Along the certain harms that would be caused to everyone who will be created, and along the potential harm that may be caused to everyone who will be created, no less important, and to many even more, are the certain harms that would be caused to others by everyone who will be created and the potential harms that may be caused to others by everyone who will be created.
No person can live without causing at least some harm to others, that is other people and certainly animals from other species. Even if people would really try avoiding harming others throughout their lifetime, it is impossible. Harming others is unavoidable and it is caused in a very large scale, much larger than we would like to think it is.
There is almost nothing in people’s daily lives that doesn’t involve, or that its creation didn’t involve, harming others. Houses, cities, clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, means of transportation, cosmetics, shoes, phones, energy consumption, medicine, cleaning supplies, and certainly food, cause a lot of harm to many others.
Each product that your child will consume causes much harm even before it was produced. Each product was a collection of raw materials each of which was produced somehow, be it a tree that was cut, water that was pumped, chemicals that were synthesized, or an animal that was tortured in some farm. And all these “raw materials”, each of which has already caused harm to others, were transported somehow to the manufacturing plant. Transportation means energy and energy, at least currently, means burning more fossil fuels and so more CO2 emission and therefore enhancing the climate crisis. After the accumulation of all the raw materials, the manufacturing process of the final product causes more harm by consuming energy and producing waste, and then more transportation (more energy) from the manufacturing plant to the suppliers storehouse. From there more transportation to stores, which in the better case are close to the consumers, but usually hundreds if not thousands of miles away as we are living in a global and extremely consumerist world so many products come from aboard which means transportation with an even higher cost. The consumers reach the stores somehow (sometimes by foot but in many cases using a private car) to buy the products, and when they finish using a product they toss whatever is left of it, which in the better case is only one paper packing, but usually it is several which are made of plastic, and the product is carried home in a plastic bag.
And this whole procedure, like most procedures in the manufacturing process, requires a lot of water. People are using a lot of water not only for drinking but also to water their ornamental gardens and plants, they use water for the food they grow, for the animals they grow for food, they use water for cooling during industrial production, they use a lot of water for all kinds of energy production (not just hydroelectric), people use water to clean their houses, cars, bodies and clothes. And their clothes consume a lot of water not only because they are washed very often but also because clothes manufacture wastes a lot of water, especially the production of raw materials. And the clothes industry doesn’t only waste a lot of water, it also pollutes a lot of water sources by the emission of many chemicals involved in clothes production. The fashion industry is also usually involved in worker exploitation. Most of the sweatshops in the world are of the textile and footwear industry. Every person needs to dress and wear shoes, and people will consume many clothes during their lifetime. And by that, without really noticing, without ever meeting any victim of the clothes they will consume, people will cause a lot of harm, in many ways, to many others.
And the clothes example is very typical of the harm people are causing since most of their harm is caused without people being aware of it or really caring about it happening, and evidently the vast majority of people are not even willing to give up their most destructive harm despite it also being the easiest to give up on, and that is of course consuming animal based food. The best and simplest way to reduce the great harm each human is causing is by avoiding animal based food, and yet most people consume animal based food.
And it is not that other ways people are feeding themselves are totally harmless, far from it. Any food production, and surely industrial agriculture even if plant based, is very harmful to many species, but animal based food is at the top without competition, and now more than ever it is easy to avoid it, and yet the vast majority of people choose to consume it anyway. The chances that your children will avoid consuming animal products throughout their entire lives is very low, and as aforesaid, this will not prevent a significant harm to others even if they will for the simple reason that food production of any kind is very harmful to others.
The cruel reality in the world we are living in is that it is impossible not to live at others’ expense. It is simply not an option. Even highly environmentally aware vegans can’t avoid harming others. Only a complete abstinence from modern life may bring people to a state where they can sustain themselves not at the expense of others. But clearly this isn’t a realistic option for almost all people in the world. Only complete abstinence from consumption, agriculture, waste production, electricity, and certainly hunting, can be the beginning of sustaining oneself without harming others. Any other option of living necessitates harm.
Creating more and more people means that more and more creatures will be sacrificed to sustain these people. And again, this is the case even if your children would be highly environmentally aware vegans making a genuine effort to live a minimalistic life. It is just insufficient as a moral justification because it is highly unlikely that the ones who are sacrificed will be willing to accept their sacrifice in cases of genuine effort. Sentient creatures don’t want to be harmed period. Making efforts not to harm others is insufficient because others don’t want to be harmed and wouldn’t agree to sacrifice themselves for humans, for your children, had anyone bothered to consider their position on the matter. We in the human society are very forgiving with these efforts, but the direct victims have no reason to embrace this compromising attitude. As far as they are concerned it is not likely that anything above zero harm to them will be accepted. We, from our perspective, may look at harming them in terms of minimalism, but for them, quite often this harm is maximum harm to all they have which is their own lives.
Since it is highly unlikely that the children you will create would choose to grow all of their food by themselves, build their homes by themselves and from environmentally friendly materials only, would move around by foot or bicycle (not electric) only, would stitch their own clothes or buy only little of them and only from places that are strict about human rights violations and environmental regulations and of course are not made from animals, would produce their own electricity from solar panels and use it minimally, would not use products with batteries such as laptops and cellphones, would clean their clothes and houses with unharmful materials etc., and it is much more likely that they will maintain typical modern consumerist lifestyles, their harm scope would be huge. Only because we barely bother thinking about it we accept as obvious the enormous scope of harm to others that each human is causing.
Another reason why harming others is widely accepted is that it is inevitable. But the fact that harming others is unavoidable is not an excuse to create more people as anyway we can’t avoid harming others, but exactly the opposite, it is the fact that we can’t avoid harming others that is a reason not to create more people so as to avoid harming others. The fact that we can’t avoid a wrong that necessarily accompanies a certain action is no reason to permit doing that action but a reason to avoid it.
Many disparage the harm to others for biased and unacceptable reasons such the species of the victim. But suffering is suffering no matter to which species the victim belongs, therefore there is no justification to underestimating the suffering of individuals from other species.
The human perception is obviously super anthropocentric but clearly all the creatures humans refer to as pests because they eat some of the food humans grow, are probably referring to humans as devils. They are nibbling some of the food humans are growing for themselves, humans on the other hand are bombing them with enormous amount of poison that as a consequence harms far more animals than intended. Put simply, as far as humans are concerned this world is theirs and for them and they are allowed to do anything they want with it because they are the strongest. Many people tend to justify their dominion over other species using this argument but within the species the same rational is highly unaccepted. No one will say (at least not out loud) to victims of human atrocities that there is nothing to do, the strong rule. This argument also utterly fails in human court of law. But against other species this very same claim somehow works without flinching.
Humans intentionally create sentient creatures with certain diseases, imprison them, isolate them from their species, family and natural environment, and preform particularly cruel experiments on them. It is immoral and unjust to imprison, hurt, isolate, deliberately cause various diseases and defects, and to murder nonhuman animals so as to assist human animals. No way would we accept this in case of experiments on humans.
Some may argue that there is no choice as we can’t let humans suffer from various diseases and health conditions. But there is a choice and that is not to create more humans who may suffer from various diseases and health conditions and as a consequence to cause more suffering to sentient creatures so that maybe some solutions or improvements may be found for these humans. People are claiming that there is no choice for that matter only because they have the power to do that to other creatures from other species, and because they are not willing to accept the idea that we mustn’t create more potential human victims. But it is utterly wrong to harm other creatures from other species in order to ease human suffering, and it is utterly wrong that there is human suffering. So not creating new people is not a bad solution to both of these problems.
And by the way, it is important to mention in that context that people who are against animal experiments are forced, despite their opposition, to support them indirectly by paying taxes, and directly by consuming products that involve animal experiments. Meaning, like in many other cases of harming others, creating new people is to create people who will support cruel experiments on sentient creatures even if they will be against that when they’ll grow up and realize what they were forced to support.
Some are trying to avoid having a serious discussion and taking responsibility over harming others by claiming that these problems can be solved. This is an evasion from serious discussion and taking responsibility because it is not likely that such an argument would be seriously raised by people who take these problems seriously and devote their time and energy to actually solving them. It is more likely to be raised by people who are willing to devote half a minute of their time and the energy it takes to make this excuse. And anyway, as written earlier, this is not true. It is simply impossible to avoid causing harm. We can elaborate about why humans can’t live without harming others even if they’ll really try, but in a world like ours this is unnecessary, especially in countries where people are driving their private gas guzzler cars to restaurants where they gorge on steaks and drink cola from a disposable plastic bottle. People cause a lot of harm to others in half an hour, so how can you talk about avoiding all harms during a lifetime?!
Only because we are so used to plastic we don’t stop and think how crazy it is that we are all using on a daily basis so much of a non-biodegradable material, whose production is harmful, and that severely harms others after being thrown away, usually after one use only.
Plastic doesn’t break down into organic material but into smaller pieces of plastic called microplastics, and these tiny pieces are found in massive amounts in the bodies of many sea animals because eventually most of the plastic reaches the ocean. Meaning many sea animals are poisoned to death, slowly dying of microplastics absorption, because it is very convenient for people to throw something away after one use only. Another thing in that context that we don’t think about only because we are so used to it and because as far as we are concerned this entire planet is ours and for our use, is that only humans are producing waste. There is no such thing as waste in nature. There is always someone who can somehow use something after someone else used it. It is only humans who produce billions of tons a year of things that no one has anything to do with after humans have used them, in many cases only a single time.
Waste is far from being an aesthetic problem only. The linkage between waste and a clean and pretty environment is an educational failure. Throwing away waste, and more importantly, manufacturing products that turn into waste, is first and foremost polluting the living environment of others. That is because most waste reaches the ocean or is buried somewhere. But since there are others everywhere, even if humans don’t devote a second of thought to this fact and tend to ignore it, throwing waste is polluting someone else’s home. Everything that doesn’t biodegrade, and fast, without the emission of other polluting materials, shouldn’t be produced. We don’t know what the share of products that fit this criterion is, but it is probably only a tiny fraction of humans’ overall production.
Others mistakenly argue that this is a natural fight that humans have won and they have a right to live here like other species do. However, since the harm caused by humanity in general and by each human individually, is immensely greater than the harm caused by any other species, it is simply a falsification to put a human on the same scale with one of its victims. It is actually the existence of one person against, in the least bad case, thousands of other sentient creatures, and probably many more. It is just hard to estimate the number of victims or the severity of the harm to each individual sentient creature whose water source was polluted by all the cleaning supplies one person has used throughout a life time. It is hard to estimate the number of victims of all the poisons that each person was indirectly responsible for spreading through all the food consumed throughout a lifetime. It is hard to estimate the number of victims of all the plastic a person throws away throughout a lifetime. It is hard to estimate the number of victims from all the trees a person fells throughout a lifetime, from all the metals that were mined and thrown away, from all the fossil fuels a person has burned, from all the water a person has wasted, and from all the chemicals a person disperses throughout a lifetime.
It is not at all the case that it is one human against one individual from another species and so it is legitimate for that human to prefer oneself over the other. The case is of one human against probably tens of thousands of creatures who are his victims. How is it possible to justify the creation of a person knowing that during his life time that person would harm tens of thousands of creatures? If it was possible to know in advance that a person would harm tens of thousands of other humans during his lifetime that person’s parents would probably choose not to create that person. Only because most of humans’ victims are non-humans people allow themselves to create new people despite the enormous harm each human causes others, harm that will be caused to others by everyone, even if some of them will not mean to, even if they will be educated from an early age to be considerate and caring, simply because they cannot do otherwise.
And unfortunately most humans don’t harm others only because they can’t do otherwise. We wish that was the case because then the world would have been much less terrible. But the cruel reality is that many people are harming others not because they can’t do otherwise but simply because they can.
Creatures from other species harm others as well, but no species even comes close to the scale of harm and damage that humans have caused, are causing, and will keep causing if they’ll keep reproducing.
Humans have been harming each other and other species since the dawn of history. Their harms started in relatively small scale because they were a relatively small species, but very rapidly the scale of harm they caused grew into monstrous proportions never seen before.
Even if we’ll count “only” the harm people have caused, are causing, and will cause to others, it is absolutely more than what’s needed to conclude that they shouldn’t reproduce.
There are fights among other species as well, but obviously it is miniaturized compared to humans’ wars. It is absolutely incommensurable in any sense. Human destruction by way of war in global scale has already been realized several times and there is no guarantee that it won’t happen again in the near future. Genocide attempts have been constantly takeing place throughout history. And ethnic purification attempts in smaller scale probably have and still are taking place all the time. And to that we need to add wars on all kinds of scales with all kinds of goals.
Wars are another absolutely crazy idea that only because we are so used to it we accept it as part of life. But the fact that wars are part of human life doesn’t make it less crazy, it makes human life even crazier.
Many people are anxious or at least feel very uncomfortable while watching nature shows, but the elaborated and cruel ways they have invented not only to kill each other, but also to threaten, torture, humiliate, extort, or hurt others for pleasure, are immensely crueler than anything any other species has ever done.
As opposed to other species, humans also torture and murder for reasons that don’t involve defense from an immediate danger, food, or as part of battles over territories, but as part of ritual sacrifices, due to fear of the ‘other’ (even if the other is no threat), hate, jealousy, religious disputes, political differences, etc.
There are cases of rape in nature for reproduction purposes. But humans are the only ones who rape to harm others. Humans don’t rape to reproduce or due to a difficulty to handle their sexual desires, rape in human society is first and foremost an act of violence that aims at hurting and humiliating someone else. Humans also rape as part of military tactics. And when humans rape for reproduction purposes it is a method to enhance ethnic purification. They are forcing their victims to bare children of another nation and by that, in their view, they are performing an ethnic purification of the people they view as an enemy.
Humans enslave each other. It happens to this day. The form has changed but the concept remained. Many people are working in very hard labor, for many hours, in terrible sanitary conditions, for extremely low pay, and with no real option to leave.
Humans abduct little children, mostly girls, and turn them into sex slaves to earn them money. This has happened from the dawn of human history and to this very day.
Humans force children to kill their own family members and to become soldiers from a very young age.
Many would probably claim that most people don’t take part in this horribleness, but unfortunately this is not really accurate. By paying taxes and by consuming various products people do indeed take part in such horribleness even if they don’t have a direct intention and awareness. Another way that people do indeed take part in the horribleness that people are causing other people is by indirectly approving of it by not directly opposing it, by indirectly and sometimes directly financing it, by choosing and supporting harmful regimes, institutions and corporations, and by choosing certain leaders with harmful agendas. Being silent about horribleness of this scale is at least approving and sometimes supporting.
To anyone who wonders how we can argue that people are so harmful yet ask to defend them from the harms of existence, there is no contradiction of course between these two arguments against reproduction – because the created people will be harmed themselves, and because the created will harm others. Both arguments coexist and are utterly compatible. People shouldn’t be harmed and shouldn’t harm others. Both claims fortify the same conclusion and that is that humans shouldn’t reproduce.