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David Hume, a Scottish philosopher famously made a brilliant observation that you cannot get an “is” from an “ought”, simply put you cannot get a prescription on what we ought to do from the way something is. Now, in your thread, you said childbirth is matter of biology. https://twitter.com/professor_hulk_/status/1347547771990110208
But biology is a description of what is and not a prescription of what should or ought to be done. That is why whether or not people should continue giving birth is a philosophical issue and not a biological one. Evolution is not sentient, it doesn’t care, the only aim is
reproduction. Because evolution is a description of what is, that is a descriptive fact of the universe, it doesn’t explicitly tell us what we ought to do. Now to another point, antinatalism is not simplistic to imagine that people will stop having children.
If you know anything about the way humans behave, you know that that’s impossible. Even trying to enforce it will lead to the opposite effect. That being said, antinatalism can be said to be a beacon to draw people to the harsh reality of existence and really contemplate
why they want to have children. There’s no reason that’s not a selfish reason to have children, this doesn’t mean that selfishness is ultimately bad here. It just means that you have to make the choice knowing that you bear the consequences for your actions.
If you can show that existence is better than non-existence then, at very least, we have an objective metric to say that bringing a sentient being to the world to suffer is justified, but I don’t think that anyone can show that.
It’s literally a miracle to be alive but if I had the choice with a full knowledge of what life is, at least from my perspective, I’ll choose non-existence. The point is that there’s no choice in the matter and bringing a being to suffer in the world on your own biological whims
or socio-cultural pressures can be immoral. When people say that bringing a life into the world is selfish, it means that the decision is only made for your own desires and not of the potential person.
