EctoLife and Antinatalism

Based On Principle
8 min readJun 3, 2023

EctoLife is basically an artificial womb system which allows for customized genetic human offspring. A lot of people have very adverse reactions to this sort of technology, because it seems “unnatural”. I personally think that society should focus on helping the 100+ million orphans worldwide (https://www.orphanslifeline.org/orphan-fact-sheet) before investing in this sort of “artificial womb technology” and before breeding more humans in general.

Voluntarily having children is in itself a very selfish, and inconsiderate act. There’s a lot more I can get into about why that is, but first I need to point out two logical fallacies that many tend to commit: the “status quo” fallacy and the “naturalistic” fallacy. They are very similar: the “status quo” fallacy is basically when someone tries to justify something by saying that “it’s ok because that’s just the way that currently is”, while the “naturalistic” fallacy is when someone tries to justify something as being good all because “it’s natural”.

They are fallacies because slavery was once “the status quo” and “the way that things were”. Certainly did not mean that slavery was actually ok, nor did it mean that it was necessary for society to function. Same goes for earthquakes, starvation, deadly diseases, meteors — they are natural, right? But that still doesn’t mean that you would be ok with being harmed by earthquakes, starvation, deadly diseases, and meteors, right? Just because starving to death is natural, doesn’t mean that starving to death is good.

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Based On Principle

Written works that reflect on a wide variety of topics, with some sort of "philosophical" angle to it. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Based0nPrinciple