.
Derek Parfit's Non-Identity Problem challenges the idea that creating a person can be wrong if that person has a life worth living, posing a significant hurdle for antinatalist arguments.
This essay explores the most compelling counterarguments to antinatalism, from appeals to gratitude to the potential for future good, and articulates why these objections ultimately fail to overcome the ethical asymmetry of existence.
If God is all-loving and all-powerful, how can we justify creating new beings into a world rife with suffering? This essay questions theological defenses of procreation in light of the problem of evil.
Suffering-focused ethics posits that the alleviation of pain is a more urgent moral duty than the promotion of happiness. This essay defends that position.
Is non-existence preferable to a life of absurdity? We pit Camus, Sartre, and Cioran against each other on the question of birth.
David Benatar’s asymmetry argument posits that coming into existence is always a harm because the absence of pain is good, but the absence of pleasure is merely not bad. This essay critically examines his argument.
To be born is a calamity. We explore Emil Cioran's radical pessimism and the literary expression of antinatalism in his aphoristic work, "The Trouble with Being Born."
Pronatalism is not a biological imperative but a deeply ingrained ideology. This essay unpacks the cultural, religious, and economic machinery that treats procreation as a default setting for human life.
A philosophical examination of the foremost counterarguments to antinatalism, from Pollyannaism to future-good, and a reasoned refutation of each.
Rising rates of mental illness and alienation in late modernity are not merely social or political problems; they are existential symptoms of a condition that antinatalist philosophers argue is inherent to conscious existence itself.