One glance at the newspaper can make you ponder on the validity of an anti-natalist view of life. There isn’t much left to say on those lines except that a world so crowded and grieved doesn’t really make a nice place to repopulate. Rajit Roy
“Do you want to make kids, my love?”, asked the sensual woman wrapped up in her lover’s bare flesh. “It’s a sin to procreate”, answered the philosophy student who had just finished his critical treatise on David Benatar's works. Since the dawn of civilization, we have been told about love and sex in the context of one universal consequence – procreation, childbirth, reproduction, whatever you may call it. This led to a complete ignorance of the ethics of bearing a child in a world as tormented and disfigured as todays. However, thanks to some compelling commentary from modern philosophers and thinkers, the idea of anti-natalism has gained quite a traction in popular culture. Be it David Benatar’s Better Never To Have Been or the dark philosophical undertones in Nic Pizzolato’s True Detective, the unacceptance of procreating sentience appears quite an affirming mainstream debate now. Is it really necessary to participate in the creation of a child? Is it ethically right to bring sentient beings into this world of suffering? Pessimistic as these questions might seem, they do need a skeptical inquiry from a logical point of view. Going by Darwin’s laws, reproduction is the only way by which a species ensures its survival in the web of life. However, our modern knowledge of genetics provides a much larger picture. It is the genes that really replicate themselves and populate the ecosystem with copies of information coded and conserved evolutionarily. Organisms go through a phase of sentience in which they thrive and compete with others to make sure they live long enough to bear offsprings that carry forward the genetic information in the same repetitive cycle. With animals, we aren’t yet sure how much suffering they can experience emotionally and whether they can actually contemplate on the reason of their being. Humans, however, are an exceptionally sentient race. We have individuals who are capable of retrospection about their own state of existence. This paradox compels us to ask – Is it moral to create such perceptive organisms without consent? (Sounds crazy, but worth a thought. Think about the monster in Frankenstein who abhors his own existence and goes on a quest to find his creator and punish him.) Moreover, there’s a more social context to this philosophy. One glance at the newspaper can make you ponder on the validity of an anti-natalist view of life. There isn’t much left to say on those lines except that a world so crowded and grieved doesn’t really make a nice place to repopulate. Rather than condemning suicides and crimes of existential passion, would it not be far better to not make people in the first place and then try to mend the world piece by piece, if that at all is possible? Perhaps it's high time we start talking about natalism in general rather than family planning. Condom ads can be made more creative and yes, philosophical!
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Rajit Roy
An existential romantic, an agnostic and a prospective biologist. Archives
September 2018
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