Creating new people is selfish and necessarily so, for the simple reason that it can never be done for the ones who were created because they did not exist in any way before it was decided to create them, so how can their creation be for their sake? How can you do something for someone before there is even someone? It is impossible to do something for someone who does not exist, and by virtue of not existing, s/he also has no interest in existing, or desire to exist. Therefore, creating someone is necessarily not for the one who is created, but necessarily for others, who are usually the ones who decided to create that someone. No one reproduces for the sake of the one born because before someone is born there is no one at all for whom you can do anything.
People create new people for all sorts of selfish reasons. Some of the common ones are an insurance certificate for old age, alleviating loneliness, filling life with meaning, genetic continuity, feeling like everyone else, feeling important, feeling needed, having a reason to get up in the morning, fear of regret if they don’t reproduce (but no fear that their children might regret if they do), to maintain, preserve and even save a relationship, make self-correction through a second childhood, etc.
Some may claim that they do this for social or national or religious reasons, but it is certainly not, and even theoretically cannot be, for the created people themselves since they don’t exist until the fact of their existence is imposed on them by their creators.
Reproduction is selfish and necessarily so because no one ever asked, wanted or needed to be created before they existed. Paradoxically, the creation of a person is never in the interest of the person being created but always in the interests of others.
This view stands in contrast to the popular position that creating people is clearly selfless since it is bestowing something to someone else. At the base of this wrong position is a flawed understanding of the concept of bestowing in the context of existence.
No one is doing anyone a favor by creating them. And this is true in the case that the life of the created person is good, or even if it was possible to guarantee that someone’s life will be good forever. Creating a person is simply an action that cannot be for the benefit of the created person because s/he did not exist before it was decided for her/him to exist and therefore technically it is an action that cannot be for the created person but necessarily for others. Creating a person is not a case of giving something to someone because you cannot bestow something to someone before there is someone at all. People had to exist in some way before they existed in order for anything to be granted to them. Granting existence is an oxymoron.
Creating people also does not benefit them because it is impossible to improve the situation of those who do not exist. For those who do not exist, there is no situation whatsoever, and there is no option to improve ‘no situation’. Creating people is not an action that causes people to move from one state to another but an action that creates people from nothing. Before this action there were no people whatsoever and after it there are. When you create people, you don’t move them from a neutral or bad state to a good one, but literally create them.
It is not that people who were not created are disappointed and frustrated that they were not created, or are even in a state of neutral or zero well-being, and we are doing them a favor by creating them, but that they have no well-being at all because they do not exist.
No one is left sad, abandoned and disappointed if they are not produced, for the simple reason that there are no ‘them’ at all who can be saddened, abandoned or disappointed. No one waits to be created. There is no waiting room outside existence. And there is no existence outside of existence. Therefore there is no reason, nor possibility, to create people for themselves. It is necessarily always done for others.
Beyond the fact that the decision to create new people is necessarily fundamentally selfish because people were created not because they wanted, asked, needed or agreed to it but because their parents wanted it, the selfishness is expressed in the most practical and severe way when the created people suffer in their lives. If people had wanted, needed, or sought to exist before they existed despite their suffering, or for some reason had agreed in advance to bear their suffering, it might have been less selfish to create them, but since none of this is the case when creating someone new, reproduction is causing suffering, or at the very least exposing someone else to suffering not out of the interest, desire, need or consent of the one who was created and suffered, but of the one who created the sufferer.
Reproduction is selfish and necessarily so because it is the creation of someone very vulnerable in a very dangerous world, for reasons and motives of the creators not the created. People who create new people expose them to a host of harms, some of which can be miserable and downright destructive, because they wanted to be parents, not because their children wanted, asked, needed, or agreed to exist.
Reproduction is selfish because it is putting someone else at risk so as to advance my own interests.
Reproduction is selfish because it forces people to be the product of a certain body, a certain soul, a certain genetic load, a certain geographical place, a certain cultural heritage, a certain society, a certain country, a certain city, a certain environment, certain parents, etc., when none of this was chosen, requested, required, pre-agreed, or desired by the created person, but by the creators.
Reproduction is selfish because it causes someone else to experience pain, frustrations, disappointments, sickness, weakness, exhaustion, boredom, fears, anxieties, loss, and death, not because they wanted to experience any of it or were willing to suffer all of it for something else they wanted to experience, but because their creators wanted to experience parenthood.
And reproduction is selfish because many people are miserable and they don’t stop their own existence because they don’t want to hurt the very people who for selfish reasons put them in a situation with the possibility of misery. They endure an unhappy reality that was imposed on them because of their parents’ wishes, and they are trapped in it because they do not want to hurt their parents’ wishes.