[split] Ethics - parental responsibility re: children

[The Grand Nudger]

Then again, the anti-natalist would counter this by rhetorically asking the question why humankind needs to progress at all anyway (which Ahri pretty much argued earlier in this thread). And once again, I find it's difficult to answer in a satisfactory manner. Maybe there isn't any good answer, but we're here anyway and we have kids and like having them, so that's that.

I think we're bumping up against a very common conviction among atheists: that life has no intrinsic meaning, and that we each give our lives the meaning we choose. 

But then if someone chooses not to choose a meaning, I don't see how we can scold that, or say that he's failing in some duty. And if he points out that other people's meanings are just things that they've chosen, and not something objectively real, and that such choices are not mandatory, then consistency demands that we agree. 

That's a common conviction between many atheists and theists.  It's not as if this world or this life has intrinsic value to nutters seeking heavenly reward.  It only has the extrinsic purpose of giving them an opportunity to get right with the big guy before they die.  Their kingdom, as they say, is not of this world.  The anti natalist position, however...a realist normative declaration, tacitly asserts a meaning and purpose to life and moral agency.  The minimally ethical life.  Obviously, if this life is genuinely void of any such content, anti natalism is factually incorrect....but I doubt we'd find too many people here (whether they think it's intrinsic or some meaning they choose to allow or give) that would disagree with the suggestion that we live a minimally ethical life. Don't have to be good..per se, just avoid being bad, at a minimum.

It matters very much to the anti natalist position that we progress, their normative statement is a map of the progress they think we're compelled to make through a minimally ethical life.  It doesn't matter to the rejection of the anti natalist position whether we progress or there's a point to progress, though - as the anti natalist position revolves wholly and completely around the ability of an anti natalist to establish that procreation is...in fact...bad. Not that there is no point to progress. Not that life is unfair. Not that suffering exists. Not that life is meaningless. As I mentioned before, you can make an anti natalist argument even if the setting is heaven, full of purpose and meaning. We hear it on the boards with some regularity. Whenever some atheist with a decidedly negative view of christianity ponders over the hilarious chance of waking up, against their will, in the fundy gods heaven. Fundy god, in that context, has failed to live a minimally ethical life - and gone a step further into the bad as they see it - in that the fundy god had a chance to seek their consent (that human parents don't) and then completely ignored their decision if it was aware of it (here again, human parents do better where we can).