Antinatalism in Ancient Egypt, in Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Gnostic Religion
The following text is the revised version of a lecture I gave at the University of Hamburg on 30 August 2022 at the invitation of interested students.[1] In 1997, I submitted a postdoctoral thesis to the University of Hamburg, which was published in 2000 under the title Ebbing away of Mankind? Neganthropy and Anthropodicy. In my habilitation thesis I defended, among other things, the argument for an abstention from procreation on the basis of an onto-ethical asymmetry:
If we do not procreate, then there is no one whom we would have deprived of existence or happiness or anything else. If, on the other hand, we do produce human beings, there will be some among them who suffer unbearably; and it would have been in our hands to prevent this amount of suffering. Now we cannot say that all suffering is compensated for by happiness, because suffering in the case of procreation represents a real malum, but unrealised happiness in the case of non-procreation (our parental wishes aside) does not represent a malum. Suffering would be endured by a produced person, whereas non-existent happiness in the case of non-procreation, however, cannot be considered a withheld happiness. We can call this the onto-ethical prevalence of suffering. The onto-ethical preponderance of suffering over happiness further means: There are reasons not to produce “someone” in view of future experiences of misery – there are no reasons to produce someone in view of future experiences of happiness.
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