Taken together, these two quotes allow us to trace the outlines of a theory: What if hope exists not for any individual human being now living — but rather for the members of future generations, who though powerless to redeem us, might nevertheless be able to overturn the injustices we have been subject to and carve out a better existence for themselves? In this view, hope is not for “us” but it is nevertheless related to us, by means of our connection to other, future human beings. “I” might not be able to hope for anything. But “we” certainly can meaningfully hope for a better world — through the actions we might take, through the world and across generations, together. This, at any rate, is how I would answer the anti-natalist position. It makes no sense to think of children as tokens of their parents’ carbon consumption, inheriting a taste for steak and air travel. And it makes no sense to think that whole generations might simply be blindly condemned to a certain fate, before they have even been conceived. The reason for this is that human action is not determined in any hard sense: human beings exist transformatively in relation to their world. Another philosopher, Hannah Arendt, referred to this fact with the concept of “natality” — “the new beginning inherent in birth.” The world might well be a terrible place, but by having a child, you are introducing something new into it.