comment: >
  
  Lol I understand your first comment better now.  Antinatalists aren't handwaving anything, you just suck at arguing your point.
context: Antinatalists are generally negative utilitarians, meaning their primary goal is the prevention of suffering.  The argument would go that no one has the right to inflict suffering on another person without that person's consent.  Whether the act which inflicts suffering also causes happiness is irrelevant; individuals can decide for themselves whether such trade-offs are worth it to them, but no one can decide that for someone else and decide to hurt someone 'for their own good'.  
  
  Thus, the fact that the created life will experience both suffering and happiness does not justify creating it, as you don't have the right to inflict that suffering regardless of what else is going on.  It's not a view I subscribe to, but it is well-considered and internally consistent.
  
  Are you saying that maybe souls exist in a spiritual realm where they consciously decide to inhabit created fetuses and therefore all children do consciously and intentionally consent to being born?  That's the closest I can come to understanding your argument here.
  
  Yes, no one can disprove that such a thing might exist, just as no one can disprove that people actually like being owned and treated at chattel slaves despite their claims to the contrary (they could be lying or mistaken about their own experiences).  Anything is possible, after all, you can never prove a negative to begin with.  
  But in practice we don't treat things as true unless we have good evidence for them; there's no evidence that children supernaturally 'consent' to being born before conception, thus it's not rational to treat that as part of your policy justifications when talking about issues like this.
  
  See 1.  Your expectation that doing something that will hurt someone will probably also help them more in the end does not give you the right to hurt them without their consent.
  
  Imagine that your child is playing in the grass near a busy street, and wandering too close to the road.  You confidently predict that if you grab them roughly by the arm, yank them harshly away from the street, and slap them sharply across the face, this will cement in them a reliable fear of playing too close to the street, making them safer in the long run - it would be for their own good.  Does that prediction that it would be for their own good give you the right to inflict that suffering on them?
  Many parents would say yes, corporal punishment is a justified and acceptable part of childrearing, even if it involves great pain and fear, so long as it is done with a reasonable expectation of helping the child in the long run.  But many others would say no, you don't have the right to resort to violence and inflict suffering on others even if you expect it to be ultimately to their benefit, even if you predict that they would retroactively approve of it when looking back on things years later.
  Antinatalism draws on the latter assumption - even if you expect that a child would ultimately have more pleasure than suffering and be glad to be born, they will definitely experience suffering in their life and your prediction about what else will happen does not give you the right to inflict that suffering without their consent.  Again, not something I agree with, but reasonable and consistent.
  
  It would indeed be nice if we could treat the ultimate causes of suffering and dysfunction that create the conditions where antinatalism is a sensible position.  But we've been trying to do that for thousands of years, without mixed success at best.
  
  At a certain point, you can't criticize people for acting rationally given their shitty circumstances, when those circumstances are largely beyond their control and not likely to change any time soon.  Sure, overpopulation wouldn't doom the world if we switched entirely to green energy and vegan diets and a lower-consumption culture; we're not doing that and there's little evidence we will, so for now overpopulation does (credibly) doom the world.
  
  Not at all.  I think you're being heavily influenced by a few angsty antinatalists who post on social media; this type of hatred for life is not typical of the movement as a whole.
  
  As I've indicated, the movement has two main philosophical pillars: that the expectation that a created life will be net good does not confer the right to inflict the suffering that life will entail, and that slowing the rate of population growth will be beneficial to society and the people in it, creating a safer and better life for everyone.  Neither of these are fueled by hatred or resentment for life in general; the latter is specifically an average utilitarian view about how to maximize quality of life for everyone alive. >
  
  The argument that "creating" a life also inflicts suffering on said life is a logical contradiction. The act of creation cannot also be a change of the creation. >
  
  The act of creation can have consequences that influence the creation. There’s nothing logically wrong with that. >
  
  Logically, anything that is a consequence of the creation is already an inherent attribute of the creation. 
  If I create a sapient machine with a .5% failure rate every year, it's eventual failure is not some separate "consequence". >
  
  But the act of creation can have separate consequences that reach back around and affect the creation. That doesn’t mean it was built into the creation. >
  
  I don't know what a "consequence that reaches back around" would be. That seems like a contradiction in terms, since a "consequence" is defined by happening later in time.
  But to put my argument a different way: since we do not have different options for existing - we either exist or we do not - no possible moral judgement can attach to it. You need the ability to change the outcome to be morally responsible. >
  
  How bout this:
  Non existence: no suffering
  Existence: x% chance to suffer
  Lets forget the individual who may be suffering and look at the suffering instead as a universal variable that increases every time an agent suffers. DO YOU have the right to gamble with this variable? Should you have the right to increase suffering with no cost to self? >
  
  Sure, I should. I should have the right to increase any random integer I can think of.
  Once you get to an abstraction like "total cumulative suffering" you can justify all kinds of absurd results. Waking people up increases total cumulative suffering, so we should ban alarm clocks. Actually we should just put as many people as we can permanently asleep so they don't suffer. While we're at it, also sterilize as much as possible of the biosphere, because all that predation drives up cumulative suffering.
  That metric is entirely separate from any actual subject, which is the problem. That is a general problem in utilitarianism that only gets worse with more abstraction. >
  
  No, the difference I made explicit is that other people waking up is suffering inflicted on self. I specified “at no cost to self”, whereas waking up is suffering at the cost to self. 
  The point I intend to make is that someone giving birth gambles with another agent’s fate of whether they will suffer or not. >
  
  Is there any conceivable action that does not "gamble with another agent's fate"? I don't see how we could have a consistent moral standard that requires avoiding all possible suffering to any possible future agent. That would be entirely paralyzing. Given a long enough timeline, the probability that any decision causes suffering eventually approaches 1. >
  
  
  I think the idea that humans "did not consent to life" is a massive assumption.
  
  This does have parallels with other forms of assumed non-consent. For example, children below a certain age are deemed incapable if entering contracts under the law, because they are presumed to not have not yet developed the capacity to understand what they are agreeing to.
  Following this logic and extrapolating to even younger ages, the same general  principle of assumed non-consent should apply to people during their zygotic, embryonic and fetal stages of development too. >
  
  The problem being that existence is not something "done to" someone, nor something somebody does.
  Existence is not even really an attribute or a state. It's just the presence of anything at all.
  There is no meaningful way to consent to existence. No theoretical declaration of this sort is conceivable. >
  
  
  there is no meaningful way to consent to existence
  
  That's the point... >
  
  If the concept of consent does not make logical sense, the conclusion is that it is not applicable. >
  
  On what basis?
  Consent cannot be given, the reason why is immaterial. >
  
  Saying "I consent to existing" is nonsense. Gibberish.
  It's like saying "I consent to blue" or "I consent to 1+1 being 2". 
  An object exists when it's in a relation to a subject whereby it is perceptible.
  A subject exists if a subject exists. It's self-referential. Saying "I exist" contains no information, since existing is the condition for saying anything at all. >
  
  It's pointing out the obvious, I'll give you that, but it's certainly not gibberish. >
  
  How so? Explain. >
  
  Because existing is a thing you do, and continue to do.
  You could choose to take a step off of a tall building and cease to exist. >
  
  No, it's not, You cannot stop existing. Other people can die, but in your world, you cannot. If you stop existing, then nothing follows. >
  
  I think the fundamental premise of antinatalism rests on the fact that suffering and pleasure are not equivalent as demonstrated by a thought experiment. Obviously thought experiments usually rely on completely imaginary situations so there is a threat of them not reflecting reality but it does demonstrate a point.
  Imagine you had a fortune teller with 100% accuracy (obviously unrealistic) he tells you if you have a baby it will be the happiest baby of all time, it will never experience a moment of suffering. Do you have a moral obligation to have that baby? Most people’s moral intuition would say no. Now the opposite, the fortune teller says your baby will have a life of pure suffering, never a moments peace just a life of pain and suffering not a moment of joy. Most people’s intuition is it would be immoral to have that baby. So we get the conclusion based on that, that not having a child hurts no one but having children can be harmful. It also tells us that suffering is more bad than pleasure is good. 
  IMO why I’m not an anti natalist is because my views around suffering are that it is based on our perception rather than objective events. There are people who have very painful difficult lives but who are still very happy. And there are people with very wonderful lives on the outside who suffer immensely which to me suggests our joy and suffering might be our own responsibility rather than something externally imposed. But if I’m wrong about that I think anti natalists have a decently strong arguement >
  
  The thing I hate about this thought experiment and its variants (no matter who presents them aka this isn't meant to imply I thought you were an antinatalist) is that no matter if I had a moral obligation or not to have the baby I still have a logical/temporal one in both the happiness and suffering scenarios because how could the 100% accurate fortune teller (or whatever a given variant of this experiment has in place of it) have seen that baby's future if there was no baby >
  
  As I said all thought experiments like these should be taken with a grain of salt. You could change it up to be a little more realistic say you knew your baby would be born with Huntington’s a very very terrible disease to have to deal with. People would probably be more split in that case but a lot of people’s moral intuitions would still be somewhat opposed >
  
  my problem isn't the only suffering or only joy it's that the knowing for 100% certainty either way creates a bootstrap paradox >
  
  That’s not something I’m familiar with could you explain a bit? >
  
  The entire Antinatalist philosophy has a strange understanding of suffering. They view it as something in its own right rather than a state a living being can experience. Strangely they also have this notion that you can ‘save’ something that does not exist. If you don’t reproduce as to ‘do the person a favor, or rather not do a disservice’ you have not actually done anything. As you can only do a disservice or favor to a subject, but there is no subject in this case. It is a general dissociation from reality to where ideas and abstracts take on actual substance to the person. A sort of common mental ailment in this age. >
  
  Per number 2: In logic and debate, there is a rule that the burden of proof falls on the asserter, not the defender. In normal terms, you can't and don't have to prove a negative. The obligation to prove something falls on the person asserting a positive. 
  For example, somebody saying God doesn't exist doesn't have to prove his statement is true - our senses tell us that is correct. We can't see, hear, smell, touch or taste god so any reasonable person would also assume god doesn't exist. If you want to assert 'god does exist', then you have to provide the proof that refutes the sensorial experience the rest of us reasonable folks are having. Make sense?
  Now back to the issue at hand: antinatalists do not have to prove humans aren't asked if we want to be born before hand because no reasonable person experiencing the world in a sane way claims to remember such a conversation. So the burden of proof falls on the person asserting we ARE asked before we are born whether or not we want to exist.
  Tl;Dr: burden of proof is never on the negative. The negative (god doesn't exist, we are not asked consent before we are born) is the default. If you believe those things (if you believe there is a conversation about consent before you are born), the onus is on you to prove that conversation happens, not on me to prove that it doesn't.
  I have yet to see that proof. >
  
  Yeah I think this is a fair argument.
  However it’s pretty obvious that humans do consent to being alive once they become teenagers. 99.9% prefer it to not existing and the other 0.1% commit suicide. 
  This is a better argument than the OPs and is something antinatalists just handwave away with their ridiculous nonsense. >
  
  I don't think it's handwaved.  Look up "The ones who walk away from Omelas".  
  Basically, imagine a city where everyone is amazingly happy, and life is great for everyone - except one child, who must be tortured endlessly with no possibly of death, in order for this city to function as it does.
  In this parable, the city residents are the 99.9% who prefer life to not existing and the child is the 0.1%.  The antinatalist would say it's not moral to torture this one child just to have everyone else living in paradise.  What would you say? >
  
  I would say that story has no connection to the world we live in and has been invented to justify doing immense real world harm despite having no connection to reality >
  
  What "immense real world harm" are you referring to?
  
  However it’s pretty obvious that humans do consent to being alive once they become teenagers. 99.9% prefer it to not existing and the other 0.1% commit suicide.
  
  I drew the connection.  The residents of the city are your 99.9% who consent to being alive and the child is the 0.1%. >
  
  I said the 0.1% committed suicide. In your example they are held alive, being tortured and unable to commit suicide. This two scenarios are completely different >
  
  There's always a 0.1% miserable enough to commit suicide though.  The one child in the story is a stand-in for the part of the population that lives in misery, not a literal single person. >
  
  
  There's always a 0.1% miserable enough to commit suicide though.  
  
  Fine, they can commit suicide then. I encourage it. I encourage all the anti natalists to commit suicide.