Antinatalism's Historical Roots

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Sarah Dierna is a PhD candidate in Interpretation Studies at the Department of Humanities at the University of Catania, where she collaborates with the chair of Theoretical Philosophy. She has published essays, articles, and reviews in various scholarly journals and collective volumes. In 2023, she edited the Italian translation of David Benatar's The Misanthropic Argument for Antinatalism for Oxford University Press. In 2025, she published the monograph È il nascere che non ci voleva. Storia e teoria dell'Antinatalismo (Mimesis).

In this episode, we focus on “È il nascere che non ci voleva”. We start by talking about how Sarah got interested in antinatalism. We then talk about the metaphysics of antinatalism, what it is to be born, whether people really want children, abortion, the harms of life, and the reality of death. We discuss why people reject antinatalism. We go through the history of antinatalism in the West and the East, including the Greeks, Christianity, and Buddhism. We discuss the strongest arguments in favor of antinatalism, whether death is always a harm, the ethics of parenthood, the strongest arguments against antinatalism, and extinctionism. Finally, we talk about how to approach people about antinatalism.

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