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Blueberry comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong
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That your child might experience a great deal of pain which you could prevent by not having it.
That your child might regret being born and wish you had made the other decision.
That you can be a good parent, raise a kid, and improve someone's life without having a kid (adopt).
That the world is already overpopulated and our natural resources are not infinite.
Points taken.
Let me restate what I mean more formally. Conditional on high living standards, high-quality parenting, and desire to raise a child, one can reasonably calculate that the expected utility (to myself, to the potential child and to others) of having the child is higher than the expected utility of not having a child. In which case I wouldn't think the antinatalism position has legs.
I'm not sure about this. It's most likely that anything your kid does in life will get done by someone else instead. There is also some evidence that having children decreases your happiness (though there may be other reasons to have kids).
But even if this is true, it's still not enough for antinatalism. Increasing total utility is not enough justification to create a life. The act of creation makes you responsible for the utility of the individual created, and you have a duty not to create an entity you have reason to think may have negative personal utility. (Strict utilitarians will disagree.)
True - we might call the expected utility strangers get a wash because of this substitution effect. If we say the expected value most people get from me having a child is nil, it doesn't contribute to the net expected value, but nor does it make it less positive.
It sounds as though that data's based on samples of all types of parents, so it may not have much bearing on the subset of parents who (a) have stable (thanks NL!) high living standards, (b) are good at being parents, and (c) wanted their children. (Of course this just means the evidence is weak, not completely irrelevant.)
That's a good point, I know of nothing in utilitarianism that says whose utility I should care about.
Whether or not someone agrees with this is going to depend on how much they care about risk aversion in addition to expected utility. (Prediction: antinatalists are more risk averse.) I think my personal level of risk aversion is too low for me to agree that I shouldn't make any entity that has a chance of suffering negative personal utility.
I'd throw in considering how stable you think those high living standards are.