Reproduction is morally wrong even if most people’s lives are ‘fine’ because the idea itself is wrong since it is never the result of the will of the one who was created or with the consent of the one who was created, because there is always a risk that a life that is currently ‘fine’ will deteriorate greatly, because there is always harm to others, and because no one is harmed by a life they have not experienced and everyone is harmed to one degree or another by a life they have experienced.
But even if for argument’s sake we ignore the fact that reproduction is morally inherently wrong, even if it is true that most people’s lives are fine, a much more important and morally relevant fact is that the lives of a great many people are really not fine.
Since the chance of creating an unhappy life is renewed with every reproduction, and since in avoiding the creation of people whose lives are ‘fine’ there is no harm to them since someone who was never created is not deprived of anything even if their life is expected to be ‘fine’ or even excellent, no reproduction can be morally justified. Since people whose lives are really miserable will inevitably be created as long as people keep creating new people, the price of creating people whose lives are ‘fine’ is people whose lives are really not. There is no symmetry here. There is immeasurable harm for some people in one case and no harm to anyone in the second case. Therefore it is much more morally relevant that some people’s lives are really bad than that most people’s lives are supposedly ‘fine’.
And do you really think that most people’s lives are fine? Don’t you recognize how vulnerable, scarred, lonely, frustrated and disappointed with life, with themselves and with others most people are? Do you know someone who lives a life that is even close to how s/he would have liked to live it if s/he could choose? That is, not people who live a life that is a realistic compromise in the face of given life circumstances, since this is not the way to check whether life is good but whether people are adaptable (and they are), the question is are the majority of people, or even if there are many people who manage to live more or less the life they would have wanted if they were not forced to live within countless compromises and circumstantial constraints, including their very selves, that is, their personality, their ability and skills, their environment, their formative experiences, their family, their initial social and economic situation, etc.?
Although the heart of the matter is not this but the claims we made earlier, we are convinced that few people live even close to how they would like to live if it were not so obvious and self-evident, and so sad, that they all have to make countless compromises. And by the way, this is also evidence that life is not inherently good. If life were inherently good, there wouldn’t be such huge gaps between people’s dreams when they were children, or even people’s dreams when they are older, and the lives they are actually forced to live.
If pessimists think that most people are unhappy, and optimists that most people are happy, realistic and honest people understand that most people just go through life, most of the time in low-level frustration, low-level pleasures, passing the time until they die. They don’t do anything important, nothing important happens to them, their big dreams fade with time and are reduced to a life with people that can be tolerated, work that can be tolerated, and enjoy small and insignificant things from time to time. These are the lives of the vast majority of people who have not endured really terrible things. People who are not in the news because they didn’t do anything important or because nothing particularly terrible has happened to them. A gray and still majority. Insignificant and completely forgotten. The chance that your child will be different is practically zero. No one would have signed up for such a life if it had been presented to them before they were created and if they had deeply understood that the alternative, meaning non-existence, is not a bad thing in any way but simply literally nothing. That is, the options are to live this meaningless and pointless life or not to exist and therefore not experience anything, not need anything, not want anything, not lack anything, and not miss anything in any way. Non-existence is not existence outside of existence and therefore missing out on existence. Non-existence is not a state in which someone is seeing but unseen, observing existence and longing to participate. In non-existence there is no existence. There is nothing. It is not a worse thing because something that does not exist cannot be worse than something else. And so to create someone is to doom that someone, in the rare case to a meaningful and happy life, in the probable case to a banal, grayish and meaningless life, and in the dangerous case to a life of misery. And in no case will anyone be harmed by the prevention of their creation. How is it not obvious that it is better to avoid reproduction?