Why Antinatalism and Procreative Beneficence Do Not Mix

The subject of this article is a critical examination of Marcus T. L. Teo's attempt to apply antinatalism to the domain of procreative ethics. Teo argues that antinatalism supports the Principle of Procreative Beneficence (PPB). In this article, we demonstrate several reasons why this is untenable. PPB is a fundamentally pronatalist principle, bearing no substantive connection to antinatalist philosophy. Moreover, the range of potential suffering that can be averted by PPB-if at all-is extremely limited. Antinatalism, by contrast, is not concerned with the quality of future individuals' lives, since it holds that the quality of all human life will be so poor as to render existence never worth initiating. Finally, we show that the emerging biomedical technologies relevant to reproduction, on which the concept of procreative beneficence depends, are almost invariably pronatalist in character, and hardly ever antinatalist.