Definition
Anti-natalism is the ethical view that it is immoral for people to have children. This principle has been supported and defined in various ways, and this entry summarizes what the construct is, some reasons for why anti-natalism may not be a popular idea, and why some people might choose to postpone or forgo procreation.
Introduction
While the origins of the term anti-natalism are unsure, much of the ideas found in anti-natalism were expressed historically by the nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In his essay On the Suffering of the World, Schopenhauer said that the general rule of life is misfortune and suffering (1851). Because people are aware of the impending threat of death, they must struggle against both pressure from time and, in other moments, boredom or despair. As a result, Schopenhauer considered humans to not just be sentenced to death but also to life. He considered the state of nonexistence to be a blessed calm of nothingness, a stark...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Benatar, D. (2006). Better never to have been: The harm of coming into existence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Benatar, D. (2017). The human predicament. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Fritsche, I., Jonas, E., Fischer, P., Koranyi, N., Berger, N., & Fleischmann, B. (2007). Mortality salience and the desire for offspring. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 753–762. https://doi.org/10.1016/jesp.2006.10.003.
Griskevicius, V., Delton, A. W., Robertson, T. E., & Tybur, J. M. (2011). Environmental contingency in life history strategies: The influence of mortality and socioeconomic status on reproductive timing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(2), 241–254. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021082.
Haselton, M. G., & Nettle, D. (2006). The paranoid optimist: An integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(1), 47–66. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1001_3.
Kanazawa, S. (2014). Intelligence and childlessness. Social Science Research, 48, 157–170.
Schopenhauer, A. (1851). On the suffering of the world (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). London: Penguin Books.
Sharot, T. (2011). The optimism bias. Current Biology, 21, R941–R945.
Sharot, T., Riccardi, A. M., Raio, C. M., & Phelps, E. A. (2007). Neural mechanisms mediating optimism bias. Nature, 450, 102–105. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06280.
Tavares, L. P. (2016). Who delays childbearing? The association between time to first birth, personality traits, and education. European Journal of Population, 32, 575–597. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-016-9393-1.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Brown, F.L. (2019). Anti-Natalism. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2912-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2912-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences