Erschienen in Ausgabe: No 49 (3/2010) | Letzte Änderung: 20.03.10 |
Antinatalism as Eve’s Escape Route in the Face of Wrongful Creation, Unrequested Existence and the Evil of Freedom
von Karim Akerma
Through the
ages the established Christian Church has tried to eradicate the Gnostic image
of an evil Creator. Even though John Milton was not a Gnostic and perhaps not
even a heretic, there is Gnostic imagery in his poem Paradise Lost. In what follows, I will elaborate on the Gnostic
element in Milton’s
poem that perhaps has not attracted due attention. It is the anti-natalist
stance: the idea of rejecting procreation so as not to produce further evil. I
suggest we call this stance the Gnostic temptation. After dealing with Milton, I will present the late Mark Twain as someone who
– presumably unwittingly – illuminates Milton's
subtextual Gnosticism I will conclude with some pertinent reflections on Kant.
Although
the anti-natalist escape route from existence is genuinely Gnostic in nature
and had been propagated by Gnostic sects through the centuries, it has
Christian foundations. In early Christianity, as well, man is but a sojourner
in a world in which to procreate would not make sense. To quote an
anti-natalist sample from the New Testament:
Art thou
bound onto a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not
a wife. […]But this I say, brethren,
the time is short: it remaineth, that both they that have wives be as though
they had none; And they that weep, as though they wept not; […] He that is
unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the
Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how
he may please his wife. (Pauli epistola ad Corinthos I., VII.
27ff)
In Luke and Matthew the same spirit appears in downright anti-human
vestments when Jesus says:
If any
man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children,
and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my
disciple. (Lucae XVI., 26) He that loveth father or mother more than me is not
worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of
me. (Matthaei X. 37)
According
to the New Testament and the Church Fathers, it is better not to have children
at all in order for redemption to come earlier. Abstention from procreation is
thoroughly in keeping with the teachings of early Christianity even though the
Church later succumbed to pro-natalism. So the most heretical thought to be
found in Gnosticism is deeply rooted in the teachings of early Christianity.
This thought perseveres and is present in John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost, where it serves to bring
before our eyes the tyranny of a God conceived of as a merciless monarch. In
this poem, Milton
at the same time develops a rationale to show that attempts at rendering a
theodicy are doomed. Incidents of evil in a world that has been created by an
omniscient and almighty God beggar justification (for details see A.D. Nuttal, The Alternative Trinity. Gnostic Heresy in
Marlowe, Milton and Blake, Oxford
University Press 2009
(1998). It remains to be shown how, in Paradise
Lost, one of the world's great literary works, theodicee shades into
anthropodicy.
Ditheism. Our world moulded, not created out of nothing
At the
heart of the Gnostic tradition – which has often been described as dualistic –
resides the idea of the God-creator as a malevolent being: An evil demiurg,
rather than a benevolent and extra-worldly God is responsible for the creation
of this world. Therefore, all matter is evil, and hence the Gnostic’s anticosmism. Since many Gnostic and,
later on, Manicheist sects have as a common denominator the idea of an inferior
creator God on the one hand and an extra-worldly supreme deity on the other,
one should speak of ditheism rather than dualism. Like
Plato’s demiurg, the evil creator did not create the world out of nothing.
Rather, he formed pre-existing matter. Even though Milton was not a Gnostic, there is Gnostic –
or at least Platonic – imagery regarding his account of the world’s origins. He
refers to the formation of pre-existing matter that is moulded into our world
rather than our world’s creation out of nothing. Uriel, the “sharpestsighted
spirit of all in Heaven”,
says:
I saw
when at his word the formless mass,
This
world’s material mould, came to a heap
(…)
Till at
his second bidding darkness fled,
Light
shone, and order from disorder sprung
(Third
Book, 708-713, p. 162)[1]
This
deviation from traditional accounts of creatio ex nihilo might serve as a first
indicator with respect to the presence of Gnostic imagery in Paradise Lost.
Anti-natalism
and suicide as escape routes from existence in Paradise
Lost
To minimize
contact with the demiurg’s world, the Gnostics propagated asceticism.
Accordingly, and in order to shorten the concatenation of evil on earth, man is
not to procreate. If man does not procreate, the divine souls incarcerated in
the human flesh – with the right amount of wisdom and insight – will eventually
return to where they belong and will reunite with the supreme deity. Hence the
Gnostics’ antisomatism and antinatalism.
In Paradise
Lost, after the Fall and before the expulsion from paradise, it becomes clear
to Eve that all future generations will have to suffer as a result of the first
parent’s sin. In the face of future suffering, she suggests to Adam to either
refrain from procreation or to commit suicide:
If care
of our descent perplex us most,
Which
must be born to certain woe, devoured
By death
at last, and miserable it is
To be to
others cause of misery,
Our own
begotten, and of our loins to bring
Into
this cursed world a woeful race,
That
after wretched life must be at last
Food for
so foule a monster, in thy power
It lies,
yet ere conception to prevent
The race
unblest, to being yet unbegot.
Childless
thou art, childless remain: So death
Shall be
deceaved his glut, and with us two
Be
forced to satisfie his ravenous maw.
But if
thou judge it hard and difficult,
Conversing,
looking, loving, to abstain
From
love’s due rites, nuptial embraces sweet,
And with
desire to languish without hope,
Before
the present object languishing
With
like desire, which would be misery
And
torment less then none of what we dread,
Then
both our selves and seed at once to free
From
what we fear for both, let us make short,
Let us
seek death, or, he not found, supply
With our own hands his office on
ourselves;
(Tenth Book, 979-1002, p. 512)
Milton’s Eve is promoting here either
abstention from procreation or suicide to escape from the suffering of
existence. In the face of wrongful existence for the future members of the
human race, Eve first suggests the anti-natalist option, then suicide. In fact,
, suicide is condemned by all major monotheistic religions: Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. Also Adam, in the very beginning of mankind, rejects
suicide as suggested by Eve[2].
In antiquity – at least for some and in some periods – suicide was deemed an
acceptable escape from suffering. In Milton’s
account, the first human, being a paradisic criminal, resembles a slave in
ancient Rome rather than in ancient Greece.
In ancient Greece,
criminals were granted the option of committing suicide as a means of
self-punishment. With so many slaves at a later period in ancient Rome, taking one’s own
life wasn’t an option, lest slave-holders be deprived of a valuable property.
In Milton’s
account, something similar applies to the relationship between man and God.
Suicide is not an option against a Christian backdrop; so much less so if we
take into account the Christian doctrine of life in hell after death. Pointing
to eternal punishment, Milton
has no difficulties with having Adam reject suicide. Committing suicide, Milton’s Adam explains to
Eve, would be to no avail:
Eve, thy contempt of life and
pleasure seems
To argue in thee something more
sublime
And excellent then what thy minde
contemnes;
But self-destruction therefore
saught, refutes
That excellence thought in thee, and
implies,
Not thy contempt, but anguish and
regret
For loss of life and pleasure
overlov'd.
Or if thou covet death, as utmost
end
Of miserie, so thinking to evade
The penaltie pronounc't, doubt not
but God
Hath wiselier arm'd his vengeful ire
then so
To be forestall'd; much more I fear
least Death
So snatcht will not exempt us from
the paine
We are by doom to pay; rather such
acts
Of contumacie will provoke the
highest
To make death in us live.
(Tenth Book, 1013-1028, p. 514)
This
argument allows Adam to dismiss suicide easily. Not to procreate, however, is
and remains a Christian path and supererogative and cannot be so easily dismissed.
By promoting abstention from procreation, Eve might even be seen as a Christian
overachiever.
Milton’s general portrayal of God will be
utterly disturbing to the Christian believer, as it draws a monstrous picture
of a God obsessed with power and glory and at the same time rhetorically
evasive. These observations have been elaborated on and epitomized in a single
sentence by Michael Bryson in his study The
Tyranny of Heaven: “Milton
constructs a God who is nearly indistinguishable from Satan.” (M. Bryson, The Tyranny
of Heaven: Milton's
Rejection of God as King. Newark:
University of Delaware Press 2004, p. 25) The verses quoted above evoke the image of a tyrannical God and
give evidence of Milton’s
rejection of God as king. Transferred into a contemporary setting, the
impossibility of suicide as an escape route from unbearable existence reminds
us of modern detention camps, in which all measures have been taken in order to
prevent the inmates from committing suicide lest they suffer less.
In book
five of Paradise Lost, Raphael is sent to Adam before the Fall, to admonish
him:
God made
thee perfect, not immutable;
And good
he made thee, but to persevere
He left
it in thy power, ordained thy will
By
nature free, not overruled by fate
Inextricable, or strict
necessity;
Our voluntary service he
requires,
Not our
necessitated, such with him
Finds no
acceptance, nor can find.
(Fifth
Book, 524-531, p. 250)
A blatant
contradiction evinces that has been arranged by Milton in a subtle manner: On
the one hand God requires voluntary service of a free being while at the same
time man is not entitled to opt out of existence. At the same time Milton
frames the whole plot with God’s foreknowledge as described in the beginning of
book three: “God sitting on his throne sees Satan flying towards this world,
then newly created; shows him to the Son who sat at his right hand; foretells
the success of Satan in perverting mankind; clears his own justice and wisdom
from all imputation, having created man free and able enough to have withstood
his tempter.” (p. 124) In Milton’s account, it was foreknown to God from the outset
that man would have to be expelled from Paradise
in the wake of primal sin. Thus the question arises of why God created man –
and why Satan? – in the first place. If he knew from time immemorial that Eve
would not be able to resist Satan’s temptation, why did God not refrain from
creation or create a more finely tuned world?
Man
superfluous against the backdrop of other inhabited worlds
In the
following passage, Milton
is in keeping with The Old Testament’s pro-natal stance.
Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk
Of puritie and place and innocence,
Defaming
as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to som, leaves
free to all.
Our Maker bids increase, who bids
abstain
But our destroyer, foe to God and
Man?
Fourth Book, 744-749, p. 206)
Only a few
verses earlier, however, Milton
has Adam explain that a world without man would not be to the detriment of God.
Without man, the stars
then, though unbeheld in deep of
night,
Shine not in vain, nor think, though
men were none,
That heav'n would want
spectators, God want praise;
Millions of spiritual Creatures walk
the Earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when
we sleep:
All these with ceasless praise his
works behold
Both day and night.
(Fourth Book, 674-679, p. 202)
According
to these verses, even without man there would be sufficient praise for God. The
latter passage almost renders man superfluous. This is all the more so, once we
take into account other inhabited worlds, the existence of which is mentioned
more than once in Miltons
poem:
Of
amplitude almost immense, with Starr's
Numerous, and every Starr perhaps a
World
Of destind habitation; but thou
know'st
Thir seasons
(Seventh Book 620-623, p. 354)
Unrequested existence
According
to many and as Milton
expresses in his Areopagita, man’s
suffering after the Fall is to be justified and explained with respect to
God-given freedom.. “Many there be that complain of divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress.
Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for
reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam
as he is in the motions.” (Areopagita 902) However, man was created good. If he
fell, he fell because – prior to man’s existence – there was evil in the world
that pushed him. That is to say, man fell because he was tempted by Satan, an
angel who had been created by God. Viewed from this angle, Adam and Eve are
innocent victims who do not deserve punishment (for more details cf. Nuttalls
study The Alterntive Trinity, p. 99f). So much less so do their offspring. In
this context, Milton
has Adam conceive of freedom as an unbearable burden. Hence he wants to “render
back / All I received, unable to perform / Thy terms too hard, by which I was
to hold / The good I sought not.” (Tenth Book, 749-752, p. 500)
Viewed from
this perspective, man was not only pushed into a world that had already been
tainted by God-made evil (the serpent-Satan), man was pushed into existence
without being having asked, man was created wrongfully:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay
To mould
me Man, did I sollicite thee
From darkness to promote me, or here
place
In this delicious Garden? as my Will
Concurd not to my being, it were but
right
And equal to reduce me to my dust,
(Tenth Book, 743-748, p. 500)
At no point
in time was Adam given a chance to consent to his own existence. His existence
is decreed by God. Adam thus laments:
Why is life giv'n
To be thus wrested from us? rather why
Obtruded on us thus? who if we knew
What we receive, would either not
accept
Life offer'd, or soon beg to lay
it down,
Glad to be so dismist in peace. Can
thus
Th' Image of God in man created once
So goodly and erect, though faultie
since,
To such unsightly sufferings be
debas't
Under inhuman pains? Why should not
Man,
Retaining still Divine similitude
In part, from such deformities be
free,
And for his Makers Image sake
exempt?
(Eleventh Book, 503-514, p. 548)
The
following statement which stoked the so-called romantic interpretation of Paradise Lost is arguably among Mill’s
most heretical phrases: “Better to reign in hell then serve in heaven”.
(First Book, 263, p. 36) Adam adds to this Satanic verse, saying that not to
exist is preferable to existence under God’s conditions. Adam wasn’t asked
whether he wished to exist or not. He never experienced the freedom of choice
not to exist. And this cannot be the case as Milton explains on several occasions, two of
which go as follows:
Who saw
When this creation was? rememberst
thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave
thee being?
We know no time when we were not as
now;
(Fifth
Book, 856-859, p. 268)
Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus,
how here?
Not of myself; by some great maker
then,
In goodness and in power pre-eminent;
(Eigth Book, 277-279, p. 372)
Adam and
Eve were given freedom, but not the freedom not to exist by committing suicide.
Still, the Gnostic temptation perseveres in Milton’s poem, as abstention from procreation
is not the same as suicide. When thinking of herself, Eve suggests suicide.
With respect to suffering future generations she suggests remaining childless.
This antinatalist stance cannot be so easily dismissed from a Christian point
of view and one will have to resort to the Old Testament to attack antinatalism
on Biblical ground, since the New Testament lends support to an antinatal
attitude, as quoted above.
Milton depicts a divine tyrant whose
ruthlessness becomes blatant as we see him proceed with creation despite his
foreknowledge of human suffering and the fact that his creatures cannot create
a compensatory theodicee. So that Eve – knowing that there can be no
anthropodicy, no justification of procreation in the face of imminent suffering
– has the severest qualms about procreation. In the same manner in which Adam
and Eve reproach God for having been created without asking for existence, any
future human will condemn the first couple for having been created. To mention
one current outlook: Milton’s
account of man’s being created without having asked for existence is echoed in
current debates on the topic of wrongful birth.
Giving
freedom to man, God bestowed him with the freedom to do evil. The deed of
giving freedom itself proves evil as it is an almighty and omniscient being
endowing this “gift” upon a limited being, such as man.The evil of freedom is that it involves the
freedom to do evil. In the next section, I will provide the reader with an
overview of how Mark Twain, unwittingly echoing Milton, convincingly shows that the freedom
to do evil demonstrates the wrongfulness of creation.
Mark
Twain: Unrequested Existence and Freedom to do Evil as the Evil of Freedom
Being created without consent is taken up again in Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger – a work
unpublished in the author’s lifetime. In his post-humorous and posthumous Gnostic prose, Twain repeats Milton’s heresy and takes
it to new heights:
“A God who could make good
children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made
every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize
their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal
happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his
angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and
maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell – mouths
mercy, and invented hell – mouths Golden Rules, and foregiveness multiplied by
seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has
none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man
without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts
upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and
finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor abused slave to
worship him!” (Mark Twain, the Mysterious Stranger and Other Tales, Signet
Classics, N. Y. 2004, p. 241)
The allegedly benevolent supreme being is
exposed as a stingy and sloppy creator. And the exclamation „Who created man
without invitation“ in The Mysterious
Stranger matches sentiments expressed by Twain in other writings such as
“Little Bessie” (chapter two) where Twain compares God to Dr Frankenstein and,
by the same token, man to Frankenstein’s unhappy monster:
“Frankenstein took some flesh and bones and
blood and made a man out of them; the man ran away and fell to raping and
robbing and murdering everywhere, and Frankenstein was horrified and in
despair, and said, I made him, without asking his consent, and it makes me
responsible for every crime he commits. I am the criminal, he is innocent.”
“God made man, without man's consent, and made
his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic,
or I will ill punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for
everything man does, all the same; He can't get around that fact. There is only
one Criminal, and it is not man.”
(http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/twainbes.htm)
In addition
to this, Twain unmasks the highly prized gift to choose between good and evil
as a hideous heavenly legacy. Once again, man’s freedom to do evil testifies to
the creator’s malignance:
No brute ever does a cruel thing – that is the
monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it
innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he
does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it – only man does that.
Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his! A Sense whose function is to distinguish
between right and wrong, with liberty to choose which of them he will do. Now
what advantage can he get out of that? He is always choosing, and in nine cases
out of ten he prefers the wrong. There shouldn't be any wrong; and without the
Moral Sense there couldn't be any. And yet he is such an unreasoning creature
that he is not able to perceive that the Moral Sense degrades him to the bottom
layer of animated beings and is a shameful possession. (Twain, l.c., p. 180)
Of course,
Twain does not want to make the case for immoral behaviour. It is only from the
heavenly point of view of a supreme Deity, before man had been created and
endowed with a free will, that he stresses it would have been better had God
not created us. Twain himself was not a man without a moral sense, as is
demonstrated by his commitment to anti-imperialism
The Gnostic
image of an evil God never disappeared. A further common denominator in Milton
and Twain is their presentation of the future in store for us. Milton’s narrative of
earthly things to come reminds us of Dante’s most sinister delineations of hell
and reveals that man’s freedom will be of no avail unto the last day.
Our future
in Milton as
revealed by Michael:
thou mayst know
What miserie th' inabstinence of Eve
Shall bring on men. Immediately a
place
Before his eyes appeard, sad,
noysom, dark,
A Lazar-house it seemd, wherein were
laid
Numbers of all diseas'd, all
maladies
Of gastly Spasm, or racking torture,
qualmes
Of heart-sick Agonie, all feavorous
kinds,
Convulsions, Epilepsies, fierce
Catarrhs,
Intestin Stone and Ulcer, Colic
pangs,
Dæmoniac Phrenzie, moaping
Melancholie
And Moon-struck madness, pining
Atrophie,
Marasmus, and wide-wasting
Pestilence,
Dropsies, and Asthma's, and
Joint-racking Rheums.
Dire was the tossing, deep the
groans, despair
Tended the sick busiest from Couch
to Couch;
And over them triumphant Death his
Dart
Shook, but delaid to strike, though
oft invok't
With vows, as thir chief good, and
final hope.
(Eleventh
Book, 475-493, p. 546f)
Such are the horrors visited upon man by a monarchical
tyrant-God as depicted in Milton’s
poetry. Now for Twain’s prose, a Gnostic’s revelation of our future:
“Would you like to see a
history of the progress of the human race? – its development of that product which
it calls Civilization?” (l.c., p. 219) “In five or six thousand years five or
six high civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the
world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest,
ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people. They all did their
best, to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest
incident in its history….” (l.c., p. 221f)
“»And what does it amount to?« said Satan, with
his evil chuckle. »Nothing at all. You gain nothing; you always come out where
you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating
itself and monotonously re-performing this dull nonsense – to what end? No
wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping
little monarchs and nobilities who despise you.” (l.c., p. 222)
Twain’s
narrative is a place where the old treasure hunt for a theodicy – a bad debt
and unfeasible in the face of deliberately chosen malign design – yields to the
necessity of an anthropodicy (a justification of procreation against the
backdrop of imminent suffering). This is not marred by the fact that Twain’s
quest for an anthropodicy is rather implicit than explicit And no sooner has he
adumbrated the quest for an anthropopodicy than he denies its possibility,
saying, with regard to procreation: “To what end? No wisdom can guess!”
In Milton
and Twain, God created man without the latter’s consent; man’s history as a
whole is tainted by wrongful creation. In Kant, man creates man. Is
anthropogenic creation less wrongful? Does Kant provide an anthropodicy, where
Milton and Twain despair of the possibility of a theodicy?
Kant –
Existence without consent on the part of the exister
In Kant, God – and his impact upon the world – can never be an object of
experience and has faded into an idea. Still, the problem of wrongful creation
remains unsettled. Kant picks up the quest for an anthropodicy (the
justification of procreation in the face of suffering) where Twain left off.
Procreation, Kant explains in his Metaphysics of Morals (§ 28 of the Metaphysics of Right), is an act in which we,
“without the person’s consent, bring her into this world, bring her
across, for which deed there is an obligation henceforth on the part of the
parents to do
everything within their power to make the child content with its condition.”[3]
Surprisingly,
by saying to “bring the person across” Kant here (perhaps inadvertently)
employs imagery that refers to the pre-existence of persons as human souls. To
bring a person across implies her existence prior to her being brought across.
The imagery suggests a pro-natal stance as it evokes a sense that the child
existed – longing for embodiement – before being brought into this world by its
parents. Here, the siren song of metaphysics is appealing as ever. It appeals,
however, to a transcendent realm that is not in keeping with Kant’s
transcendental position.
When a
person – ie a being equipped with freedom – is transferred into this world,
this happens without consent on the part of the new sojourner on earth.
Therefore, says Kant in his Metaphysics of Morals, the parents must not escape
responsibility and are obliged to do everything within their power to make the
child content with his condition. They are not entitled to leave him to his
fate. A first problem that arises at this point is that Kant leaves out of his
account a facet that goes along with the very nature of procreation: Parents
can never guarantee their offspring’s well-being, as procreation always implies
the unknown, a lottery. Not only biologically, but also inasmuch as our future
is unknown to us. Kant, it is true, tries to forestall the lottery of existence
by calling on parental responsibility. Yet their responsibility expires as the
children come of age, as Kant says. Thus, the new earthling who has come of age
might find himself in dire straits biologically or socially. And of course, as
the person did not exist prior to his existence on earth, she has all the right
to rue the day in retrospect when her parents decided to procreate (or did so
accidentially) and to address reproaches to her parents who – endowed with a
free will – could have abstained from procreation.
There is yet another aspect in Kant’s philosophy that dooms any attempts
to create an anthropodicy. In a similar fashion to Milton and Twain, Kant acknowledges that a
person brought into existence is brought into existence without having
requested it. This, however, cannot be reconciled with the following Kantian
decree from his Fundamental Principles of
the Metaphysics of
Morals: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of
any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only.” (Quoted in
Ethics: The Study of Moral Values, by M. J. Adler and S. Cain, Encyclopedia
Britannica, inc. Chicago-London 1962, p. 219)Any Kantian will have to face the precept never to reduce a human
being to a means but always to treat her also as an end.
Now,
someone who does not exist yet, cannot be treated as a means. Neither can he be
treated as an end. However, when deciding to procreate, parents inevitably
conceive of the future person rather as a means than an end. They cannot,
ontologically speaking, procreate for the sake of the person who will exist[4].
They can, however, procreate in the pursuit of their own happiness or their
country’s well-being. Note well that parents and countries do exist already.
Creating a new human being inevitably goes along with conveiving of a human
being as a means without being able to treat him as an end. The parents, the
family or the institutions for the benefit of which the new person might exist
do already exist, while the person that is conceived of does not exist yet.
There is an asymmetry here inasmuch as procreation yields new people for the
sake of existing people or institutions while procreation will never benefit
someone who does not yet exist.
To repeat
the aforementioned: Someone could object that – in the same manner in which
they cannot be treated also as an end – future people cannot be treated as a
means as they do not exist yet. Looked at from a different point of view, from
the point of view of imminent procreation, the argument is not convincing: If
people procreate, pre-existing parental or societal needs, wishes, aspirations
or demands are fulfilled (or not). The same does not apply to those who will
start to exist because, had their parents not procreated, there wouldn’t have
been thwarted needs and wishes on the child's part.
Procreation
always involves pre-existing ends into which a new person fits as a means.
Regarding procreation, it is not possible for us to treat non-existing future
persons also as an end, whereas it is possible to conceive of them as a means.
Therefore, in light of the Kantian request to always treat persons also as an
end, we had rather not procreate.
[1]
All Milton quotes are taken from John Milton, Paradise Lost/Das verlorene Paradies,
English/Deutsch, Zweitausendeins Versand, Frankfurt/Main 2008
[2]Later on, however, Adam will join Eve, exclaiming:
The misery, I deserved it, and would bear
My
own deservings; but this will not serve;
All that I eat or drink, or shall beget,
Is propagated curse. O voice once heard
Delightfully, ‘Increase and multiply’,
Now death to hear! For what can I increase
Or multiply, but curses on my head?
Who of all ages to succeed, but feeling
The evil on him brought by me, will curse
My head, ‘I’ll fare our ancestor impure,
For this we may thank Adam’;
(Tenth Book, 726-736, p. 500)
[3] Immanuel Kant, Kant Werke 5, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft und Die Metaphysik der Sitten, Könemann
Verlag, Köln 1995, p. 338
[4]
I am elaborating here on an observation made by David Benatar in his Better never to have been. The harm of coming into existence,
Oxford University Press 2006, p. 129f
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