Five Steps to Doing Good
(as an antinatalist)
Welcome to our five-step guide on how to do good (as an antinatalist). If you’re reading this, then you likely: 1) identify as an antinatalist, or are sympathetic to the viewpoint, and 2) wish to do good by taking action to help others. In this guide, we have put together five key steps we think can help any antinatalist in their journey to do good.
Before detailing these five steps, we think it’s important to explain what this guide is not.
This guide is not an all-encompassing blueprint for life. Each of our lives have many aspects, and our efforts to do good are only one part (if it is at all). This guide aims simply to give a high-level roadmap for how to start your personal exploration of doing good in the world, with some initial pointers we think will be valuable. You can find further reading and related links throughout our website.
This guide highlights five impactful steps that can be taken by someone on their journey to do good. This is not to discount other actions that could also be promising steps for one to take. We just believe these five steps are a solid foundation that are broadly accessible to most people who are wishing to do good.
This guide is not asserting that these steps must be taken in order, nor that every individual needs to complete all five steps to do good effectively. We’ve arranged the steps in an order we think is sensible – with earlier steps complementing the latter ones – but we don’t want people to think that, because they have not completed one of the earlier steps, they cannot pursue the latter ones.
Now, onto the guide itself!
Don’t have (any more) children.
This step won’t come as a surprise. One of the few things that all antinatalists agree on is that procreation is morally wrong. Whilst our motivations may differ, our conclusion is shared.
Note that we use the phrase: 'don’t have (any more) children', as opposed to ‘don’t have children’. People come to the antinatalist conclusion at different times in their lives, and some people may have already reproduced before this point. We don’t want antinatalist parents – who are an important voice in the antinatalist community – to feel as though this guide doesn’t apply to them.
Not reproducing, of course, carries the benefit of not imposing harm on the person we would have created, but it also means that we have avoided the opportunity cost that comes with raising children. Raising a child tends to be very time-, energy- and resource-intensive, and not doing so allows us to put that time, energy and resource toward doing good. We will explore those avenues of doing good in the latter steps.
Become vegan.
We believe that speciesism should be rejected as an arbitrary form of discrimination like racism and sexism. Rejecting speciesism, we believe, commits antinatalists to also rejecting the human breeding of non-human animals (e.g. the breeding of animals on farms). For the same reasons we oppose human reproduction, we oppose humans breeding other animals too.
One individual, through consuming animals and products derived from them, can typically be the cause of thousands of other animals being brought into existence over the course of their lifetime. Unfortunately, these animals often live horrible lives and die violent deaths. If each of us don’t reproduce, we will not bring into existence perhaps several people. If each of us became vegan, and avoided funding the industries breeding and using animals, we will not be demanding likely thousands of other animals be brought into existence. For this reason, we believe becoming vegan is a particularly impactful action. You can find more information about becoming vegan here.
Steps 1 and 2 could be seen as simply aligning our actions with the obligation non-speciesist antinatalism accords to us: not bringing sentient beings into existence. These are often referred to as negative duties. The remaining three steps are grounded in positive action – going beyond refraining from causing harm, and trying to actively do good. We do not claim that these are necessarily duties or obligations (i.e. things that people should do), but rather actions we believe could be good for people to take if they seek to do good.
Plan your career.
Over the course of your life, you’ll likely commit approximately 80,000 hours to your career. We therefore believe that it’s important to put thought into how you want to use all of this time – especially how you can use it for good.
There are two broad avenues to doing good with your career that people tend to pursue. Since we are not experts in career planning – which is why we have linked elsewhere on our website to those that are – we will focus on highlighting these two options in quite a high-level way.
Working directly for organisations doing good. This means planning your career within organisations that work directly on the problems you’re seeking to help address. This could include working in the charity sector, but it could also mean working in sectors such as politics, medical research, journalism (e.g. helping to highlight overlooked issues), and research and development (e.g. developing alternative proteins) amongst others. The details of working directly on an issue will, of course, depend on the issue itself and the sector you choose to work in.
Earning money to donate to organisations doing good. This means choosing a higher-earning career and giving a large proportion of your income to effective charities and causes. Again, there are a variety of options here and the best fit for you will depend on your skills, interests, and personal circumstance. One thing to note here, is to be wary of not overstepping sensible ethical boundaries in pursuing higher quantities of money, such as happened in the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
As we’ve already noted, career-planning can be complex. We strongly recommend seeking tailored advice where possible, taking your time, and reading widely before making any life-altering decisions. You can find more information and guidance on this on our Careers page.
Start donating.
We’ve already touched on this with ‘earning to give’ in Step 3 – so it’ll come as no surprise. There are many effective charities working on a range of high-impact causes in an evidence-based way. Many of these align with antinatalism, and you can visit our charity recommendations on our Donations page.
Note that we’ve said ‘start donating’, as we think of it as a high-impact habit to begin. The most difficult donation to make can often be the first one, but once you have made the first donation (and hopefully set up ongoing regular donations), you can decide to change the amount depending on your circumstances in the future. If you already donate regularly, great!
Antinatalists can be in a particularly good position to donate to effective charities as many of us will not raise children. In the UK, at the time of writing, it costs approximately £200,000 (low estimate!) to raise a child to 21 years of age. This money could do a significant amount of good if donated to effective charities. Just as an example, it costs approximately £4,000 to save a human life through donating to effective malaria charities. This would therefore translate to saving 50 lives for the cost of raising one child – with that £200,000. Likely more good could be done if donating to help non-human animals, given the comparatively small amount of funding these charities receive.
One suggestion when it comes to donating is not not pressure yourself to give significant amounts in the beginning. There is also wisdom in setting yourself up financially (whilst maintaining the habit of low-amount donations) before then giving more generously having achieved financial stability. This will help to secure your own well-being, but also make your habit of giving more sustainable. It can help to think about donating as giving a significant proportion of your income away over your lifetime, rather than an unsustainably large amount in the short-term.
Build the antinatalist community.
This final step may be less intuitive to some, but it could also be one of the most impactful (if done effectively). To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily mean building a bigger antinatalist community – this will likely naturally happen anyway – but a better community. When we say ‘better’ here, we mean building the potential of the community to have a larger positive impact.
We believe this could be a highly impactful endeavour as it has the potential to facilitate other people in the community significantly increasing their impact. Suppose you have followed these five steps, and through this final step, you support many other people in the community to be more impactful. This could result in you increasing your personal impact many times over – and you never know the positive potential the people you influence could have.
We do however appreciate that community building and influencing others in this way is not for everyone. Some people have a natural predisposition that lends itself to such a venture, while others are less suited to it. We can also appreciate that many find online antinatalist spaces not conducive to positive engagement and community building, and this can therefore be a difficult task. As such, we do think this is the least accessible of the steps in this guide, and we therefore understand if people decide to focus on the other four.
In terms of specifics, you can find our write-up of our How to Build a Healthier Antinatalist Community Panel from the Antinatalist Advocacy Conference 2023, in ten suggestions for community building. With respect to focusing on impact, we believe that facilitating discussion, sharing resources (such as on our website), forming support groups, and organising events could be great places to start. Simply beginning with the 5 steps and setting an example could be a wonderfully positive thing to do... We also realise we don’t have all the answers here, and it would be great to see people coming up with ideas amongst themselves!
Thanks for reading! If you have any thoughts or feedback, please use our Contact Us page.