If existence is a harm in itself, then it immediately follows that giving birth is unethical, unless you reject any notion of free will.
If you do the latter, then antinatalism and pretty much any other school of philisophy becomes moot since there are no agents around that can make decisions or change their thoughts.
To give a closer analogy, it's like saying that circumcision is a barbaric practice. It follows that you are implictly declaring that people who circumcize their kids have done something bad (doesn't mean you think they were solely responsible, or that the act was inexcusable/irrational on their part). If you deny this, then your initial statement was meaningless. Whether or not someone then takes offense is a different matter altogether.
The world is full of people with opinions that disagree with those you may hold closest. On a basic level, I don't understand why you'd be offended by someone else's opinion as long as they're not forcing it upon you/being a dick about it.
That said, my original point before I got lost in the details is just that I found it intriguing that you expected antinatalism to be so neutral a statement that it shouldn't warrant a response from others.
>The world is full of people with opinions that disagree with those you may hold closest. On a basic level, I don't understand why you'd be offended by someone else's opinion as long as they're not forcing it upon you/being a dick about it.
On a more complex level, the "you do you" approach is a denial of choice. Since the status quo is a certain way, and has certain consequences, then passiveness is in fact a deliberate and non-neutral action. That's not to say that you should conspire to offend and feel offended at every turn, just that moral relativism as a way of evading the responsibilities of free will is a fantasy.
To give an extreme example to illustrate this, let's say we replace the word circumcision above with a far graver issue: "Slavery, in my opinion, is a barbaric and silly practice, but why should that matter to you if you chose to sell your kid into slavery? You're you, and I'm me. We can think about things differently."
Edit: >Overpopulation is a meme. Many first-world countries today are literally seeking to import more immigrants because of under-population.
Their being a need for more humans to meet human ends is not surprising, but it certainly doesn't make an argument for the necessity of more humans from any ecological perspective.
> Besides, humans are natural too. It's not like we're built in factories and have smokestacks on our heads. We ARE part of that world which you think is beautiful, and to end human reproduction would be to partly destroy this world.
This logic doesn't compute for me. Is your perspective that, by definition, anything humans do is natural? If so, I think we have a fundamental disagreement on the definition of "natural". I don't think that packing the Earth to the gills with humans at the expense of other species survival is in any way a positive development.
Overpopulation is a meme. Many first-world countries today are literally seeking to import more immigrants because of under-population.
Besides, humans are natural too. It's not like we're built in factories and have smokestacks on our heads. We ARE part of that world which you think is beautiful, and to end human reproduction would be to partly destroy this world.
That said, are you claiming that life only has value if there exists some "ecological necessity" for it? Because I just don't see enough consistency in any definition of "ecological necessity" to make it a meaningful term. Ecology has shifted dramatically throughout earth's history - any species you could have called "ecological necessary" in the jurassic era doesn't seem so necessary in the long-run judging by the multitude of life that continued after extinction events.
I'm claiming that humanity should not be held so supremely important that in the name of blind procreation we should be displacing and bringing to extinction other forms of life and potentially bringing the habitability of the planet for all life into question.
Isn't it also selfish to prevent your children from experiencing its beauty? To smell a flower, to touch and be touched, to experience love, to feel the joy of truly understanding something - the list is truly endless!
Besides, our primary job is to ensure the continued existence of the human race, and the first and most important step in that process is to bring new humans into this world.
Yes, I agree: there are other factors to consider when making this decision, and honestly, I don't judge you either way.
The way I look it is that if we cease to give birth to new humans, we are guaranteed to go extinct, but there is no guarantee (yet!) that overpopulation or environmental abuse will cause a world ending event. The earth has gone through far more destructive eras and yet here we are!
Ultimately, it is indeed a philosophical argument: does the risk of potential suffering outweigh the joys of experiencing life? I don't think so, at least not yet.
I think some people (including myself) might have the knee-jerk reaction that the main difference between antinatalism vs. just vanilla opting-out-of-parenthood, is that the former offers you a way to feel smug/holier-than-thou. What would you say in response to that knee-jerk reaction?