Introduction
The central problem of sentient life is suffering. This, moreover, is one of the defining features of sentient organisms: they can feel and react.Footnote 1 The problem discussed in this article therefore concerns not only humans, who are sentient organisms but not merely sentient organisms, but also many species of non-human animals. Regardless of whether nonhuman animals are attributed with higher forms of consciousness or only with sentience, they can experience both pain and pleasure.
The core claim of this article is that suffering is too high a price for sentient life. Every sentient organism pays that price simply by being alive, even if, as a sentient organism, it can also experience pleasant states. Even if one grants, for the sake of argument, the pronatalist assumption that life has value or meaning, that assumption would be easier to defend only in the absence of suffering. Thus, even if the process of life were itself meaningful and valuable, the absence of suffering would be a necessary condition for defending the claim that sentient life is worth starting. Once suffering is recognized as inevitable, the meaningfulness of existence becomes questionable, and the alleged advantages of sentience are undermined.
My aim is not merely to restate a familiar antinatalist conclusion but to bring antinatalist reasoning into direct conversation with bioethics and healthcare ethics. The argument developed here is that the moral burden of justification should not fall primarily on abstention from procreation but on procreative choice itself. If suffering is an unavoidable feature of sentient life, then bioethics and healthcare ethics should be more critical of the pronatalist assumptions that structure discussions of reproduction, assisted reproductive technologies, and the moral status of bringing future sentient beings into existence.
Inconveniences of being a sentient being
The burdens of being a sentient organism are associated primarily, and perhaps exclusively, with suffering. The problem is not transience or the inevitability of death. On the contrary, under present conditions, transience and death are among the few features that limit the duration of suffering. If sentient organisms were immortal or lived unusually long lives, their lives could become an even greater burden, given how burdensome they already are and how burdensome they were for previous generations, whose life expectancy was incomparably shorter than that of the current generation. From this point of view, a medical ideal centered on life extension and longevityFootnote 2 is not obviously a good ideal.Footnote 3
This is one of the mistakes of pronatalist culture, which treats death primarily as a problem. From the perspective of the antinatalism defended in this article, death can also be understood as a consolation for sentient beings because it is ultimately the only way permanently to end suffering.
The biological lives of nonhuman species are often treated, from the standpoint of biology, as beyond moral evaluation. On that view, we have no moral obligation to sympathize with animals that fall prey to predators nor to prevent such events. Perhaps, for this reason, people produce documentaries that depict the struggle and death of nonhuman animals. Analogous documentation of the moment of human death is generally considered inappropriate, may be restricted legally, and the very fact of dying is commonly treated as morally troubling. This anthropocentric way of understanding life and death interferes with a proper understanding of the process of life in nature. It is often used to support the claim that biology and natural life are morally neutral. Neither the struggle for survival nor the evolution of life is then judged to be good or bad.
Yet if we adopt an antinatalist starting point, one centered on compassion for all sentient organisms, both biological evolution and the process of life itself cease to appear morally neutral. If their essence involves suffering, struggle for survival, and the killing of the weaker by the stronger, then they are morally troubling. There is no compelling argument for the claim that a process characterized by persistent suffering and death is simply neutral. Admittedly, it is difficult to attribute guilt to living organisms other than humans for killing in order to survive. That fact, however, does not change the moral significance of suffering itself. From the point of view of any suffering sentient being, it would be better not to have to experience that suffering.
The default attitude shaped by pronatalist culture is to recognize the value of life and the value of biological existence as such. With rare exceptions, death is not regarded as desirable, as superior to life, or as a goal. As long as death is associated with suffering immediately preceding it, and as long as it signifies the end of future opportunities, it can indeed appear morally negative. However, this way of thinking about death is incomplete because it reduces death to the irreversible end of what is supposedly good. Every sentient and conscious organism knows, however, that death ends not only what is good but also what is bad. Death irreversibly ends the possibility of pleasure, but it also irreversibly ends the possibility of suffering.
This latter feature is recognized culturally only in exceptional cases, especially in relation to chronically ill people. The idea of death as relief appears when a situation is hopeless and suffering is almost unbearable.Footnote 4 Yet, these remain exceptional moments in which the relieving role of death is acknowledged. Today, it is primarily antinatalist philosophers, ethicists, and bioethicists who emphasize the irrationality of existence in light of the inevitability of suffering.Footnote 5, Footnote 6, Footnote 7, Footnote 8
This raises a basic question: what benefit does existence provide for a sentient being? In one sense, the prospect of death makes the only plausible purpose of a finite existence the experience of pleasure. It is difficult to identify any other meaning for an existence that is finite, vulnerable, and marked from birth by suffering. Life projects do not by themselves constitute the meaning of life because they remain bounded by the finitude and mortality of human beings. At most, they provide local purposes within an existence that remains globally fragile and perishable. The problem, however, is that even the limited purpose of experiencing pleasure is difficult and only intermittently attainable.
Religious systems and beliefs illustrate this point in a revealing way. They often imply that earthly life, because it is transient, is not self-sufficiently meaningful. Eternal life becomes the source of meaning within the religious worldview and moral system. In this sense, religious doctrines indirectly affirm an antinatalist intuition by suggesting that life has genuine meaning only if it neither ends nor includes suffering. The promise of life after bodily death is frequently bound up with the promise of the absence of suffering. Seen in this way, religious thought exposes the inadequacy of finite, suffering-filled life by suggesting that life has meaning only on the condition that it is both endless and free of suffering. A life that ends and suffers is therefore difficult to defend as meaningful in itself.
Advantages of not feeling anything
It is useful to distinguish between two different states in which nothing is felt. One is a state in which a formally sentient being exists but feels nothing. The other is a state in which a possible sentient organism never exists and therefore feels nothing. The first case is unusual and philosophically limited. It is difficult to explain why the life of a sentient being devoid of all feeling would be meaningful. The point is not only that such a being would be deprived of pleasure, which pronatalists often treat as one of the reasons why life is worth living, but also that social functioning and morality presuppose an ability to feel. The life of a formally sentient organism that feels nothing therefore appears meaningless from the standpoint of a life supposedly justified by the possibility of pleasure. For that reason, this state is not the real alternative considered in this article.
This conclusion may seem paradoxical, but the paradox arises only because of a misleading alternative. The relevant alternative to the existence of a sentient being that experiences suffering and sometimes pleasure is not the simultaneous existence of a sentient being deprived of all feeling. Rather, the relevant alternative is nonexistence.
Life without feeling would make little sense even if it were entirely free of suffering. The argument from asymmetry does not straightforwardly apply to a living organism that exists but feels nothing.Footnote 9 In such a case, the absence of suffering would be good, but the absence of pleasure would still appear bad. The asymmetry operates differently in the case of a sentient being that never exists. In that case, the absence of suffering is good, while the absence of pleasure is not bad. That is because there is no subject who is deprived of pleasure.
Thus, the only genuine alternative to sentient existence is nonexistence, not a form of living existence devoid of sentience. What matters is the case in which a sentient being never comes into existence, not the case in which a being that already exists later ceases to exist. The latter is not a morally satisfactory alternative because it may involve intense negative feelings and suffering before death. That is contrary to the spirit of antinatalism. It is also a poor alternative in debate with pronatalists, who appeal to interrupted opportunities, memories of past pleasures, and expectations of future pleasures of which a person would be deprived by death.Footnote 10
From the antinatalist point of view, any possible future life is not worth starting because suffering is inevitable. Even if we assume that there could be rare cases in which a sentient being suffers very little and experiences some pleasure, that possibility does not make procreation morally justified. The future of any sentient being remains unpredictable with respect to the quantity of suffering and the frequency of pleasure. Since bringing a future sentient being into the world always creates the possibility of suffering, the inability to know in advance what the quality of that life will be is itself a sufficient reason not to bring that being into existence.
The inconveniences of existence
Existence is problematic for sentient beings because it includes suffering. Suffering, both physical and mental, is pervasive. Mental suffering in the form of stress, anxiety, concern for survival, and discomfort generated by social interaction should not be underestimated. Even if one were to treat mental suffering as secondary to physical pain, it remains a significant burden. From the perspective of nonexistence, understood as never being brought into existence, an existence marked by these burdens will always be worse than never existing at all. Because suffering is inevitable for any sentient being, sentient life is not worth starting.
From the perspective of the antinatalist philosophy developed here, it is difficult to identify any decisive advantage of existence as a sentient organism over never existing. The issue under consideration is not whether some lives are worth continuing. That question lies largely outside the central concern of antinatalism, which focuses on the irrationality and immorality of procreation rather than on condemning already existing individuals for continuing to live. Antinatalism does not compare the antinatalist preference for never existing with the pronatalist valuation of continuing an existence already under way. Instead, it compares the option of never existing with the option of an existence in which suffering is inevitable.
Hypothetical benefits attributed after the fact to an already existing sentient being should not be compared with the condition of that being’s possible nonexistence. Had the sentient organism never been brought into existence, it would never have suffered and would therefore not have been deprived of anything. Nor would it have lost a future. The argument from an open potential future matters only from within a pronatalist perspective that finds the meaning of life in ordinary moments of living. Although such moments may have subjective value, they do not provide a strong enough counterweight to the totality of suffering that the sentient being will experience.
For a proper understanding of antinatalism, it is therefore crucial to recognize which states are being compared. When inappropriate states are compared, antinatalism is misunderstood and sometimes distorted. If, for the sake of argument, one adopts a pronatalist perspective, then acknowledging stress, self-sacrifice, and the other inconveniences of human life may appear insufficient to undermine the meaningfulness of existence or the morality of procreation. But that conclusion depends on a mistaken comparison. Pronatalism typically compares one form of existence with another: an existence with less suffering, an existence with more suffering, or an existence with different opportunities. Antinatalism, by contrast, compares the existence of a suffering sentient being with the condition of never having existed and therefore never having suffered.
Advantages of not existing
Pronatalist philosophy and pronatalist culture have formed a deeply rooted habit of regarding existence as superior to nonexistence. For this reason, among others, it is difficult within a pronatalist culture to adopt the view that nonexistence may be morally preferable. Yet, if the life of a sentient being is fundamentally a struggle for survival marked by suffering, then the state in which that organism never exists is the only morally justifiable state.
Again, it is important to identify the relevant alternative correctly. The opposite of pronatalism is not the termination of an already existing life but the state of never being brought into existence. It may be true that, under certain conditions, the pronatalist view that an already existing individual should continue living can be defended. But it does not follow that it is better to bring a new sentient being into the world than for that being never to exist at all. The claim defended here is narrower and stronger: it is always better never to exist, in the sense of never being brought into the world, than to begin a sentient life marked by suffering.
One reason for this conclusion is the asymmetry argument, according to which, in a scenario in which a sentient being never exists, the absence of suffering is good, whereas the absence of pleasure is not bad.Footnote 11 The relevant case is one in which a possible sentient being never comes into existence. Preventing suffering, and not experiencing suffering, is morally good. Not creating pleasure, and not experiencing pleasure, are not morally wrong in the same way. The decisive point is that in the state of never existing, the absence of pleasure cannot count as a deprivation because there is no subject who is deprived.
By contrast, once a sentient being exists, the absence of pleasure can under some conditions be regarded as morally problematic and may even generate reasons to provide pleasure. Ordinarily, there is no strict obligation to provide pleasure, as opposed to the more stringent obligation not to inflict suffering. Still, even if we adopt the pronatalist point of view for the sake of argument and assume that we should strive to provide pleasure, such an obligation would apply only to beings already brought into the world. It does not justify bringing into existence a sentient being that did not previously exist and that, once brought into the world, will inevitably suffer regardless of the amount of pleasure it may later experience.
A second argument in favor of antinatalism is the argument from the badness of life.Footnote 12 This argument concerns the quality of life and holds that because suffering is unavoidably built into the life of every sentient being, no life is worth starting. Suffering significantly lowers the quality of life and often makes life barely worth living. Pronatalist culture encourages the assumption that life is always worth living and that procreation is therefore morally desirable. Perhaps, this may be true for some already existing sentient beings whose lives are worth continuing. Yet, a life that appears objectively worth living may still not be worth living from the subject’s own point of view.
A third argument in favor of nonexistence over existence is risk based. According to this argument, procreation is always both immoral and irrational.Footnote 13 It is immoral because it results in the creation of a sentient being who will inevitably suffer. The capacity for suffering is an integral feature of sentience. Those who procreate know this and nevertheless choose to reproduce. From the antinatalist perspective, they therefore act immorally by bringing into existence a life marked by suffering. Although, according to the nonidentity problem, the act of procreation does not make the future person’s life worse than it otherwise would have been, antinatalists can still argue that procreation creates a life that is bad even if it is not worse.
Procreation is also irrational because of risk. Every future human being, as a sentient being, will inevitably suffer, and every sentient being is also at risk of extreme suffering and a very difficult life. To decide to procreate in the face of that knowledge is therefore irrational. Its irrationality is intensified by the fact that what matters in the procreative context is not merely probability but possibility itself. Pronatalist critics may respond that human life is full of risk, and that many activities involve possible harms whose probability is low. Travel safety offers an obvious example: the possibility of accident or death always exists, but for a particular individual, it may be unlikely.
The structure of risk in procreation is different. Risks faced by already existing sentient beings are not symmetrical with the risk involved in bringing a never-existing being into existence. Already existing beings must engage in risky activities to survive and to live. Some risks can be avoided, but a certain burden of suffering is unavoidable once one already exists. That condition is the consequence of having been brought into the world in the first place. By contrast, in procreation, we do not merely expose an already existing individual to further risk; we create a new sentient being who will not only suffer periodically but may also encounter extreme suffering. All subsequent evil, suffering, and risk presuppose that original decision to procreate. This does not excuse harms done to already existing sentient beings. The point is rather that procreation is the source condition of all later harms suffered by the new being. For that reason, and on antinatalist grounds, it should be abandoned.
In conclusion, nonexistence has both a moral and a logical advantage over existence. A sentient being that never exists never feels pain. A sentient being that never exists also never causes suffering to other sentient beings, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In this connection, it is difficult to underestimate the negative environmental impact caused by humans. This impact includes environmental destruction, overpopulation, consumption of resources, and the suffering and death inflicted on other animal species.Footnote 14
Antinatalism in bioethics and healthcare ethics
Bioethics and healthcare ethics should take seriously the antinatalist analysis of sentient life in terms of pleasure, suffering, and the meaning of existence. These disciplines already address many issues arising from human suffering, including abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, transplantation, in vitro fertilization, and criteria for access to medical care. Each of these issues involves physical and/or psychological suffering. Yet bioethics and healthcare ethics rarely ask a more basic question: whether the initiation of sentient life itself should be treated as morally unproblematic.
A prominent example is abortion, which is directly linked to reproduction. If there were no reproduction, there would be no phenomenon of abortion considered as a serious bioethical problem. Nor would there be the large pool of suffering connected with it. That suffering concerns the future child who may be born because abortion was prohibited or otherwise prevented despite the pregnant person’s wishes. It also concerns the pregnant person, who, in addition to possible physical suffering, may experience significant psychological suffering related to the decision itself. Those closest to the pregnant person may also suffer, depending on their attitudes toward the procreative decision.
Abortion, like other bioethical issues connected with procreation, bears the mark of pronatalism. In addition to dealing with suffering already present, it also concerns the initiation of a future chain of suffering for a possible future human being. The same is true of assisted reproductive technologies, which aim to bring a new human being into existence by whatever means are medically available. From the antinatalist point of view, such determined reproduction is immoral and irrational because it ignores arguments that warn against the suffering of future sentient beings.
Bioethics that considers these reproductive issues without asking the prior metaphilosophical question about the meaningfulness of life in the sense at stake between pronatalism and antinatalism risks intensifying the suffering of sentient organisms. If bioethics and healthcare ethics took seriously the antinatalist warning about the inevitability of suffering and the simplest possibility of preventing it by not bringing a new sentient being into existence, their evaluation of assisted reproductive technologies would necessarily become more cautious.
Another group of issues widely discussed in bioethics concerns the end of life, including euthanasia and assisted dying. These issues would not arise in the same form had it not been for the pronatalist affirmation of sentient life, which, being doomed to suffer, can eventually reach a state in which ending that suffering becomes the person’s only goal.
More than many other branches of philosophy and ethics, bioethics and healthcare ethics confront the suffering integral to sentient life. They are disciplines that attend to the moral dimensions of suffering. Despite this, they very rarely address antinatalism, as if life were a default state, an unquestionable given, and the only task were to respond to suffering after sentient beings already exist. Yet, this special contact with suffering should encourage a more critical and cautious approach to procreative decisions and reproductive rights.
Many bioethicists support reproductive rights, including access to contraception and abortion, but they often do so within a feminist rather than an antinatalist framework.Footnote 15 Support for feminist ideas is important and morally significant. However, feminism does not by itself address the more basic problem discussed here, namely, the suffering inevitably associated with sentient life. Feminist bioethics can support contraception, abortion, and antinatalism, but it can also support pronatalism by taking women’s welfare, freedom, and autonomy as the highest values rather than the prevention of sentient suffering as such.
In conclusion, bioethics and healthcare ethics have a special moral obligation not only to alleviate suffering that already exists but also to prevent suffering where possible. That obligation supports a closer alignment between bioethics and antinatalist philosophy. Since the practical global influence of bioethics remains limited and many debates remain largely academic, there is no realistic danger that antinatalist bioethics would bring about the end of humanity by ending procreation. The immediate goal is more modest and educational. Antinatalist bioethics should make potential parents more aware of the suffering inevitably built into human life. More attention should be paid to the possibility of extreme physical and psychological suffering in future sentient beings. A more antinatalist bioethics would also place less emphasis on assisted reproductive technologies because such emphasis conflicts with the logic of antinatalism, which warns against the consequences of reproduction rather than encouraging it.
If concern for the environment is among our most important moral duties, then bioethics should join that concern. One possible, and perhaps the only effective, way to do so is through an antinatalist critique of the assumption that procreation is the default, natural, and obvious state. It may be possible to develop within bioethics a discourse that treats abstention from procreation, rather than procreation itself, as the default moral position. On such a view, it would be decisions to procreate that require special moral justification. At present, decisions to procreate are generally not regarded in bioethics as requiring justification, unlike decisions to terminate a pregnancy or to end a life full of suffering. Overpopulation and the resulting problems emphasized by philanthropic, misanthropic, and ecological antinatalism make it increasingly difficult to continue regarding procreation as a natural and desirable default. Antinatalist bioethics would, therefore, be a bioethics concerned with the well-being of future generations, who, within the pronatalist paradigm, are planned to be brought into a world that is increasingly difficult to inhabit because of overpopulation, pollution, and environmental destruction.
Conclusions
Life in general, and sentient life in particular, is marked by paradox. One of these paradoxes is that life appears to lack an intrinsic purpose, even though evolutionary biology describes its “purpose” simply as persistence and reproduction, that is, the passing on of genes. In that sense, it matters little which organisms pass on which genes or in what forms those genes are carried. Sentient life is only one possible carrier, and human beings are only one relatively recent form among many in natural history.
The fact that we value and care for life, especially sentient life, does not by itself establish that life is meaningful. Life for its own sake, as evolutionary biology in one sense describes it, would be easier to justify if it did not involve sentient suffering. Yet because life consists of suffering, transience, and death, the morality of this process becomes questionable. As argued in this article, suffering is not the only element that challenges the meaningfulness of sentient life, but it is a central one. It counts against the value of sentience, against the continuation of life as a process, and against the moral legitimacy of procreation. Although antinatalist ideas often conflict with common intuitions, the perspective of never existing makes visible something that pronatalist assumptions typically obscure: the possibility of never suffering. This is a distinctive possibility because it presupposes the absence of a subject who would otherwise bear suffering.
The role of bioethics and healthcare ethics should be to remind us of this possibility, especially today, when there are strong reasons to believe that the lives of future human beings will be worse in terms of objective external conditions, including climate change, environmental degradation, pollution, and overpopulation, than the lives of many people who have existed so far.
Funding statement
This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (UMO-2024/53/B/HS1/01295).
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