The Value of Becoming Actual: Antinatalism, Cosmic Meaning, and Ontological Natal Permissibilism

Abstract

David Benatar’s antinatalism holds that coming into existence is always a harm and that procreation is therefore morally impermissible. This article develops a non-theistic alternative to a recent supernaturalist response to Benatar offered by Wakeman and Launonen. It defends ontological natal permissibilism: the view that actualizing a possible person as a perspectival subject is a defeasible prima facie good, and that this good can contribute to the moral permissibility of procreation when the expected conditions of life do not defeat it. The argument does not defend demographic pronatalism, a duty to reproduce, or the maximization of births. It instead challenges the priority Benatar gives to harm-avoidance by arguing that non-existence is not peace, protection, or safety, but the absence of a subject. Drawing on debates over cosmic meaning, Christian universalism, eternalism, and the Block Universe, the article distinguishes between physical and perspectival permanence. Mere inscription in spacetime does not generate value, since stones, collisions, and horrors also occur. Value arises when actuality includes conscious relation to reality, embodied presence, and world-contact. Ontological joy names the non-hedonic value of becoming actual as a possible perspective. Extreme suffering may defeat procreative permissibility, but it does not establish that birth is always only the imposition of harm.