Should We Stop Having Children?
2020 was bleak, wasn’t it? I think this last year has made us realise how bad things can get, and things are only gonna get worse. Yes, the vaccine rollout has been tremendously successful and this whole pandemic thing seems to be coming to an end soon (fingers crossed). But there are still fatally important issues that remain unresolved, and that the pandemic has distracted us from: rising temperatures, rising sea levels, more catastrophic weather events, devastating droughts, increasing air pollution and toxicity, more wars, more diseases, a refugee crisis, and the list unfortunately goes on. To be frank, the planet is trending downward pretty rapidly, and the forecast for humans is not good. In a world where standards of living are invariably getting worse, should we still have kids?
This is in fact a debate currently going on in philosophy, ethics, and environmental studies, and it goes by the name of Anti-Natalism — the belief that procreation (bringing human lives into existence) is morally wrong. An Anti-Natalist believes your parents did something objectively wrong and unethical having you (don’t worry, I think your great). The idea actually goes as far back as the Tragedies of Ancient Greece, with the Ancient…
