Natalism, Natality, and the Climate Crisis: An Arendtian Argument against ‘Green’ Anti-Natalism

In public discourse surrounding the climate crisis, it is often suggested that the responsible thing, both ethically and environmentally, is to have fewer children – or even to refrain from reproducing at all. Thus the broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough, in his capacity as patron of the charity Population Matters, has stated:

“All of our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder – and ultimately impossible – to solve with ever more people.”¹

Meanwhile, in a 2019 Instagram livestream, the prominent American congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave voice to an emerging generational anxiety when she asked:

“It is basically a scientific consensus that the lives of our children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it OK to still have children?”²

Empirical studies (e.g. Murtaugh and Schlax 2009; Wynes and Nicholas 2017) have argued that the single most environmentally responsible thing an individual can do is to have one fewer child. According to the data, whereas getting rid of a car can save an individual an average of 2.4 tonnes of carbon from their ‘carbon footprint’ every year, if we attribute a percentage of a child’s emissions to the parents, then having one fewer child can save ‘you’ 58.6 tonnes of carbon a year (Wynes and Nicholas 2017: 6).

Meanwhile, polling data often suggests that the fact of the climate crisis is causing people to think differently about whether to have children. For instance, a 2020 Morning Consult poll suggested that for around 35% of childless American millennials, fear of climate change is a factor in their decision not to have children.³ Meanwhile, a 2023 systematic review of such studies by a team of researchers at UCL found that in 12 out of 13 studies, conducted worldwide, stronger concerns about climate change were associated with a desire to have fewer children, or none at all (Dillarstone et al 2023). Recent books by authors such as Gina Rushton (2023), Elizabeth Rush (2023) and Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman (2024) have discussed climate anxiety at length in the context of the decision whether to have children. Even if our children don’t meaningfully contribute to global warming themselves – in a rapidly warming world, are we really able to guarantee that they are able to live a good-enough life?

Granted, there are still plenty of people – many of them infinitely more powerful than the ones making the case against human reproduction – who think, and support policies designed to achieve, the exact opposite. Across the developed world, fertility rates have stalled in recent years – taking a further hit as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic (Aasve et al 2021). This has led to a discussion, parallel to the one around climate change, of a coming ‘demographic time bomb’, with the concern being that rapidly ageing societies, such as the UK, Italy, or Japan, will prove unable to sustain themselves – regardless of whether or not they're also underwater, or on fire.

In certain countries, this talk has also been fuelled by fears of geopolitical decline relative to younger, more fecund nations (see e.g. Yglesias 2020) – as well as the racist and/or xenophobic fear that immigrant labour will be required to care for ageing native populations. Reactionary governments have cited these fears in moving to curtail access to abortion and contraception, or put programmes in place that incentivise women to stay at home and have as many babies as possible: see for instance Poland’s generous child benefit policy, which has been correlated both with an increase in the fertility rate, and with more women dropping out of the labour market.⁴

The political prominence of such views is worth noting. But it’s also fair to say that they don’t get as much play in academic philosophical debates. In academic environmental ethics, the association of having fewer kids with environmental responsibility dominates. Thus Sarah Conly (2016), Travis Rieder (2016), and Trevor Hedberg (2019) have all argued that the climate crisis gives us a duty to reduce family size. Leonard Kahn (2019), meanwhile, goes even further, arguing that all pregnant people in the developed world have a duty to abort the foetuses they are currently gestating. Other work focuses not on the question of if the climate crisis gives us a duty to reduce family size, but rather on what we ought to do, given that it does. Thus Anca Gheaus (2019) has argued in support of multi-parent families: in order to give everyone who wants it the opportunity to raise children, without then needing to do anything environmentally irresponsible.

In this paper, I will challenge the idea that having fewer, or no kids is the environmentally responsible thing to do. I do this by arguing that ‘green’ anti-natalist arguments rest on a mistaken understanding of human nature: in short, that they do not really understand the creature they are arguing should be born (less often) into the world. This is because ‘green’ anti-natalists do not take into proper account what Hannah Arendt describes as the human condition of ‘natality’: “the new beginning of which each man is capable by virtue of being born” (Arendt 1998: 204).

In section 1, I rehearse the two ‘green’ anti-natalist arguments that I have already hinted at in this Introduction: the ‘Carbon Footprint Argument’ (CFA) and the ‘Child Welfare Argument’ (CWA). In section 2, I unpack Arendt’s concept of ‘natality’, giving some of the history of Arendt’s engagement with the concept before analysing it into four key statements. In section 3, I show how – once we take the fact of natality into account – neither the CWF nor the CWA convinces. In the Conclusion, I consider where all of this might leave the ethics of parenthood in the age of the climate crisis. I suggest that we are perfectly ‘justified’ in having children – but that we have a duty (which we would have anyway, but which now shows itself up in a particular way) to ensure that we parent our children virtuously.

1 Two ‘Green’ Arguments for Anti-natalism

Arguments for anti-natalism often proceed a- or trans-historically, with advocates attempting to establish the wrongness of human reproduction as an absolute. Thus for instance David Benatar, the most prominent contemporary anti-natalist, argues for anti-natalism not primarily on the basis of how bad the world actually is (though he is at pains to acknowledge that it is bad), but rather on an (alleged) asymmetry between pleasure and pain. For Benatar, the fact that coming into existence makes us able to experience pain, means that existence is something simply not worth having – and this can never be outweighed by the fact that, by existing, we are also able to experience pleasure (Benatar 2006: 29-30).⁵While most readers might not buy Benatar’s utilitarian framing of the issue, it is worth noting that this is an understanding of existence that goes back to antiquity. Thus the ‘Wisdom of Silenus’ given by Dionysus’s satyr companion to King Midas, as famously quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy:

“Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is – to die soon” (Nietzsche 2000: 42).

'Green’ anti-natalists do not need to go quite this far. They can be more ‘ontic’ than ‘ontological’ – proceeding not from some essential fact about human existence, but simply from some contingent fact, or set of facts, about how the world is right now.⁶ In short, ‘green’ anti-natalists can argue that it is morally wrong to have children because we live in the age of climate disaster – and such arguments do not need to claim that human reproduction either is or would be wrong more generally.

In the current discourse, both popular and academic, surrounding climate change and the question of whether or not it is morally OK to have children, it is possible to isolate two such ‘ontic’ arguments for anti-natalism.

1.1 The Carbon Footprint Argument: ‘soft’ and ‘Hard’

Call the first the ‘Carbon Footprint Argument’ (CFA). According to the CFA, it is morally wrong (or perhaps more typically: morally questionable) to bring new human life into the world, because new human life is bad for the rest of the planet. This is the argument that the likes of David Attenborough have made; it is the argument which informs something like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s public declarations that they will have no more than two children.⁷ In academic philosophy, it has been formulated in at least two versions: a ‘soft’ version, which we can find in Hedberg (2019), and a ‘hard’ version, suggested by Kahn (2019).

In Hedberg’s paper, he is concerned to prove that there is nothing special about having children that exempts it from the ordinary duties we have to reduce our carbon consumption (Hedberg 2019: 45). If we must urgently reduce our carbon emissions by doing things like not eating steak, or not taking domestic flights, then so too must we urgently reduce our carbon emissions by having fewer children. The ‘soft’ version of the CFA that Hedberg sketches in his 2019 can thus be reconstructed as follows:

• 1. We have a moral duty to reduce our carbon footprint by doing things like not eating steak, or not taking domestic flights.

• 2. Not having an additional child would reduce our carbon footprint far more than not eating steak, or not taking domestic flights.

• 3. People have a right to have children.

• 4. There is nothing ‘special’ about child-rearing that exempts it from our duties to reduce our carbon footprint.

• 5. We have a moral duty to have fewer children.

This is perhaps not (yet) an argument for anti-natalism per se. It is certainly an argument for anti-natalism once you’ve had one child, or perhaps two – a provision Hedberg specifies to ensure that no-one need miss out on the joys of having a sibling (Hedberg 2019: 57-58). It is also an argument that not having any children at all is in some sense supererogatory – that it is good in a way that goes beyond the ordinary duties we have to other people, or the planet. But it does not say that climate change means that having children is, as such, morally wrong.

Kahn however goes further than Hedberg. Kahn is an act utilitarian, so he is mainly interested in increasing the amount of human happiness overall – his arguments extend further than the fact of climate change itself. But he is particularly interested in the disparities between what it means, right now, to have a child in the developed world, and what it means to have a child in the developing world.

As Kahn argues, the amount of money it costs to raise a child in the developed world, could support far more new human lives in the developing world (Kahn 2019: 32-33). For this reason, anyone who falls pregnant in the developed world – and is able to financially support their child – has a moral duty to abort their foetus and use the money to support children in the developing world instead. Similarly: since children in the developed world will be responsible for more carbon emissions over the course of their lifetimes than children in the developing world, we ought to prefer that more children are born there, and not here (Kahn 2019: 36-37). Kahn’s metaethical commitments do not seem to permit the idea that anyone in the developed world might be entitled to have and raise their own child.

From this discussion, a ‘hard’ version of the CFA can be stated as follows:

• 1. We have a moral duty to reduce our carbon footprint by doing things like not eating steak, or not taking domestic flights.

• 2. Not having an additional child would reduce our carbon footprint far more than not eating steak, or not taking domestic flights.

• 3. In you live in the developed world, then not having an additional child saves even more carbon, than if you live in the developing world.

• 4. We should therefore prefer new children to be born in the developing world, than in the developed world.

• 5. No-one has an intrinsic right to have their own children.

• 6. It is morally wrong for people in the developed world to have children.

This is by no means the point that Kahn himself most emphasises – but the most crucial difference, it seems, between the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ variants of the CFA, lies in Kahn’s commitment to the view that no-one has an intrinsic right to have and raise (their own) children. One might input the stuff about people living in the developed world polluting more than people in the developing world into Hedberg’s argument, and his conclusion would come out mostly the same: no matter how much your particular kids may or may not be polluting, Hedberg would not be able to bring himself to tell you that you are absolutely prohibited from having them. Likewise, an even stronger version of Kahn’s argument could likely be formulated which states that people in the developing world, too, have a moral duty to refrain from having children – on the basis that the planet simply cannot stand any additional carbon emissions at all.

Thus, the ‘hardest’ version of the hard CFA – an argument that as far as I know no-one in academic philosophy has actually argued for, but which would however get us to a genuinely and full-throatedly anti-natalist conclusion – can be stated as follows:

• 1. We have a moral duty to reduce our carbon footprint by doing things like not eating steak, or not taking domestic flights.

• 2. This moral duty is absolute – it is so urgent that we reduce our carbon emissions, that any choice we make that might increase them, even in some small way, is absolutely morally wrong.

• 3. Not having an additional child would reduce our carbon footprint far more than not eating steak, or not taking domestic flights – regardless of where you live in the world.

• 4. No-one has an intrinsic right to have children.

• 5. It is morally wrong to have children.

In summary, then: the CFA is not typically stated as an outright argument for anti-natalism. Rather, it is made in order to claim that people have a duty to have fewer children: we thus have a duty to reproduce below the replacement rate of fertility. Anything more than this might on an individual basis be preferred (in reality, not everyone will choose to reproduce below the replacement level of fertility; overall, every little helps). Not having children is thus good but supererogatory. Nonetheless, it is significant that with just a few tweaks to the overall logic of the argument, it can be made to work as an (outright) argument for anti-natalism. Certainly the force of the argument is to make it seem as if having children is morally questionable: that even if we do not necessarily need to condemn ‘breeders’, the best thing to do is to not reproduce at all. Non-breeders can thus be assured of a certain sense of moral superiority.

1.2 The Child Welfare Argument

Call the second ‘green’ argument for anti-natalism the ‘Child Welfare Argument’ (CWA). It is in a way a lot easier to get a truly anti-natalist conclusion out of the CWA: it does not admit of the same hedging about what may, or may not be, a morally acceptable rate at which to limit population growth. The CWA states that it is morally bad to have children, not (just) because of the additional damage such new human children might do to the planet, but because the planet has by this point been so badly damaged, that we can no longer guarantee our children the possibility of a good-enough life.

One quite specific version of this argument has been suggested by Anca Gheaus (2016), who argues that, given the centrality of child-rearing to human life, it would be morally wrong to have children if we cannot guarantee that they are likely to be able to raise children of their own (Gheaus 2019: 501) – with climate change of course threatening this possibility in ways that would previously not have been imaginable (Gheaus 2016: 506). This of course is interesting in terms of the above-stated considerations about whether or not one has an intrinsic right to have and raise one’s own children: as far as Gheaus sees things, this right is conditional on the possibility that it can be carried down through the generations.⁸

More generally, the CWA proceeds from the fact that the effects of the climate crisis are likely to be very bad. Today’s younger adults have come of age into a world far less stable and secure, and with far fewer opportunities for social or economic advancement, than the world their parents and grandparents came of age into. The climate is already very volatile – and this has already had some very extreme, and very noticeable, real-world effects: from floods, to wildfires, to the destruction of plant and animal life; even, some have argued, to the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost certainly, over the next few decades, things are not going to get better – they are going to get a lot worse. The most extreme climate change scenarios have the planet reduced to a Venusian wasteland, completely unliveable. But even on the better ones, life is going to get even nastier, more brutish, and shorter than we are used to it being at present.

Given all this, the CWA can be formulated as follows:

• 1. It is only moral to bring children into the world, if you can guarantee them the possibility of a good-enough life.

• 2. Any ceteris paribus right to have children will always be trumped by the condition placed on it by (1).

• 3. Even in the best-case climate change scenarios, the effects of climate change will be so bad, that we are unable to guarantee that possibility to any child born today.

• 4. It is morally wrong to have children.

From all this, then: we can get a ‘green’ argument for anti-natalism from the idea that we need to prioritise the welfare of the planet, and we can also get a ‘green’ argument for anti-natalism from the idea that we need to prioritise the welfare of our (as yet, thankfully, only hypothetical) children.

1.3 Commentary

What are we to make of the CFA and CWA? Certainly, I think, if you care about green issues, they are likely to be at least somewhat convincing. You might not ultimately act on them – but it remains likely, I think, that if you are someone alive right now, who both cares about the environment and has (recently) had children, then you have somehow potentially fallen ethically short; that you may have somehow morally failed.

My view, in short, is that these arguments are powerful – and yet there is something a little bit off about them. They seem to show us that we must, given the fact of climate change, refrain from having children. Yet as someone who does have children (albeit without reproducing above the replacement level of fertility): I do not read these arguments and think that I have done something wrong, in bringing my children (who I love) into this world. Nor do I look around me at the other parents on the school run, and see people who I think have done something monstrous. When I learn that a friend is pregnant, I do not get angry, or sad: I feel very warmly towards this news; I congratulate them. Indeed: I find it impossible to read these arguments, and expect them to lead to a conclusion that people in general will actually act on – I do not seriously expect that, even among people who think very seriously about the climate crisis, the fertility rate will slump to zero. These are (seemingly) good arguments, then – for a conclusion that it doesn’t seem possible, at least not for everyone, to believe.

Perhaps it’s just that the anti-natalist’s moral compass is correctly oriented, whereas those of all us ‘breeders’ are wildly off: perhaps this is just an instance of false consciousness, where some monstrous moral wrong doesn’t appear as such, because it’s been normalised. But I think there is a much better reason for my inability to accept these arguments. In my view, these arguments seem prima facie plausible. Yet neither actually works, on the sort of deep, ethically guiding and motivating level they seem to be intended to, because they neglect a very fundamental fact, about the sort of creature we human beings are: a fact which fundamentally conditions how we relate to the world, other people, and ourselves.

2 Arendt on Natality

This fact, to put it simply, is that we are born. Or, to put it slightly less simply: it is that – as Hannah Arendt claimed – “the decisive fact determining man as a conscious... being is birth or ‘natality’, that is, the fact that we have entered the world through birth” (Arendt 1996: 51).⁹

The concept of ‘natality’¹⁰ appears throughout Arendt’s work: she mentions it throughout her authorship from her very earliest work (her doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine)¹¹, to her very last (The Life of the Mind). In this section, I will rehearse the Augustinian heritage of Arendt’s understanding of natality, before showing how she relates it to human freedom, political life, and hope. There will be quite a lot of material to unpack here in terms of elaborating the concept, but getting it all on the board will allow us to analyse Arendt’s understanding of natality into two key points, which result in two key claims. These two key claims will then allow us to see where the CFA and CWA go wrong.

2.1 Augustine and Natality

Arendt appears to derive her understanding of natality from Augustine. As Arendt describes Augustine,¹² he is a distinctly ‘Roman’ philosopher insofar as he thinks that philosophy both is, and should be, concerned with the pursuit of private happiness (Arendt 1978: 85). For this reason, he is very much concerned with the fact of our mortality: “the fact that we shall leave the world through death” (Arendt 1996: 51). Our desires are typically, as Augustine points out, futural: the fact of our death means that all of our desires, our hopes for the future, will ultimately come to nought. This fact threatens to overwhelm us – perhaps in just the way the threat represented by the climate crisis might (also) threaten to overwhelm us today. There can seem to be no point to anything, because ultimately everything will prove transient; will be destroyed regardless; will come to nought. So far, so proto-Schopenhauerian.

For Augustine, the cure for our fear of death – derived from our fixation on the future – is remembrance: to look back to the past, as it were, and remember where we came from (ibid.). It is here that ‘natality’ comes in. We are born – but, for Augustine as a thinker whose work is irreducibly Christian in character, we are not just born. We are born, because we have been given life by God. It is the task of the Christian to find a way of making “the choice out of this world”: to achieve the possibility of a lasting happiness – beyond the transient, material world we happen to have been born into – through faith and grace (Arendt 1996: 78).¹³

I suppose in a way this could be a cure for climate anxiety, too: if we are worried about the future because we are worried that everything we think makes us happy is going to be destroyed (for instance via environmental disaster), then maybe we should respond by seeking a more permanent sort of happiness through something that exists beyond this world, i.e. the divine. The problem, of course, is that can only seem monstrous to someone who either doesn’t share Augustine’s Christian faith, or else is a Christian of sorts but doesn’t share Augustine’s specific, neo-Platonist spin on Christianity, and Christian love.¹⁴ As Arendt herself points out, at this stage Augustine’s dialectic shoves him inevitably in the direction of predestination, which she calls “the most dubious and also most terrible of his teachings” (Arendt 1978: 105) – “a perverse radicalisation of Paul’s teaching that salvation lies not in works but in faith and is given by God’s grace” (Arendt 1978: 106).

Here Augustine’s argument effectively leads him to endorse a pretty extreme form of fatalism: we can live well – i.e. overcome the fear and uncertainty represented by the fact of our mortality – if we are able to remember the fact of our natality: the fact that we were given life through God. This remembrance promises us a more lasting form of happiness than we might hope to attain on this earth – if we have already been chosen for this happiness by God.

So, again: while this might work to allay the climate anxiety of someone who happens to share Augustine’s specific version of religious faith, it is unlikely to be at all convincing to the vast majority of people with an activist interest in the climate movement – even in the minimal sense of ‘an activist interest’ which entails that the fact of the climate crisis means we ought to somehow alter our behaviour. Why, then, should natality interest us at all here?

2.2 Natality and Human Freedom

The clue to Arendt’s interest in Augustine’s emphasis on natality is given to us towards the end of the discussion of Augustine that appears in the second volume of The Life of the Mind. What was God’s purpose, an author like Augustine would have had to ask, in creating man? God is eternal, and perfect, and without beginning. But He caused time to have a beginning, as well as humanity.

The reason that Arendt has Augustine giving, is that it was necessary to create man, in order for there to be novelty (Arendt 1978: 108). Without humanity, time would just be cyclical: the endless repetition of the ever-same. Humanity is needed to create, to do, new things: to make God and his creation truly infinite, in the sense that it is able to encompass things that are not-yet, as well as what has already-been.¹⁵ This is what, for Arendt, distinguishes us from other animals (Arendt 1998: 22-23). New human beings are born into the world as new individuals: each human being is a distinct ‘person’, in a way that even the highest non-human animals are not. “Before Man there was ‘Nobody’, nobody one would call a ‘person'” (Arendt 1978: 109). This, indeed, is part of how humanity is “created in God’s image”: like God, human beings are capable of creating, capable of beginning new things – just in a very different way to how God is (ibid.). And this is the true significance that Arendt identifies for natality.

“Every man, being created in the singular, is a new beginning by virtue of his birth; if Augustine had drawn the consequences of these speculations, he would have defined men, not, like the Greeks, as mortals, but as ‘natals’, and he would have defined the freedom of the Will as... the freedom of which Kant speaks in the Critique of Pure Reason” (ibid.).

This reference to Kant is also particularly significant in terms of what Arendt wants to do with natality. The “freedom of which Kant speaks of” which she is referring to is the “faculty of spontaneously beginning a series in time,” which Kant treats of in the Third Antinomy but also (famously) argues does not fit into the empirical world: our faculty of freedom is thus something he thinks we need to maintain his transcendental story in order to be able to claim.¹⁶

Kant’s problematic thus anticipates familiar 20^th century debates surrounding compatibilism and so forth: from an empirical standpoint, all events in time seem to have been physically determined, ‘since the big bang’. Is our free will, then, simply an illusion? Kant is perhaps a truer ‘compatibilist’ than most of the thinkers whose theories of freedom pass under that name, since he does genuinely think that free will is compatible with determinism – in the most robust possible sense insofar as for Kant we are indeed free: it’s just that we're free on the level of things-in-themselves, and so our freedom can never be manifested directly in the sensible, empirical world. But Kant’s story in the Third Antinomy is still far from the most satisfactory theory of freedom anyone has ever devised – hence in part why this particular puzzle left over from the Critique of Pure Reason proved so catalytic for the development of German Idealism.¹⁷

As Arendt has it, Kant was exactly on the money when he identified freedom with the faculty of spontaneously beginning a series of time, and really didn’t need to make such a meal of the Third Antinomy at all. We see this once we gain a proper appreciation of the fact that we are born.

“Had Kant known of Augustine’s philosophy of natality he might have agreed that the freedom of a relatively absolute spontaneity is no more embarrassing to human reason than the fact that men are born – newcomers again and again in a world that has preceded them in time” (Arendt 1978: 110).

2.3 Natality and ‘Action’

These themes are drawn out in a perhaps more extensive way, with different emphasis, in one of the two central opuses from the middle period of Arendt’s authorship, The Human Condition. The Human Condition is structured around an articulation of three distinct sphere of human life: what Arendt identifies (with a rather curious disregard for how these words figure in ordinary language) as ‘labour’, ‘work’, and ‘action’.¹⁸

Briefly, “labour is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body” (Arendt 1998: 7), i.e. it is in the context of ‘labour’ that we do things like eat food, have sex, or physically give birth. Work meanwhile is “the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence... Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings” (ibid.). When Arendt talks about ‘work’, then, she is talking about working on the world: making things, creating things, that wouldn’t otherwise be there. If human beings were only capable of ‘labour’, and couldn’t also ‘work’, then life would be an endlessly difficult struggle to satisfy our basic, material needs. Because we can also ‘work’, we can satisfy our material needs in increasingly easier (perhaps also, increasingly complex) ways.¹⁹

‘Action’, meanwhile is “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter” (ibid.). Action, Arendt stipulates, “corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” (ibid.). It is “specifically the condition... of all political life” (ibid.). It is also, Arendt claims, the most essential capacity that we have as human beings.

“Men can very well live without labouring, they can force others to labour for them, and they can very well decide merely to use and enjoy the world of things... the life of an exploiter or slaveholder and the life of a parasite may be unjust, but they certainly are human. A life without speech and without action, on the other hand... has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men” (Arendt 1998: 176).

“All three activities,” Arendt tells us, “are intimately connected with the most general conditions of human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality” (Arendt 1998: 8). But “of the three, action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality” (Arendt 1998: 9). This is because, she tells us, “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting” (ibid.). Both labour and work can involve the production of quantitatively new things, new instances of what has come before. But only action can bring about something completely, qualitatively new.

For Arendt, then, we are capable of beginning something new, because we are able to act with, alongside, other human beings. Our freedom, as a ‘faculty of spontaneously beginning something in time’, is for Arendt a metaphysical potential that we need a certain sort of social context to make actual: we exercise our freedom as a member of a political community. It is in this context that, as Arendt has it, we are able to ‘disclose ourselves’ to others: “in deed or word” (Arendt 1998: 180). “The question asked of every newcomer,” is “who are you?” (Arendt 1998: 178) – and new human beings are constantly answering that question, in a way that can be revelatory both to themselves and others, in what they do. If you do choose to reproduce, your children – as anyone who has ever been a parent will know – will not just be a carbon copy of you, their parents: while they might have inherited certain of your personality traits, they also very definitely have a will of their own. This might not always be a good thing: all new human beings are (as we know) able to do bad as well as good. But it does at least mean that they can do things differently.

2.4 Natality as the Ground of Hope

Because new human beings are able to do things differently, Arendt identifies action as “the one miracle-working faculty of man” (Arendt 1998: 246). Without it, she is clear (Arendt 2005: 107ff), a “decisive change for the better” really may not be possible (Arendt 2005: 111): we might simply be engulfed by whatever the present badness happens to be; that everything currently seems to be tending towards (Arendt 1998: 246). With it, we can always hope that something will suddenly happen to change things for the better; that the otherwise seemingly natural, inexorable state of affairs will be somehow brilliantly interrupted.

“The life span of man running toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction if it were not for the faculty of interrupting it again beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin” (ibid.).

Hope, then, is for Arendt grounded in the fact of birth. “The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality... It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born” (Arendt 1998: 247).

“Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope... It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us’” (ibid.).

In a way then, what Arendt does with natality, for all it has its origins in Augustine, ends up turning Augustine on his head. For Arendt, (new) life is a gift – not because of its origins (in God), but rather because it allows us to look into the future, without simply fearing ruin, and death. We will all, as individuals, die. But as members of a political community – a community which will continue to grow, and change, for (we hope) a long time after die – our achievements can be remembered, and sustained.²⁰

2.5 Analysis

It is possible, I think, to analyse what Arendt has to say about natality into two key points, which can in turn be used to support two key claims.

The first key point is that every birth is a new beginning – in the very strong sense that every time a new human being is born, this represents the spontaneous beginning of a new series in time. In this way, Arendt thinks, we are all born into the (physical, material) world possessing something like what Kant describes as transcendental freedom. Call this Arendt’s Kantian hypothesis.

Arendt supports her Kantian hypothesis via the second key point that I wish to highlight, namely that – as she has it – every new human being is able to disclose themselves, as themselves, in speech and in deed. As we do this, we distinguish ourselves as being individuals, distinct from everyone else around us (including our immediate progenitors, our parents). There is of course an element of contingency here: a new human being may not disclose themselves as someone good. But they are, nonetheless, a new individual. Call this the Fact of Disclosure.

The reason why the Fact of Disclosure works in support of the Kantian hypothesis, is because it is by disclosing ourselves as distinct individuals, that we have the power to work (as Arendt claims) ‘miracles’: that we can save the world from (otherwise) going to ruin, by finding ways of doing things differently to how they have been done before. For this reason, new human life can be identified as a source of hope. This is the first of the two key claims I wish to highlight. Call this Arendt’s Hope Claim.

The Hope Claim then yields the second of the two key claims I wish to note here. This claim is that, because new life is able to function as a source of hope, it is also possible to experience life as a gift. We were all ourselves a new beginning once; we have all ourselves contributed to our community in various ways. After us, (we can hope) new generations will do so too – and whether we are biological parents or not, we will have contributed in some way to what those generations achieve. We can hope, perhaps, that our words and deeds will be remembered. But even if they aren’t, we can at least hope that not everything we currently draw meaning from will go to ruin. Life, in this sense, can be considered a ‘gift’, not because our lives are likely to be easy, but because our lives (all our lives) form part of something that has a deeper, richer, more lasting significance, beyond us (in this way, Arendt secularises Augustine’s understanding of life as a gift from God). Call this the Life as a Gift Claim.

3 ‘Green’ Anti-Natalism and the Fact of Natality

We are now in a position to relate Arendt’s understanding of natality back to the CFA and CWA.²¹ In section 1.1, I unpacked various versions of the CFA, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’, which might be associated with a more or less strong commitment to anti-natalism. These different versions of the CFA had different premises, however all of them featured a premise that amounts to (1) We have a moral duty to reduce our carbon footprint, followed by a premise that amounts to (2) Having fewer (or no) children is a very effective way of reducing your carbon footprint. In this, the choice whether or not to have children was likened to the choice whether or not to eat steak, or take domestic flights.

Seen in the light of Arendt’s Hope Claim, the idea that the decision to have a child can be understood in this way – effectively the sort of decision one might make as a consumer – must I think strike us as nonsense. One might reliably predict the ‘carbon footprint’ of one’s decision to eat a steak, take a flight, or trade in cryptocurrency. This is because these are all examples of commodities, or processes, that just will consume a given amount of carbon. But a child is not a commodity, or a discrete purchase that burns a given amount of energy. A child is a new individual, that is able (miraculously!) to do things differently. Maybe most children won’t: this, after all, is part of what it means to be able to articulate this stuff in terms of averages. But while more people might mean more carbon gets consumed, it also means (by Arendt’s lights) that the chances of real novelty are increased – and so the basic contingency of the claim that more children will (on average) mean more carbon emissions is revealed: it is at most true only for now. And as per Arendt's Hope Claim: the best way to ensure that it is only true for a limited period of time, is to boost our chances of novelty as much as possible.

The existence of a moral duty to reduce our carbon footprint, then, cannot entail a moral duty to have no, or fewer children. This is because our moral duty to reduce our carbon footprint is grounded in the fact of the climate crisis: we need to do what we can, to help prevent the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change. But Arendtian considerations would suggest that the only way in which we can do this is by cultivating novelty, something which is grounded in the fact of natality – in the transformative potential inherent in new human life.

To this, I suppose, the ‘green’ anti-natalist might say: sure, we’re going to need some children. But only the most extreme version of the CFA was ever intended to deny that. The point is to find the right balance between preserving the transformative newness associated with new human life, and our duty to reduce carbon emissions. And here the scales might still, as it were, be tipped in favour of not having children: if everyone else is still reproducing, we should (still) consider it morally laudable to refrain from having any, or more. But the Arendtian thought that I want to insist on, against the ‘green’ anti-natalist who might treat the question of new human life as a matter of complex accounting, is that new human life must always be welcomed. There cannot really be any ‘ideal balance’ between having enough children to ensure sufficient novelty, and limiting carbon emissions: the whole point of Arendt’s argument is that we cannot say in advance who might contribute to society in the right kind of transformative way; we do not know what they might be able to do.²² For this reason then, no-one should be criticised morally for choosing to reproduce beyond a certain minimal point: from an Arendtian perspective, it really is a matter of ‘the more the merrier’, or perhaps ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’.

Let me be clear: my aim here is not to impose a moral duty to have as many children as possible – far from it. There are plenty of reasons to resist imposing such a duty: it’s just that they’re mostly independent of the climate crisis. Thus for instance from a feminist perspective: if we were to say that ‘one’ has a duty to produce as much new life as possible, qua human – well then this duty is much less burdensome for the roughly 50% of humanity who no-one expects to be able to gestate. It would also perhaps be very cruelly burdensome to those people who would be (apparently) subject to the duty, without being – for whatever reason – able to fulfil it. One must also be suspicious of the contemporary association, noted in the Introduction, of pro-natalist politics with nativism.²³ Reproduction itself ought to be as much a matter of personal choice as it is feasibly (given the mechanics of it) possible. But then regardless of how much one chooses, or is able, to reproduce – not at all, just once, as much as possible – one nonetheless, just as a member of a society, of the human species, has a duty to raise, support and celebrate those children who do happen to be born to us, as much and as well as possible. Children are after all, to cite a cliché, the future.

So what about the CWA? Surely one risk of seeing things as we now are, via Arendt’s Hope Claim, is that we risk treating new human life as a means to an end: it is OK to bring new human beings into existence (even in a world in the throes of an unprecedented environmental crisis), because maybe these new human beings can help us solve it. Maybe then it’s OK to have children for the world’s sake, but what about their own?

The Life as a Gift Claim can help us out here. The Life as a Gift Claim entails that our life can still be experienced as something ‘worth having’, even if it is mostly characterised by great difficulty. This is because our lives are not (only) meaningful because of the hedonistic pleasure we experience over the course of them – but also because of the challenges we experience while living them, that we might work both individually or collectively to overcome. Our lives have been given to us not only to enjoy, but as a means by which we might participate in the (collective) world.

Or to put this point another way: no-one in history has ever lived a perfect life. We suffer – but we do not, for the most part, think our parents have done something morally unforgivable by bringing us into the world: even David Benatar thanks his parents in the acknowledgements to his first book. Our children are likely to suffer – of course they will, and they are likely to suffer through a crisis that they have done nothing to bring about, but which they have been fated to struggle to overcome. But this is just what a life is. To exist, as we human beings do, is to be given a project that we are both condemned, and have the opportunity, to solve. Maybe sometimes this seems horrible; but sometimes it also seems beautiful. Life, in all its fundamental tragedy, can still be thought worth living.

4 Conclusion

If we buy what Arendt has to say about natality, then neither the CFA nor the CWA – both popular arguments which proceed from the fact of climate change to an anti-natalist conclusion – can be seen to work. The CFA and CWA are both forgetful of something that Arendt identifies as perhaps the most fundamental fact about the human condition: that we are each born, as a new individual distinct from everyone else. This in turn can help us to make sense of something else noted earlier in the paper, namely that for all the prima facie plausibility of the arguments, they do not seem all that apt to alter our behaviour. We might not all be fully cognizant of Arendt’s understanding of ‘natality’ – but if she is right about it, it must somehow undergird our place within the world in ways that would be significant, even if we were not fully conscious of them.

The climate crisis, then, gives us no particular reason (at least not from either of these two arguments) to be anti-natalists. That is the conclusion I have wished to secure, and yet it must be noted that there is a certain weakness here.

Partly, this weakness proceeds from the fact that this strategy against ‘green’ anti-natalist requires endorsing Arendt’s understanding of natality. But Arendt never really gives an argument ‘for’ natality: she presents it more as a fact that she’s observed – although equally, it’s clear that natality isn’t really an empirical ‘fact’, of the order of the cat being on the mat. Is the human condition really how Arendt makes it out to be: are we really all potential ‘miracle-workers’ whose mere existence is able to ground hope? I think what Arendt writes seems plausible: but certainly, say, a hard determinist wouldn’t. Does pointing to ‘the fact of natality’ even involve any sort of falsifiable assertion to begin with? There is, at least, more work to be done here.

Perhaps more significantly, there is a danger that really all I have written here, is just an argument in favour of complacency. I am sure there are people worried about the climate crisis, who incline towards ‘green’ anti-natalism, who have been reading this, thinking: well all this is, is an argument not to change our behaviour – an argument to proceed as if everything is fine; to keep on having children regardless, in the (ultimately passive) hope that maybe one day one of them will fix everything for us.

Against this, what I want to suggest is that Arendt’s arguments invite us to think about the ethics of having children, in relation to the climate, in a slightly different way. Arguments like the CFA and CWA ask us whether or not we can ethically justify the decision to have children, in the face of the climate crisis. But this question might always have been, effectively, the wrong one to ask. To repeat a point already voiced in answering the CFA above: perhaps reproduction should be something individuals have total, voluntary control over – but it isn’t, and it’s probably never going to be. Regardless of how much one does or does not reflect about the significance of the climate crisis, babies are still going to get born anyway. Given this – given that babies have been, and will (short of some Children of Men-type scenario²⁴) continue to be born, into a rapidly warming world – the really important ethical question is to instead ask: how should we raise our children to deal with this?

Arendt emphasises the importance of new life in transforming the present social world – which is patently something that we need. Perhaps then what we really need to think about, is our duties towards our children (accounting for the fact of the climate crisis) as parents. How should we be raising our children – to combat the climate crisis? In what sort of arrangements? What sort of people might we, should we, hope them to be?

What I want to close this paper by suggesting, then, is that while (as I have argued) the climate crisis does not give us a duty to have fewer, or no children, it does give us a duty to think differently about how we parent our children: to think about what it is, these days, to raise our children virtuously. I have nothing concrete to say on this subject, that I am able to voice in the context of this paper. But what I would highlight, is that this might point us in the direction of existing work bringing virtue ethics into conversation with environmental ethics²⁵ – as well as recent work (including that of Gheaus, which I have mentioned) that uses the climate crisis as an occasion to think differently about the nuclear family.²⁶

As emphasised against the CFA above, we all – regardless of whether we happen to be, have chosen to be, or would choose to be biological parents – have a duty to help a better future to be born. We must all welcome new life: perhaps especially in a world, in a society, that is often deeply hostile towards it. We must all be curious about novelty, and help to cultivate it.