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 # Richard Stallman's Antinatalism
 If you check the promoted page[1] of this blog, you'll see I have promoted Richard Stallman's article "Why it is important not to have children"[2]. I have the promoted page so that I have somewhere to promote others' ideas and so that I don't have to write a new post for each idea. But I still want to highlight a few of the points in that article that I find most compelling.
 
-The strongest reason Stallman gives for not having children is to avoid the global heating disaster (climate change) fueled by overconsumption and overpopulation. He notes that first-worlders who consume lots of resources especially should not have children. Even if there were no other reason not to have children, I consider averting climate change a strong enough reason on its own. Having one less child does more for the environment than all the other personal choices you can make combined. It's a no-brainer.
+The strongest reason Stallman gives for not having children is to avoid the global heating disaster (climate change) fueled by overconsumption and overpopulation. He notes that first worlders who consume lots of resources especially should not have children. Even if there were no other reason not to have children, I consider averting climate change a strong enough reason on its own. Having one less child does more for the environment than all the other personal choices you can make combined. It's a no-brainer.
 
 Besides not contributing to climate change, there's also the legitimate concern about what kind of world children born today will live in. Given the current trajectory of climate change and the failure of nations to address the problem, children born today will be destined to live in a world where large regions are uninhabitable and there's constant conflict and war over resources unless drastic action is taken to prevent disaster. Is it moral to put another being into a world like that?
 
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ Where Benatar deviates from this model is in premises 3 and 4. He places values
 Total: +0
 ```
 
-Clearly this makes no sense. If you break your leg, in that moment, the pain of your broken leg isn't cancelled out by the fact that your other leg remains intact. That's absurd. But that's exactly what Benatar's argument seems to imply.
+Clearly this makes no sense. If you break your leg, in that moment, the pain of your broken leg isn't canceled out by the fact that your other leg remains intact. That's absurd. But that's exactly what Benatar's argument seems to imply.
 
 ### Self-Contradictory
 To further illustrate the point that Benatar's value system makes absolutely no sense when his premises are interpreted in an absolute sense, I'm going to create 3 more diagrams representing his argument:
@@ -151,12 +151,12 @@ Also, evolutionarily speaking, we value our close relatives over strangers. It m
 
 The rest of David's points are different ways of either restating his original asymmetry argument or smuggling in our normal intuitions, so I won't cover them. I believe his arguments merely confuse people into thinking they agree by equivocation and subtly smuggling in extra assumptions that are applied in the wrong context.
 
-## Suffering Experienced by Descendents
-But Benetar has more than just the asymmetry argument. And the rest of his arguments seem much more coherent at least. He claims that we are responsible for the suffering of our descendents for having brought them into the world.
+## Suffering Experienced by Descendants
+But Benatar has more than just the asymmetry argument. And the rest of his arguments seem much more coherent at least. He claims that we are responsible for the suffering of our descendants for having brought them into the world.
 
 If your quality of life is extremely low and you cannot support a child and you voluntarily bring a child into the world, I agree. If responsibility means anything, you're partially responsible for their suffering. By the same token, if you have strong reasons to believe your child will be extremely happy and you give birth to an extremely happy child, all else being equal, you can take partial credit for their happiness.
 
-Certainly the potential suffering of descendents is cause for some people not to have children. But if you want to make the case that nobody should have children because of the suffering of descendents, we have to talk about depressive realism[7].
+Certainly the potential suffering of descendants is cause for some people not to have children. But if you want to make the case that nobody should have children because of the suffering of descendants, we have to talk about depressive realism[7].
 
 ### Depressive Realism
 Depressive realism is the idea that depressed people are the ones who see the world most clearly. It's the optimists who are kidding themselves. This is in contrast to conventional wisdom which says depressed people have a negative cognitive bias.
@@ -165,7 +165,7 @@ Antinatalists claim that most people do not evaluate reality correctly. They cla
 
 Some antinatalists further argue that the lives of all animals are very bad, not only the lives of humans. This philosophy is known as "universal antinatalism". According to universal antinatalism, since humans are the only species capable of understanding the predicament, we ought to sterilize other animal species to save them from their default state in the wild which is a life of struggle.
 
-I don't know whether or not depressive realism is true. I'm also not sure whether animals suffer more than they flourish. I will give the antinatalists credit on these points. The suffering of descendents does seem to be the strongest argument in favor of no one having children and animal sterilization out of all the antinatalist arguments.
+I don't know whether or not depressive realism is true. I'm also not sure whether animals suffer more than they flourish. I will give the antinatalists credit on these points. The suffering of descendants does seem to be the strongest argument in favor of no one having children and animal sterilization out of all the antinatalist arguments.
 
 However there is the possibility that future technology might deliver us eternal bliss so good it would retroactively justify all humanity's past suffering and the suffering of all other beings. This is a point Matt Dillahunty made when he addressed antinatalism. However it's not a valid point since it seems equally plausible that future technology could create suffering, perhaps even unfathomable torment beyond anything we've ever experienced. As a side note, Matt's criticism of antinatalism[8] seems to miss the point.
 
@@ -174,7 +174,7 @@ Anyway, there are a lot of unknowns about the future. We don't know how good ete
 Benatar has cited historical evidence[9] trying to show that the rare moments of bliss we experience do not offset all our suffering and the additional suffering we cause other animals[10]. This seems to be a plausible hypothesis. But we also shouldn't forget that humans have made a lot of progress in quality of life over the years as well.
 
 ## Famine Relief
-David Benetar also argues that:
+David Benatar also argues that:
 
 > "...in a situation where a huge number of people live in poverty, we should cease procreation and divert these resources, that would have been used to raise our own children, to the poor." - Wikipedia, licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0
 
@@ -202,8 +202,8 @@ Finally, there's the argument that not having children opens up the possibility
 ## Environmental Antinatalism
 In conclusion, I agree with Stallman's arguments against having children. I don't think procreating is a good idea for most first-worlders right now. We need the global population to go down for the sake of sustainability.
 
-## Suffering of Descendents
-As for Benetar, his asymmetry argument is absurd. But he does have a point about the suffering of descendents. I'm agnostic towards depressive realism. I'm not trying to promote depression. I'm just not going to say it's true or false based merely on my own personal experience because there are 8 billion other people on the planet all with different experiences of the world. If your intuition is that depressive realism is totally implausible and life is mostly good and most people do evaluate the reality of their own well-being correctly, then that's fine. I'm just not that certain.
+## Suffering of Descendants
+As for Benatar, his asymmetry argument is absurd. But he does have a point about the suffering of descendants. I'm agnostic towards depressive realism. I'm not trying to promote depression. I'm just not going to say it's true or false based merely on my own personal experience because there are 8 billion other people on the planet all with different experiences of the world. If your intuition is that depressive realism is totally implausible and life is mostly good and most people do evaluate the reality of their own well-being correctly, then that's fine. I'm just not that certain.
 
 If depressive realism is true though, we shouldn't continue the species hoping future technology will make all the suffering worthwhile. It seems equally likely that future technology will create more suffering. The arguments in favor of not having children in order to have more time and money to help the poor and adopt or foster children seem compelling.
 
@@ -217,7 +217,7 @@ The arguments for antinatalism coming from the Kantian imperative and impossibil
 ## Practicality
 From a pragmatic point of view, humans would never be willing to go extinct voluntarily. Given the uniqueness of our species and our technological advancement, we should not take such a matter lightly. As far as we know, there's no other life like us in the rest of the universe. To extinguish ourselves based on an estimation of well-being which we might be getting wrong could be a grave mistake.
 
-While I consider antinatalism supported by suffering of descendents at least plausible, it seems like more people would be open to hearing Stallman's antinatalism than Benetar and his colleagues' versions. Therefore as a matter of strategy, if you want to promote antinatalism, it's probably best to promote environmental antinatalism and give reasons having children is personally undesirable rather than telling people not to procreate because "life is mostly suffering".
+While I consider antinatalism supported by suffering of descendants at least plausible, it seems like more people would be open to hearing Stallman's antinatalism than Benatar and his colleagues' versions. Therefore as a matter of strategy, if you want to promote antinatalism, it's probably best to promote environmental antinatalism and give reasons having children is personally undesirable rather than telling people not to procreate because "life is mostly suffering".
 
 # Conclusion
 I believe I'm more open-minded to antinatalist reasoning than many other philosophers who seem to search for reasons to quickly dismiss people like Benatar. I understand that ideas don't live in a vacuum. They live in real human minds and the idea that life is mostly suffering could be a very hard pill to swallow, or even consider.