Climate change and anti-natalism: Between the horrible and the unthinkable

Abstract

There is no longer any doubt that the coming decades will bring serious threats to humanity from anthropogenic climate change. As we have suggested elsewhere, horrible scenarios are far more realistic than non-horrible ones, and science and technology are incapable, especially in our non-ideal world, of equitably distributing wealth, access to resources and adaptations to climate change. In this article, we offer an alternative to these inevitable horrible scenarios. The alternative is to implement either an anti-natalist policy, or procreative beneficence and reproductive rights policies aimed at radically reducing the birth rate. These alternatives, however, are potentially unfair and quite possibly unthinkable to most of humanity.