“If it was a matter of hunting a deer, everyone well realized that he must remain faithful to his post; but if a hare happened to pass within reach of one of them, we cannot doubt that he would have gone off in pursuit of it without a scruple” – Jean Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau eludes, in this quote above, to the problems of assurance and coordination within the PCA. In deer-hunting, a group of hunters must work together to encircle the target to ensure that the animal does not escape. A single member’s failure in such a project drastically increases the odds of failure. Problematically, it is not far from imagination that a member of the group is tempted to leave his post.

The Stag Hunt, a form of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, can be used to illustrate the problem of assurance. In this game, the player is asked to imagine that he is hunting for a stag with another teammate (i.e., a two-person team). While on the hunt, a hare passes the team by, and the player is given the option of leaving his post and hunting for the hare. If the player leaves his post, his teammate will fail to capture the stag. The payoff of possible outcomes can be summarised as:

	I hunt for stag	I hunt for hare
Teammate hunts for stag	3:3	0:2
Teammate hunts for hare	2:0	1:1

Where the ratios in each cell represent [My Utility : Teammate’s Utility], we can see that the best state of affairs is to remain for the stag hunt, unphased by the passing hare. The problem, however, is that we lack the social assurance of our teammate’s cooperation. In the event that our teammate fails to cooperate, we (the player) are left with no food. This game thus hinges on the expectation of trustworthiness of others.

As if the expectation of cooperation is not enough of challenge, we are also met with the challenge of coordinating cooperation. That is, it is not enough to have the commitment of cooperation — party members must also know what their roles are, and how to fulfil their roles. In the Stag Hunt, we do not cooperate in doing the same thing in order to have a successful hunt. On the contrary, both teammates must undertake different responsibilities; perhaps one member must spook the animal into running in the direction of his confederate, who will trap the animal.

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Bringing this back to antinatalism and population growth, the problem of coordinating cooperation becomes even more insidious.

1. Because this is a global issue, efforts to collaborate in curbing population growth must reach the global community. That’s more than 7,700,000,000 of us.
2. Antinatalism is an unintuitive position to advance. People like babies. People like making babies.

These problems are, without exaggeration, gargantuan. In the case of the Stag Hunt, we see a watered-down example of the need to coordinate and assure cooperation. Within the dyad, this is certainly achievable. If, perhaps, this were a group of ten cro magnon hunters going after a wooly mammoth, we can imagine a higher statistic of defection within the party. The only reason we have to believe that the thousands of slaves who built the great pyramids in Egypt could cooperate in doing so is exactly that they were slaves. Even if, say, they were promised a grand, shared benefit from building the pyramids, it seems much more likely that cooperation cannot be guaranteed amongst the men.

Let us, at this juncture, not lose touch with reality. Antinatalism is a hard pill to swallow for extremely powerful reasons. A rudimentary understanding of evolutionary theory explains that evolutionary pressures select for the urge to reproduce. Entire social traditions across the world are built around childbirth and childrearing. Entire industries rely on childbirth for survival. The bottom line is simply that we are so intimately attached to the construct of childbirth that antinatalists just seem to tout nonsense undeserving of attention.

Thus, in my opinion, we see the grand failure of collective action with antinatalism. Antinatalism, albeit growing in influence today, convinces a mere fragment of the international society. This is not sufficient. Prima facie, and uncontentiously, I am confident in saying that we would be much better-served if everyone around the world had just one child less, than for all antinatalists to abstain from childbearing altogether.