Not exactly an argument for natalism
Suppose you take action to give someone life, either by preventing them from dying or by procreating. Given the instinct for self preservation that all living organisms appear to share, and which can only be overcome by extreme experiences (resulting in suicide or self sacrifice), your actions are exactly the actions the person whose life you preserve would take if they could (not in every case, but in nearly every). And they are almost certain to approve of your actions. And they are unlikely willingly to give up what you have given them.
No other act of gift giving has such a high success rate, that is, results so often in such a strong attachment to the gift received. It is the standard by which all other gifts are measured. In which case, you need reasons not to do it for the question of whether you should even to arise. If you're about to save someone's life but you know they'll live on in a permanent vegetative state, you'll have a think. If you and your procreating partner both carry some rare gene that causes a terrible disease, you'll have a think. Very little rises to the level where it's at all likely that the receiver of the gift of life will disapprove of your actions and not be fiercely attached to the life you have given them.
No other act of gift giving has such a high success rate, that is, results so often in such a strong attachment to the gift received. It is the standard by which all other gifts are measured. In which case, you need reasons not to do it for the question of whether you should even to arise. If you're about to save someone's life but you know they'll live on in a permanent vegetative state, you'll have a think. If you and your procreating partner both carry some rare gene that causes a terrible disease, you'll have a think. Very little rises to the level where it's at all likely that the receiver of the gift of life will disapprove of your actions and not be fiercely attached to the life you have given them.
Comments (221)
I think that this happens more often than you might think. Not to mention one can only appreciate their life after having been given life; that someone will appreciate being alive after having been given life is different from there being an external, abstract motivation to give life before it is given (which doesn't exist). Thus, giving life is only given value after you you have made the decision; there is no should or should not at all until it is done - barring having knowledge that those you bring into existence will suffer and die and not appreciate having been given life. It seems to me should not is both more pertinent than should and exists independently of should.
I think in both cases denying those lives saves life.
I think it reduces suffering. How does it save life?
As you note, this is not exactly an argument for natalism or against anti-natalism. Our anti-natalist friends will not be convinced in the slightest. I'm sure you know that.
I see that you have become a moderator. Thank you. I'll try to be nice.
By euthanizing (by inaction) in the first case and not proceating or aborting in the second, inherently diminished, or abject, living conditions are prevented (not merely "reduced").
I'm not following this. Can you take another swing at it?
Quoting ToothyMaw
So does this: you come to me with a toothache and I shoot you in the head.
Quoting T Clark
No it's not. Just a stray thought. Procreating is the default. One way to describe that is by chalking it up to reproduction being instinctive (insert selfish gene theory if necessary). Saving lives is the default, with the same explanation (insert something about the evolutionary expansion of kin affinity if necessary).
Maybe it's not all that unusual -- if you see someone beating up someone else, there's little reason to think the victim won't approve of you intervening, and if they could stop the beating themselves they would. Life-giving and -preserving actions are just the most extreme version of this. I was thinking about this point of @Outlander:
Quoting Outlander
and how @khaled regularly (since his conversion) mentions that most people like life. I was just thinking that we can say a bit more: almost everyone is fanatically committed to having their own life continue and will gratefully be the beneficiary of almost any (within some ethical boundaries) effort to bring that about. People who lose everything to wildfires or hurricanes don't kill themselves en masse. The overwhelming majority of people who suffer all sorts of tragedies don't respond by immediately taking their own lives.
Meanwhile the neighborhood anti-natalist suggests that having to wait in line sucks, having to hold down a job sucks, and you add up these and similar injustices and life just sucks. Humanity at large has considered this question and disagrees. I think almost all of humanity, if they think about it, agrees with @Outlander; I thought I'd throw in something about why they don't bother to think about it, why it's not only a matter of instinct but a perfectly reasonable default view.
Well, it's difficult. I suspect that, despite claims to the contrary, AN is connected with personal disposition. They happen to be the kinds of people who feel the negatives of life more than the positives.
I believe most people don't like to think much, it can set one off in a series of endless, often unsettling questions.
But if I had to guess, it might simply boil down to the fact that experience is almost infinitely rich, whereas in non-being (what before birth and after death presumably are) there is nothing at all. The differences couldn't be higher.
It is conceivable that a person can simultaneously have a desire and also desire that they do not have this desire, e.g. an alcoholic who wishes they could stop drinking, a depressive who wishes they did not have the instinct to live, etc. Simply having a desire does not entail being appreciative of having this desire.
I'm inclined to say that people feel attached to life whether they want to be or not. People who have suffered tragedy, loss of loved ones, go on, but might be inclined to say they'd rather not.
What are we to make of that? Anything?
My guess: in the Gaussian main, we h. sapiens have been reliably 'bio-cognitively programmed' (i.e. driven) by natural selection pressures to live on despite abject exigencies. "To be or not to be" seems very much – mostly –a first world (e.g. Danish prince's) problem.
I'm saying that life is only potentially given value after it is given, thus reasons we should not bring life into the world are more pertinent than reasons to do it; if it is so likely that people will appreciate existing, and natalism is the default, then the most important factor is whether or not there is some sort of condition that will prevent them from appreciating existing after being given life. Thus, once again, reasons for - such as the instinctual drive to procreate - are categorically distinct from more important reasons against - a child being brought into the world that will experience only pain and die shortly. And while I am no anti-natalist, I think that it is selfish to bring a child into the world merely for the purposes of furthering your genes if you cannot properly care for them.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Did I say that minimizing suffering is so important we should shoot people in the head for having toothaches? Did I even say anything about why we should minimize suffering at all? I see being promoted to mod status gave you mind-reading skills.
Yes, our commitment to continue living appears to be instinctive. We might, in considering our own situation, choose to discount it as a bias; but when making a decision about whether to give life to another person, we can rely on it --- that is, you don't need to know anything else about the person (their tastes and preferences) to know that this is exactly the sort of thing they would want. I can't assume that random person who's just been in a car accident would wish to own a copy of Brilliant Corners; I can assume they want me to call 911. That's all.
Quoting TheMadFool
By and large we apparently don't. I think there are really unusual boundary cases, sure, just as real people do face circumstances that can overcome their commitment to self-preservation. But the evidence says people will put up with a lot.
Quoting ToothyMaw
I really thought I had said almost exactly that. (But then the OP also mentioned instinct and people are still pointing out to me that it's instinct.) My point was that the presumption for life is so strong, that you need a pretty extreme negative on the table before you're anywhere near the threshold of it being a close call, worth thinking about.
There have been people who took "be fruitful and multiply" as a divine commandment; on that view, having children is a moral duty, and you should have basically as many as you can manage. I'm not saying that. I could also hold a view that life is pretty swell, and I could count that as something on the "pro" side when considering whether to save or give life, to be weighed against whatever negatives come up. I'm not saying that either. I'm saying, more or less, that life needs no argument. It is the default. The cases where the question even arises are already at some extreme of experience. The behavior of billions and billions of people shows this clearly. And I'm saying we might want to acknowledge that in the way we think about it.
Quoting ToothyMaw
Just having a little fun. I wasn't impugning your character or your intellect.
Still that "troublesome" self-preservation drive at work, I'm afraid. This is the paradox: we need to fear death to live but we have to die to...??? Why would we/God want to say, "ok, that's enough, I'm done/leaving or you have to go!" Something rather painful awaits an immortal or is life simply boring after a point?
Here it's meant to cover keeping someone from dying, resuscitating them, and procreating.
If you want to be pedantic, something like "taking steps to further the goal of a particular person being alive at a future time."
Quoting tim wood
What whole notion? Did you think I'm doing science here? Anyway, I provided an alternative if colorful English fails to meet your standards of precision.
Have you ever read David Benatar's Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence?
He makes a distinction between starting a life and continuing a life. There are different things to consider with both.
I think English had already enshrined the distinction.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That is a true thing to say.
Human reproduction is a fact. I would like, if possible, not to become entangled in the metaphysics of how two people become three people. At some point in this process, the two we all agree on treat the third as a person, or consider them as they would consider a person. That may happen before conception, during pregnancy, at delivery, or even at some other time. Doesn't matter to me which, for the sake of this discussion.
My point was that there is no reason for should that is comparable to reasons for should not and that should not is the main consideration - perhaps the only consideration - that really matters when it comes to the act of bringing someone into the world and whether or not said person will predicate value to their own life. Which is not so much a sort-of argument for natalism but rather an argument for more prudent selection for giving life.
... to make room for descendants. After all, genomic self-replicators self-replicate or perish: without mortality, I think, natality would not be sufficiently urgent or adaptive in nature (for vertebrates).
Life, as some killjoy pointed out, more or less vacillates between 'boredom and pain' (which we use culture, entertainment and/or various modes of intoxication to distract ourselves from) so at anytime prematurely checking-out of The No Exit Hotel always has its charms. Immortality? Boredom becomes unconscious (apathetic?) orgasm, or the most sublime form of ceaseless yoga. I'd give it go. :death: :flower:
Space is at a premium. Lebensraum (Hitler, 1 September 1939).
Ergo, those who feel immortal, who have a sense that their life will somehow go on forever, have no biological desire to reproduce. Ha!
A sense of one's own immortality, a sense that one's life will somehow go on forever needn't be a sign of megalomania; it can be a sign of feeling desperately trapped in one's situation.
An example to demonstrate why I believe your argument isn't what you think it is: maybe you want to bring into the world the next greatest violin virtuoso, but you know that they will have a rare disease that will cause them significant chronic pain - but not so much that they cannot become a virtuoso. You conceive the child and they become the virtuoso you so desired - but they don't want to live because of their pain; they wish that they hadn't been born. Does your pleasure actually give their life value? Perhaps it gives it some external value; but they don't value their own life, and I would argue that that is what matters if you are correct in your OP; you basically admit that reasons for should not do not compare to reasons for should.
This is not even in the ballpark of what I've been posting. Maybe that's why I haven't been able to understand your responses.
Careful, Fool. Don't confuse mortality as a 'genetic imperative' with ethnic cleansing & mass-murder. That Ought doesn't follow from any Is.
Here I thought I said something worth saying!
It's people who reproduce. People make the decision to reproduce, or not. It's not that their genes somehow run the show.
:ok:
Either I hit a nerve or you aren't trying very hard. My point, once again, is that in the context of whether or not someone should be given life, the most important factor is whether or not they will value their life. In my example the violinist didn't value their life, but there were reasons for the person to continue being the violin virtuoso they were, even if they were pretty crappy reasons. If you are correct in your OP and reasons for not giving life are basically the only reasons that matter, then that the violinist doesn't want to live - something that could have been predicted - is imperative. So it seems to me whatever reasons might be used to justify giving life are definitely eclipsed by good reasons not to give life. Thus, your argument is more an argument for greater prudence in giving life, and not in support of natalism much at all.
I don't think that's what I said. My claim, in a nutshell, is that we do not, as a matter of course, need a reason to save a life or create one. Under some circumstances, there may be an obvious and powerful reason not to, and then you can begin to weigh this against that, collect your pros and cons, etc. An extraordinary prima facie reason against first gets you to this point, to it being a decision, and maybe it carries the day, maybe not, but what it will square off against is not the assumption in favor of life, but actual reasons, stuff we like about life or value or feel some obligation to, perhaps even religious obligation.
Perhaps it's still not clear what I'm saying, and if I can't somehow make it clear, then maybe this is just a lousy idea.
One oddity of my claim is that I've presented it as if our knowledge of self-preservation is itself a reason. That might be true, but it's a little weird. It is a convenient way to present the tremendous evidence that life needs no argument, no justification.
So reasons for giving life only need be considered once there is a reason not to give life? That sounds specious; should we not always act for reasons? But I get what you are saying now - you represented it much more clearly.
You actually do cite a reason for giving life in absence of of a good reason not to: that the person you are giving life to would have acted the same in your shoes - which makes sense to me. Your OP was well-written, don't doubt it, we forum members are just being a little obtuse - or at least I was.
Is this a reference to this?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Excellent! Seriously, this just what I'd like to hear.
Quoting ToothyMaw
It's true. Maybe now that I've spent a little time with the idea I'd express this differently.
Quoting ToothyMaw
On the one hand, we don't. On the other, we couldn't. On the third hand, no.
I think our behavior can be described in terms of reasons or in terms of causes. If someone else talks about my reasons for acting as I did, they're at most reporting what I said; but they can refer to things I may not even be aware of, and that will sound more like a causal explanation than a rational one. (Is that obvious, or do we need examples?) We sometimes speak of ourselves in these sort of causal terms as well, but I think it's more natural, more common to speak of our reasons because we're more confident we know them. (Again, the causes driving our behavior turn out often enough to be things we're unaware of to be discomfiting. I blame Freud.) ((Also not saying we do know our reasons; I'm trying to avoid doing much psychology here.))
To connect that with the talk of "instinct" I've been throwing around: I don't think we experience our instincts as reasons for behaving the way we do; I think we experience them as needing no reason at all for what we do. (Only for the specific elements of our behavior we think of as wired in, of course.) But now I can come along, as an amateur philosopher, and I can look at the behavior people engage in without thinking, as the saying goes, and I can offer an explanation -- and in this case it's the bit about self-preservation and so on. (Another amateur philosopher might say, instead, that everyone has "bought into the Narrative" or something like that. I hope I'm more convincing.)
Procreation is admittedly the messy part of this, so I think a person in peril is an easier place to start. It seems to me we do not reason our way to offering help or trying to get help, we do not feel there's a decision to be made here at all --- not as a rule, mind you, but if say there's great risk in helping and little chance of success, then yeah you might start to think about your chances of success. More than that, I think most people would be somewhat repulsed by the idea that someone would make a rational analysis and reach a decision before helping someone else in peril.
All I'm trying to do is shine a spotlight on this element of our lives. It's not an argument for anything, just trying to understand how we really think about life and death questions. Or, rather, mostly don't think.
What? This isn’t about “their terms” and “our terms”. You offered a comparison that is invalid. Every antinatalist is aware that people generally like life (except @schopenhauer1 seems to remain unconvinced regardless of evidence presented)
Arguing badly against stupid positions is the best way to reinforce them.
We both reject the conclusion of the anti-natalist argument.
Does that conclusion follow from the premises offered by the anti-natalist? I think, by and large, it does. It's not a complicated argument.
Perhaps they rely on some suppressed premise, one you could conceivably get them to reject. Perhaps they make an inference that is unsound in some very subtle way.
Figuring out how a paradox works is fun, but it's not necessary for rejecting its conclusion.
You could look at this thread as an "argument" for starting from different premises.
That makes sense.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, acting in instinct is pretty much always an action devoid of a rationale. But is the default - natalism - right? Even if it is true that it is instinctual to give life, and people are largely happy to be alive, that doesn't mean we shouldn't act without reason in this context imo. It seems to me that your argument is not so much an argument but an explanation; if you are arguing that we should act in a certain way then you need reasons - either abstract or personal. I don't see how instinct can make right.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You correctly acknowledge here that you are explaining something more than making an argument. The only part of your argument that actually seems to be an argument is the reason that most people who are given life would have acted the same way as the person who saved them.
Yes, that sounds about right.
Right. I'm not defending the instinct for self-preservation. But I am arguing that we can rely on all members of our species having the same instinct.
I also claim that we already do this, in rendering aid to people in peril without analyzing whether they want it or not, and in most people who decide to have children not considering it a moral issue at all unless there are specific circumstances that raise the issue --- hereditary disease, a parent's personality disorder, extreme poverty. Such circumstances make it an issue; reproducing itself needs no justification.
I think I'm comfortable claiming that this "extended instinct" is also rationally defensible, that we are perfectly right to rely on the approval of those whose future life we attempt to guarantee.
So the whole claim is there's something we can rely on, and that we generally do, and that we should, but only defeasibly, taking into account all sorts of reasons when we find ourselves in circumstances that seem to call for a decision.
Insofar as this relates to AN, it might be around here, if there's an assumption that reproducing is always a decision faced, always a moral question, always requires analysis of reasons. Of course, maybe AN only claims that something like that should be the case.
Yes. But comes with ridiculous baggage oftentimes.
“Everything is wrong” also consistently leads to the antinatalist conclusion but also leads to charity being wrong which the antinatalist will disagree with, thus forcing them to re-examine their starting premises.
Logical consistency isn’t an issue. Not with antinatalism or nazism or anything else. The inconsistency lies in an adherent’s inability to accept the full consequences of their premises. And if they can do so, there isn’t much room for argument.
If you were making a direct argument in favor of natalism you would need to defend this instinct, but you are skirting the issue here, instead making more of an argument that natalism is natural - not right - then claiming that if it is natural it requires no reason. Thus, you say, giving life needs no reason. This is not a good argument.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
But according to an anti-natalist it does need a justification other than the one mentioned above; if I make the argument that procreation is always wrong because people suffer in ways that are asymmetric with sources of happiness, cannot consent to existing, etc. then you need to give me a reason for procreating to counter that. That people like being alive largely does not contend with the harms of bringing a person into the world according to an anti-natalist.
Just because there are multiple ways to reach a conclusion, and one of the ways is ridiculous, that doesn't reflect upon reasonable ways of reaching that same conclusion or the conclusion itself; you don't reach the conclusion that everything is wrong via typical anti-natalist reasoning.
I never said so. I was implying that all the ways of reaching the antinatalist conclusion come with ridiculous side effects, and the best way to argue against it is to highlight said ridiculous side effects.
I sincerely doubt anyone starts with the premise that "everything is wrong". And you cited it as a premise leading to the anti-natalist conclusion, not a side effect of it. So what I said remains valid: typical anti-natalist reasoning doesn't have ridiculous side effects like "charity is wrong".
Sure. You can argue that someone holds B because of A, but A also entails C, and they shouldn't hold C, so they should give up A. That leaves B as an option, just unsupported.
As I said, that can be fun, and I'll probably keep doing that, but it's also possible to start, as I do, from the position that B is insane.
Quoting ToothyMaw
Ah, no, not really. I'm saying people behaving in this way do not experience themselves as needing a reason to do so, do not experience the need for decision at all.
Quoting ToothyMaw
On the one hand, I'm claiming that there is a way to construe our behavior as reasonable -- this is the claim that the person affected by our actions would want us to behave that way, because they have the same instinct we do. (Oh! Note this also implies reciprocity: they too know we have the same instinct they do, and [I] would do the same for us[/I]. And we know that they know ..., and they know that we know ... Nice to get all that for free.)
That's an argument.
On the other hand, why? Why should it need justification? I claim that this is an assumption of the moral theorist, despite the evidence that most people do not believe these actions require justification.
That isn't an argument for anything. You are just explaining people's lack of thought given to whether or not they should procreate/save lives.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
But that doesn't make saving someone/procreating right; they might suffer intensely but still want to live, for instance. I think you underestimate this portion of the populace. And a person who procreates or saves a life cannot guarantee that the person given life will share their value system - what if they are a Schopenhauer? What if they don't have that instinct for self-preservation you seem to predicate to everyone? And what if there is no way of knowing if they will have that instinct, as is probably the case?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Then we aren't discussing ethics, because reason is central to any ethical theory - or it sucks.
Sorry for the edits.
You genuinely seem to be ignorant of all of the good anti-natalist arguments.
For instance, no great harm is at stake if one does not procreate; no one will be brought into the world that will potentially not want to live or suffer immensely. But if we procreate, we run the risk of bringing someone into the world who might wish that they had never existed but is unwilling to kill themselves because suicide is an unpleasant solution.
Thus, even if you might bring into the world someone who would have acted the same way doesn't mean you aren't at great risk of causing a lot of suffering or producing a person who regrets being born and that wouldn't have acted the same way. There is no negative outcome if you don't procreate, but many possible negative outcomes if you do.
Unless you consider not procreating immoral. Then you have the happy cows argument to contend with.
No, it isn't. I know.
Quoting ToothyMaw
No one can guarantee anything. I claim it is perfectly reasonable to assume, without argument, that people want to live. And I claim that if you reflect upon humanity, then you do also have a reason in support of the premise. And if you think about it a little more, the fact that everyone seems to assume this about everyone else is only more reason to count on it.
There will be occasions when you're wrong, or when the circumstances incline you to look for more.
Quoting ToothyMaw
Then I'm certainly not offering an ethical theory. What difference does that make to our discussion? (For the record, I lean toward "moral sentiments" as a foundation, so this whole line of thought comes naturally to me.)
Quoting ToothyMaw
I am not ignorant of the arguments, though I may be ignorant of the good ones. I think the AN position is prima facie absurd. I've enjoyed trying to figure out how it works, but I thought I'd try something else for a change.
I'm not directly addressing the arguments for AN here. There's always two or three places to do that, if you'd like. I do think it's reasonable to discuss why I don't think I have to address them.
I don't assume this of everyone, and I myself do not possess this intuition that everyone, including myself, ought to want to live - regardless of how many do and make this assumption. Maybe I'm defective; but I know that if one suffers enough, one will end their life or wish that they had never existed. Most people are just lucky that they don't suffer enough.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You made an argument in favor of an ethical theory, and didn't acknowledge my counter-argument. Why don't you have to address it? Did you even read my whole post?
Yes it does. The most popular argument for example, the "it's an unconsented imposition that can be harmful so it's wrong" that I hear very often has the side effect that giving gifts is wrong unless you ask for permission first. It would also prevent you from, say, sending a kid to school.
So far I haven't seen an AN argument that is consistent with the rest of the AN's beliefs.
Is a philosopher, then, like a troll guarding the bridge to parenthood? He pops up saying, "You may not pass until you have answered my riddle!"
Most people just ignore the troll, and that's what I find interesting.
"But the child might immediately fall into a pit of lava!" cries the troll, as people stream past him.
"What lava pit? There's no lava pit around here." someone calls as they pass by. "Why would I give birth in a lava pit?" asks someone else.
"Well," says the troll, "Life is kind of like a pit of lava."
The crowd is unconvinced. "No it isn't." They keep crossing 'his' bridge.
"But it might be!" responds the troll, sensing an opening. "You don't know for sure that it isn't."
"If life were kind of like a lava pit, I would have kind of caught fire and kind of burned to death years ago," says someone, and gives the troll a little shove so he topples back under the bridge.
It's a bit like the argument from error: because someone, sometime, in some specific circumstances, was 'deceived by their senses', everyone, always, and in all circumstances, must accept the possibility that they are, at that moment, in those circumstances, being deceived by their senses.
"So you're saying that. because a straight stick looks bent when it's half in the water, that bent tree branch there might actually be straight?"
"It might be. How could you know for sure that it isn't?"
"But where's the water?"
There are circumstances in which people feel that whether to have a child is a moral choice, and that they should weigh, as best they can, what they know against what they don't, what is good in life against what is bad, and so on. But does that entail that absent those circumstances, and absent any such concerns, everyone should always feel that it's a moral choice, and that what they ought to consider in making that choice is just the issues that the anti-natalist raises, and weighted in just the way he does? You agree with the AN, prove him wrong, or admit that you're irrational -- that's the trilemma you're offered. And almost no one believes it.
I have enjoyed the intellectual challenge of trying to refute AN, but I never for a moment thought that if I couldn't come up with a refutation then my only remaining options were agreement and dogmatic disagreement. Mostly I think of it as a minor paradox: something that feels like it might be a moral principle leads quickly to a patently absurd conclusion. Either it's not a moral principle, or we oughtn't be trying to do ethics that way. You can learn from looking at paradoxes.
It just seems plain to me that, curious though it is, AN is a free-floating theory that doesn't actually engage with the moral lives of people. When it tries to evoke moral sentiment in its audience, it's ridiculous. ("But the lava!") It's just a strange logical artifact. (I'm reminded of Ariel Rubinstein here, by any estimation one of the world's leading game theorists, who always says that game theory is just an interesting branch of math and has nothing to do with real life.)
I doubt you're convinced, and that's probably because nothing here is exactly an argument either. It's a question of how you approach the doing of philosophy. People say all kinds of shit, and only some of it is taken seriously by other people. It might be worth thinking about why that is. Dewey somewhere says that most problems in philosophy aren't solved, they just no longer feel "live", compelling, or important to philosophers. AN is a solution to a problem only it believes in: it both asks and answers the question, is it immoral to have children? No one else asks, but AN keeps insisting it has an answer.
The question doesn't make any sense to me either. May as well ask if it is morally right that the sky appears to be blue. At its core it boils down to a self-contradiction or just an attitude that says because one, or more, persons suffer that it isn't a fair trade off. Life isn't 'fair' and it is silly to view existence as being 'fair' or 'unfair' - not that I have seen any AN admit this is basically where they are coming from (but it can be seen on the surface of some).
All that said, asking the question (no matter how absurd) is a possible step towards understanding it to be absurd and that not all sentences with '?' at the end warrant a '?'.
I am not an anti-natalist, but if I were, then I would uphold all of the implications of my beliefs.
No to mention the harmful consequences of giving a crappy gift or sending a kid to school are significantly less than the wide range of horrible illnesses/conditions/disorders than can be inherited or developed throughout one's life; there are degrees of harm; having Huntington's disease is certainly worse than being bullied, for example.
Not to mention, if we were all anti-natalists, there would be no children to send to school.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Of course not. You seem to think I'm an idiot. I'm not telling people that they shouldn't reproduce because some random amateur philosopher on a forum says they shouldn't, I'm asking you to actually acknowledge a counter-argument. Which you won't. If we are discussing philosophy we should be dealing in arguments and reasons - not sentiments and semi-fallacies about instinct.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This is verging on disgusting - and you are yourself committing a fallacy: just because most people don't suffer enough to not want to live, to have not acted the same as the person who gave them life, does not mean that we shouldn't pay attention to this contingency. Just because people are ignorant of other's suffering doesn't mean that suffering on a level that would make someone not want to exist doesn't matter.
All I would argue is that reasons should always be considered when procreating, and that people do consider reasons for procreating more than you think. Furthermore, I've given it a think, and your claim that people just procreate out of instinct is more than a little condescending.
Savage.
We are not responsible for the sky being blue. It is just the way it is. But we are responsible for procreating - and we could stop or at least wonder why we do it; we can actually consider reasons for and against. I mean, do men get up on super-duper tall ladders in the wee hours of the morning and paint the sky blue every day? Maybe they would go on strike if we didn't pay them?
I agree that it is absurd to say that life is fair or unfair as if there is some part of oneself or one's experiences that is distinct from one's own life - or the self that experiences one's own life - that could somehow be compatible with a different existence; if your life was more fair it would be a different life and you would be different too. But as far as certain lives being genuinely horrible and painful, the idea of unfairness makes some sense - you aren't existing on the terms you would like to, which is true for a great many people, even if they are happy to be alive.
My point was they are equally as pointless not that they are exclusively comparable in certain ways. I could just as well as said "The world to be spaghetti dreamed forks, or the dark to lighten the sound of foam. Which is it?"
Granted some non-questions appear to more easily pretend to fit a certain context than others.
If I was to take your point more seriously I can just as easily throw the same kind of thinking right back at AN thoughts. We have the instinct for procreation (evidence being we're part of a species that exists) and we also have a moral sense of responsibility in how we live (not in how we don't live). So the 'responsibility' is no more valid a point than 'procreating'. We have a sense of responsibility tied to our procreative abilities. I cannot see how it can be argued that these are separate to the point that one is on a pedestal but not the other.
It's true for me too. I've lived through some horrors. I don't regard that as any kind of justification for someone erasing my life once I hit that point of suffering ... if some understood what it was I felt they might likely think it 'better that I die, than suffer what I was suffering'. No thank you!
This had nothing to do with having children though. A non-existent person is non-existent not a 'potential person'. Such word play may convince others and I understand that there are gray areas. I don't see the world as black and white though ... more of a gray mushy, marbled mess of interwoven shades .
Just because those two things exist simultaneously and without conflict much of the time doesn't mean that they do not conflict sometimes and that they are coequal. I am arguing that if reason is to guide our decisions and not instinct, which I think should usually be the case, then we should consider reasons for procreating - even in the absence of knowledge that the person conceived will or will not appreciate having been given life or suffer immensely.
As for responsibility being tied to instinct: I would say that instinct matters insofar as it creates a desire to procreate, but the reasoning behind whether or not someone should procreate is distinct; people rarely, if ever, admit that they are procreating merely out of instinct. They have all kinds of justifications: religious, ethical, practical, etc.
So while neither is on a pedestal, I don't think either one has to be for us to be prudent in giving life.
All the more reason to believe that it isn't wrong to not take a great risk in bringing someone into the world. Or, if we do, to be careful about it.
Of course.
edit: that was not sarcastic
I don't see any 'wrong' or 'right' about it. The very question of it being right or wrong to have children is meaningless to me. I've tried to understand the AN point of view but there seems to be a disjoint in their thinking as some claim that they 'value life' yet, for all intents and purposes, wish human life to cease (quite literally).
Neither do they seem to understand that life without suffering is NOT life. Suffering isn't something inherently 'negative' it is just how we tend to view it overall.
Life is absurd. I'm okay with that and if it wasn't absurd I think I would likely have ended my life some time ago. The 'absurdity' makes it interesting.
I think they do value life insofar as they value people living on their own terms, something I got at earlier. People cannot always live on these terms - or even anywhere close to them a lot of the time, however.
Quoting I like sushi
It seems to me intense suffering and a strong will to live do not cancel each other out, and neither does the inevitable pain and sought-after happiness one will experience. Thus, the "overall" is not an equation to be balanced, but rather the sum of your often disparate experiences as you understand them, and, as such, if you believe that your perceived suffering is unnecessary, it is desirable to cut it out; no good is lost and the "overall" is still coherent. No one will cease living if they suffer less.
I get what you are saying though. Suffering is inevitable, but if gratuitous amounts of it can be prevented it should be.
Quoting I like sushi
Indeed.
I’m not saying that. I’m saying ‘suffering’ is actually what gives life value. No suffering is a zombie life without emotion. Some people want lives of candy and lollipops because they naively think that is ‘better’ for them. Nope.
That's what they all say at first, until they see said implications.
Quoting ToothyMaw
Oh, so now it's not about unconsented impositions. Now only unconsented impositions that have consequences that are "too bad" are considered wrong to impose. So sending kids to school is fine because, hey, how bad can it get right?
When you do that you add more work to yourself because now you need to show that life counts as "too bad" and why it does.
And besides, you can't just take the absolute worst consequence of something and say "see this is how bad it can get! So it's wrong to impose!" You'll get that all impositions are wrong by that logic. "Sending kids to school? Monstrous! What if they get molested by teachers!!!!! See how bad it can get! Sending kids to school is wrong now!". "Giving someone a gift you are near certain they'll like? Monstrous! What if they hate it so much they get a heart attack at the mere sight of it and die! Giving gifts is wrong now." etc. Taking the absolute worst consequence and using that to say the imposition is wrong is a terrible argument.
Quoting ToothyMaw
Irrelevant to the argument.
:starstruck:
Quoting I like sushi
As long as the people involved don't decide on which narrative to go with, there is confusion.
If we go with the "selfish gene" narrative, then we cannot consequently talk about responsibility or anything else that is conceived of as being subject to a person's will.
If we go with the personality narrative, then we cannot consequently talk about the genes, selfish or otherwise.
Those two narratives are mutually exclusive.
Interesting!
@Wayfarer, what do you make of this?
Along these lines a life devoid of suffering is not a life at all as far as I can see. There is a price for everything (even living in the lap of luxury). Some don't know how good they've got it and it is them who suffer because of this (albeit blindly) because they don't know what it is to suffer - something prevalent in nihilism I'd say.
So far, it seems that you're focusing on life's hardships and equating those with suffering.
The general AN position is against 'suffering' which we all understand (no need to redefine the word). They must simply view 'suffering' (and I've seen this) as an item to be eliminated and have no regard for any balance. They are happy to refer to 'pleasure' as the opposite of 'suffering' but only when it suits their argumentation. When pushed the goal posts are moved to 'responsibility' (conveniently ignoring that to understand pleasure we must necessarily understand pain/suffering).
If they do except this (some just won't) then they view the negative as outweighing the positive. Depression and suicide are not reasonable arguments either as a great number of people live through these periods and are more than content that they didn't kill themselves.
I haven't seen a convincing argument that holds up the 'responsibility' point. It repeatedly boils down to 'what right do you have?' ... it is a non-question much like asking what right do I have to do anything.
From a recent discussion with someone on this forum I don't see a full understanding presented of what it means to say 'I'm an anti-natalist' OR I could just be assuming that to be an anti-natalist they must argue with certain underlying principles (otherwise it is contrary).
It reminds of the kind of attitude that surrounds people who deny free will and therefore think that anything they do or say is absent of any personal responsibility. Having children is not a denial of responsibility it is bringing responsibility to one's chest and understanding what we are.
Either way it's nice to see people thinking about stuff like this even if some of makes almost no sense to me and what I say makes almost no sense to them :)
People consider all sorts of things --- whether they can afford to take care of the child, whether they feel prepared to handle the responsibility, whether they want that responsibility, whether they think they are capable of being a good parent, a loving parent. It is a great moral undertaking, raising children.
But hardly anyone considers the possibility that not being alive is better than being alive. Does that mean they assume being alive is better?
Maybe? Or maybe "better" and "worse" don't make sense here.
My little story attempts to go around the question by noting that living things exhibit a preference to continue living. (Plants defend themselves against parasites --- do they do so because they think it's better to go on living?) That gives acts like saving a life or creating one a certain moral sheen: we act in accord with a norm that is prejudiced in favor of life, and we do so knowing that we act in accordance with that norm. The question of whether living is better than not living need not arise.
But we, not being plants, can form the question:
Quoting I like sushi
Does that mean we can answer it?
It means that the spanner fitfully wakes under the duress of upper, downy hairs' delight ... a perfectly reasonable sentence grammatically but semantically useless.
What is the shape of a circle?
Where do we put the Moon when it rains?
Do balls roll down hills?
How do people carry eggs between their legs when they don't lay eggs?
Do I have two eyes in my head?
All grammatically correct but utterly useless if taken seriously.
Do we have the right to procreate? (see directly above)
Oh yes, I know you and I suspect there's not a real question here. I was hoping to get others to wonder whether "better" and "worse" make sense here.
In fairness to @ToothyMaw's approach, I suppose it's better to ask if "better" and "worse" can be made sensible here. But then we're back to the whether whatever sense can be made with this question --- people think they're doing something when they talk about it --- actually engages with the sense that people think of as their moral lives. If they don't hook up, it's still just a little logical puzzle.
Exactly :up: so much of advice is simply embracing the suck because what alternative is there? Ha
I see AN similar to veganism. Not everyone would see the morality of it. Or one can say of the "realization" one has of class consciousness in Marxist theory. Sometimes the "realization" of something's moral import is itself something one must "realize" and is not as clear cut in the cultural milieu (for obvious biased reasons) as murder or theft. But even these more "obvious" categories have been philosophized as to what "degree" what was the "intent" etc. All things that must be parsed out and not assumed but to be grappled with, even if you didn't consider those aspects prior to someone bringing up its implications. The point being with all of this is what counts as moral is not immediately realized, nor does it have to be to still be considered moral.
If your criteria is, "Morality must be immediately apparent to its import, then this is patently wrong.
"Have been" is inarguable, but I see no reason to think philosophy is the origin of the taboo against kin-slaying, for example.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I take your point, and I could see how someone would find the comparison to, say, veganism compelling.
I remember Freud describing how an overdeveloped superego could make a person miserable, insisting on standards of thought and behavior they could not possibly meet, but at the same be a source of pride, because look what high standards they have!
If AN is a matter of human beings developing a standard of morality that human beings can only meet by not existing, that's at least paradoxical.
Rather than steal your thunder and debate AN here, I've been trying to figure out what makes people even less likely to accept AN than, say, veganism. The arguments are interesting, but they're far from the whole story. You see the rest of the story as a process of realization, or consciousness raising, and that's plausible. You could say I'm just looking at the other side, at our resistance to that process.
I find that resistance reasonable, but I want to get the facts right first.
(I could be helping your cause by figuring out what you really need to argue against, rather than just making the same arguments all the time without convincing anyone.)
No, but there's a difference between simply tradition and philosophizing about an action, can we agree on that? Even the judgement that tradition is what morality is is a philosophical judgement.. Now you have crossed from arbitrary what is given to what has been introspected, rationalized, and put into a dialectic of analysis.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
:up:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Interesting.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I can see that. However, it really is just a standard of non-action taking place. DON'T do this. The back-and-forth goes usually something like:
N: "But I want to because if not, I will be sad."
AN: Being sad is not a criteria for if something is right.
N: (Inevitably shifts to a bizarre kind of utilitarianism).. But you see, my sadness will be somehow overall worse off than a whole lifetime of negative experiences for the person being born..
AN: A) even from a utilitarian point of view, this is probably not true that your sadness equates to all the negative experiences of a lifetime of another person.
B) A person not born will have no negative consequences, where that person certainly will have negative consequences once born.. No happiness for that person, literally matters not to no one. The due care is on the side of NOT causing negative experiences, and not not causing happiness (which matters not to no one in this situation).
C) From a deontological perspective you are forcing a negative set of situations and a game of challenges to be overcome (lest dire consequences) onto someone else. You made this decision for someone else, and deemed it right. Not having a child does not deprive any ONE from anything. The ledger is always on the side of NOT causing negative experiences for someone else.
Whether or not you agree with any of this, you should at least see that it can be a subject philosophical conversation. The point ANs often make is that it should at least be in the discourse and not dismissed offhandedly because you just don't like the implications.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I commend this effort. I too am interested in this. But just keep in mind, that there is resistance doesn't mean "Thus it's right that we resist". That is where you must make a connection if you want an argument other than, "This is what we tend to do, thus this is right".. I mean you could make that argument, but then we can bring up a lot of things we tend to do that we probably should not (get angry, put people down, overlook someone else, step on people's heads, etc. etc.). Probably daily we do some violation that if we looked back, we should have handled differently, but we did so out of our own self-interest at the time.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I wholeheartedly commend the effort and look forward to any conclusions. Here is one major one I think for the resistance- cultural self-reinforcement.. a feedback loop.
Cultural meme: Procreation is good. Religious, tribal, social.. This reinforces...
Personal preference: I want to procreate.. I also don't want to "miss out" (what people mistake for "biological clock is really just not missing out) which also reinforces:
Parental/family/social pressure to have children.. "Why haven't you procreated yet...Don't you want X lifestyle?"
AN claim proposed: Disgusted at the idea that is reinforced, taken as personal preference.. Dismisses idea out of hand that procreation could be anything but good (with some exceptions perhaps that are circumstantial).
This is most depressing but existential reasons..
People pin their purpose on the immersion of taking care of someone else..What do they do at X stage of life.."Oh no is there more??". That kind of thing.
What AN ultimately does is question the project of life itself, and this is scary itself. But it's not much more than Buddhism, just taken to a practical level.. Life has X negative qualities.. Why keep procreating more people that experience this?.. Now it becomes a political question of "Well, I justify negative experiences because X".. Now you are the judge, jury, executioner of why someone else needs negative experiences.. Odd from an AN perspective.
Another existential one is the depressing nature of AN. I do not deny that AN can be depressing to think about. I depress myself with it sometimes if I am writing about it in a happy mood. This doesn't take away the import or rightness of the conclusion.. "This conclusion makes me depressed.. Wah wah.. it must be wrong". Same as the conclusion must be wrong because you are sad from earlier example.
:up: To the degree we thrive (i.e. flourish – optimize agency), not only in spite of but because of suffering (i.e. by pro-actively reducing suffering), I think we give our individual and/or collective lives value.
Right! That I agree with.
Here's another way to think about my story's reliance on our instinct for self-preservation.
Do people who find themselves to be alive feel wronged by their parents? Overwhelmingly the answer is no, but there are obviously problems with that. Some, perhaps many, might feel that way sometimes, and that's a reminder that feelings are tied to specific events, to specific circumstances. People can have something like a feeling that is present across varying circumstances, but we tend to reach for different words there, something like "attitude" or maybe "outlook" or "mindset", though the latter have a more cognitive ring to me, more to do with expectations than affect.
I find it plausible that we experience our own instinct for self-preservation largely as an attitude that life is fundamentally a good thing. There are of course extreme experiences when we just want it to stop, and those powerful feelings might trump the general attitude. There's a sort of corollary too, that we may generally have a pretty negative and sour affect but if we find ourselves suddenly in danger (car skidding off the road, that sort of thing) then our instinct for self-preservation will come roaring back as a feeling, a powerful desire not to die in this moment.
Antinatalism is the claim that a person brought into being has thereby been wronged. Their being wronged might be accompanied by an attitude that they have or have not been wronged, or, more fleetingly, feelings that they have or have not been wronged. In other words, sometimes the antinatalist claim will align with the purported victim's own feelings or attitudes, and sometimes it won't.
To start with, then, we need to clarify in what sense someone may have been wronged without feeling that they have been wronged. That's certainly possible, but I'm not sure the usual cases are much help. For example, if you steal from me but I don't know it, sure, I've been wronged and don't feel that I have been. But that's a matter of knowledge; if I knew, I would feel wronged. Being alive isn't like that: we know perfectly well that we are, and, past a certain age, we know perfectly well how we came to be. I haven't been able to think of an example that's more like the wrong life is supposed to be.
Now for the wrong done. Is the wrong intermittent? That is, am I wronged by my parents only at the moments in my life when I am suffering? Taking that option, we could focus on whether, in those moments of suffering, I have feelings of having been wronged by my parents for bringing me into being. (And then, if those feelings are absent, we have to have ready an account of that, along the lines suggested in the previous paragraph.)
Another option is that the wrong is something like exposure to risk of suffering; in that case, the risk is persistent from the beginning of your life until its end, and you are wronged in this sense every moment you are alive, whether you are suffering at the moment or not. An analogy for this sort of wrong leaps to mind, that of a general who sends troops on a mission based on a preposterously faulty idea. The troops may come to no harm, through luck or their own ability, but they will still feel wronged; they will resent having had to run that risk because of someone else's folly. Here again, we need an account of why people mostly do not feel wronged as the troops sent on this mission do.
The conception of the wrong done can be strengthened, it seems, by noting that not only are you exposed to risk every moment of your life, but it's a near certainty you won't always escape harm. How should we think of the wrong done here? It's not clear to me. We have, in the first take, actual harmful events; we have, in the second, unjustified risking of harm. This third seems more about establishing culpability: if our general knew a certain sort of mission was risky and sent the troops out not once, when they might have gotten lucky, but over and over and over again, people might feel he was "tempting fate", relying on a faulty view of the chances of no one coming to harm. I'm not sure we even need that calculus here, because there's no question about whether the parents are culpable. (It might have some point if we take parents as a group, and stipulate that some of their offspring will be unlucky, and so on. Not clear then who we take to be the moral agent; when I suffer should I blame all parents, as a group, rather than mine?)
What's the point of all this? Twofold. On the one hand, insofar as I incline to any theory of morality, it's based in the moral sentiments, but I don't want to make too much of that, because I don't have much of a theory. On the other hand, most successful moral arguments succeed precisely by arousing the moral sentiments. It's no good telling someone that they should think something is wrong that they don't; you change their view by showing it to them in such a way that they feel it is wrong. (And obviously there's just as little point in telling people how they should feel.) I think this is what you are attempting with your favorite analogy lately, the "forced game": you want to elicit from your audience a feeling that placing someone in such a situation is wrong.
I don't think "optimism bias" is any help here. If it's real, it only explains why people think their lives have been, and will be, overall better than they actually have been and will be. But that's a cognitive issue. If people in moments of suffering, do not feel wronged by their parents, optimism bias doesn't explain that; if they do not feel wronged all the time because they are constantly at risk of being harmed, optimism bias doesn't explain that; and if you fail to arouse the moral sentiments of your audience, to feel that children have been wronged simply by being brought into being, optimism bias doesn't explain that either.
It's difficult to keep this discussion distinct from the antinatalism discussions elsewhere. I'm trying to avoid critiquing arguments in favor of antinatalism, and focus on why it's unpersuasive. Maybe this post makes it clearer how closely connected I think our experience of moral life is to what we find persuasive in moral discussion.
(As philosophers, we'll always be tempted to believe that the class "persuasive" can be identified with the class "coherent and logical", though we know perfectly well that it cannot. I am going to make an effort to connect any criticism I have of antinatalism's coherence to the goal of moral suasion as described above.)
I've been waiting for you to mention Buddhism.
The resemblance between AN and Buddhism is very limited and merely superficial. You formulate that idea nicely -- "What AN ultimately does is question the project of life itself". So does Buddhism. But Buddhism goes about it very differently than AN, and most importantly, Buddhism proposes a way out of suffering -- while alive. Also, the reason why a category of Buddhist practitioners doesn't engage in sex (and thus doesn't produce children) is not motivated by the desire to not cause an injustice to potential future beings, but out of a general committment to not indulge in sensual pleasures. In contrast, AN still pursue sensual pleasures; in fact, they see the whole point of life in them.
In some ways, antinatalism is, basically, a stunted Buddhism, or even more a stunted Jainism. Both of these religions question the project of life itself and seek or propose an end to it, on account of suffering.
Antinatalism is putting forward some ideas that can, to some extent, be found in those religions, but antinatalism does away with most of the other ideas and practices of those religions. This is one of the reasons why antinatalism has such a poor persuasive power. It doesn't have its own metaphysics, nor much of a system of ethics, except for that one aspect of not brining new people into the world. Their idea of not bringing new people into this world kind of "floats in the air", only loosely connected to some ideas of injustice, suffering, hardship, but without any concrete underpinnings -- which, however, a theory would need to have if it successfully wants to go against the flow of life as it is usually lived (the way Buddhism and Jainism go against this flow).
Quoting I like sushi
Actually, not having a precise definition of "suffering" is part of the problem. Often, it's understood so broadly that it becomes a meaningless term.
It's interesting for me to see what people say on this topic. I have some background in Early Buddhism, so it's easy to for me to think about suffering, but I can now better appreciate people who don't have such a background and how they approach the problem of suffering.
That has nothing to do with AN.. And the resemblance to Buddhism is the life is suffering aspect. Agreed about the solution to the problem. The AN does not usually need karma, reincarnation or similar ideas, unless some kind of metaphor (which just makes it a Western version something similar to cause/effect/contingency). Buddhism, like Pessimism sees the system suffering of desire.. Schopenhauer had some great parallels he mentions in The World as Will and Representation. You should read passages from Book 4. The 8 fold path and such is interesting, but no such prescription except wholesale asceticism, compassion, and aesthetic contemplation is offered by Schop and I believe he thought that only certain character-types will be able to endure the path of asceticism.
This seems like you are aiming for why people don't commit suicide.. An AN would argue that the threshold for starting someone else's suffering (whether or not a certain predominant attitude towards life prevails) is wrong. The attitude of the person doesn't make the starting of someone else's suffering thus good. Still goes back to the happy slave in an unjust situation.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Happy slave.. If I punch you now, and you get enlightenment from it later, that would be crass utilitarian thinking.. Another way to think about it, is I shouldn't punch people, whatever their later feeling on it is. It is wrong to cause suffering, period (when you don't have to in the first place.. no one existed to need the suffering).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Exactly! Now that is closer to the AN view.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Can moral sentiments be misleading if they lead to bad conclusions? I think you were closer when it comes to cognitive bias, which you seem to dismiss. It is not applying justice in an unbiased way. It is not just to cause X negative experience onto someone else UNLESS it is the time honored practice of Y. Do you see how that could be biased? Every other kind of harm is always justified when the person is born, so it's after the fact (schooling, vaccines, punishment for violating something, etc.). Not so in this case. It would seem in no other case would people's moral sentiment simply say, "Cause unnecessary suffering for someone else".. But it gets clouded in this case because, because, becuase, why?
Well, you say self-preservation. Self-preservation would be dealing with the self, this is dealing with another, so it's not quite that. I would say it's the sadness of not being able to do X activities related to procreation.. But also because it makes people sad that there would be no X, Y, Z in their future. That seems dystopian.
There is also a political agenda at play. People want to see the way of life they lived (with minor adjustments for future improvements perhaps) carried out. The injustice is, when it has to be carried out, by someone else. Why should they perpetuate your need to see a political agenda enacted in the world?
What do you mean 'some background'. You were brought up as a buddhist? How does that make it easier to think about suffering?
You claim that the happiness of the person in the position doesn't have much to do with the justice or injustice of imposing that position. So, what's your definition of an unjust position, without reference to what the person in the position thinks of their position? Is it unjust above a certain number of work hours a week? A certain difficulty of work? What's your standard?
Quoting schopenhauer1
What does "unnecessary" mean here? What is "necessary harm"? I thought an example of "necessary harm" is when it prevents an even larger harm on the person in question (what's what I remember your definition was), but you contradict that here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Wouldn't sending kids to school also fall under this umbrella of wrong impositions then?
I don't think of the moral sentiments as just a matter of the individual's reaction --- it's more like language: each of us speaks an idiolect, sure, but collectively, in the aggregate, those overlapping idiolects define a speech community, and the practice and intuitions about usage of each of us also carries some authority. There's no Correct English; there's only what English speakers by and large think is correct, and what they say. Each can speak, to some degree, for the entire community on correctness of usage, even though now and then they will disagree. And that authority comes not just from knowledge but from the fact that the practice of each us determines, in part, what counts as correct English.
As morals go, it's plain that there are differences among individuals, and between communities, but if you think of humanity in the whole as your moral community, then these are just idiolects and dialects. There are commonalities across communities and traditions as well, and they are considerable. I look for the basis of morality in what people feel is praiseworthy and blameworthy, what fills them with admiration, what they resent or find repulsive. I don't see any firmer ground for morality than that.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That's an interesting example, and it's apparently pretty important to your view, so maybe we should spend some time on that. I'll just note, to start with, that my case doesn't rest on every individual slave feeling wronged by his master. It is true that slavery has been a common practice throughout the bulk of human history, in a variety of forms; but the fact that all of the modern world officially disapproves of slavery doesn't support either of us more than the other. If you compare, say, ancient attitudes toward slavery and modern ones, the fact of change shows that human beings can be brought, en masse, to finding slavery repellent. There's room for you to think of yourself as one of the first abolitionists, if you like, but it doesn't undermine my view of the task you face, to move us to find life itself repugnant, as we find slavery repugnant, and hold blameworthy those who place another in that situation.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But of course you can't mean this. A boxer does not feel wronged when their opponent punches them, even if it hurts. On the other hand, if you punch me after the bell has wrung and I've dropped my guard, I will feel wronged. There's an issue of consent here, which is important to your case as well. But there is a further counterexample: sometimes young men are in the habit of playfully punching each other on the bicep, and it's supposed to hurt, just not much. Whether anyone consents to that isn't quite clear. What is clear is that there will be cases where the punched party does not feel wronged, but cases, if the punch was in anger and hard enough to raise a bruise, where they might. Intention matters as well, and plays almost no role in your account of our being wronged by our parents. If someone takes a swing at your buddy, who's standing next to you at a drunken party, but hits you instead, do you feel wronged? Maybe, maybe not. If you feel very wronged and pull a knife, those around you will (one hopes) try to de-escalate the situation by getting you to feel differently about it -- he's just drunk, he didn't mean it, you're not even bleeding, it's just a party, shit happens. None of that is a denial of the bare facts that A caused harm to B, but it's an invitation to see it in a different light so that you feel differently about it.
If snapping fingers was equal to today's situation, then certainly that would count.. Are there aspects of the world you would not have wanted to be the case, or are you just doing what is necessary? Of course we de facto do what's necessary.. We must follow the rules. Can you make your own rules? Can you have designed it from the first place nd then played it, tweak it, reverse it? Of course not. Then it's not just..
I can't give you a complete list, but I can give you a sufficient one:
1) Can't create your own rule for the game..
2) We can judge the game (unlike say an animal that kind of just lives out the game).. Our layer of rationalization/language etc. allows judgement etc.
3) Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting khaled
Right, but I am talking more about the idea that anything is justified if somehow your feelings about it lead to a positive experience (whether you know it or not). So, sure maybe putting you in crutches makes you feel enlightened down the line, doesn't mean I should put you in crutches.. I am just showing cases where it is clear that ones personal feelings don't align with the injustice.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Not a very good standard considering this is also the case in the utopia and you find it ok to impose life there.
Quoting schopenhauer1
These are both true in a utopia and IRL, so the real difference maker must be (3)
Quoting schopenhauer1
But I'm just confused what (3) actually means. This bit seems to just be begging the question. "Impositions are fine after you're born, but if it's before you're born they're not fine". Isn't that exactly what we're debating?
That's very inconsistent for your line of argument. You try to find ethical "rules" that people abide by, that they don't abide by in the case of having children, for no justifiable reason, hence showing an inconsistency, like here for example:
Quoting schopenhauer1
It's also what I'm trying to do to you, show an inconsistency in beliefs which I believe is there. But point is, this:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Separates the "laws for imposing" into two categories. "Laws of imposing after you're born" and "laws of imposing before you're born". This completely destroys your project. You are trying to show that people's "laws of imposing" would preclude birth if applied rigorously. By separating it into two categories you open the door for someone to say: "Every other kind of harm needs justification when the person is born. Not so in this case. Since the person is not born, no justification is needed to do something that could harm them, so yes I am justified in genetically modifyin ma kid to be blind!" With exactly as much validity as your claim above.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Important question is: What about cases where you know that they'll appreciate the imposition later down the line? In other words, it's not what you feel about it, but what they feel about it. Supposedly neither of these matter when it comes to whether or not an imposition is wrong (happy slave and all) so again I ask the question (this is probably the 10th or so time):
Quoting khaled
And you still haven't actually explained what you mean by "unnecessary". I get what you were doing with the original quote, I'm asking for clarification on what you mean by "unnecessary".
So just to be extra clear, if you respond to nothing else:
What is "unnecessary suffering" as opposed to "necessary suffering"?
What is an "unjust position" as opposed to a "just position"?
That was more or less the starting point for this discussion, not with a claim that we know it for a fact in the case before us, but that we assume it and it's reasonable to assume it.
Did you not speak of pursuing other pleasures, apart from having children?
Which is why antinatalism is so impotent. ha.
Yes, character-types like these:
I've been around Buddhism in one way or another for more than twenty years. I've studied some of the Pali Suttas, and I can find my way around Theravada doctrine, and also in roundabout other Buddhist schools.
Especially in the context of Early Buddhism, it is often said that the Buddha taught only one thing: Suffering and the end of suffering. With all this talk about suffering, one becomes comfortable enough to think and talk about it.
The main argument is thus:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting khaled
Unnecessary is not ameliorating greater harms with lesser harms, but simply causing harm to someone for no reason other than you want to see an outcome take place.
Quoting khaled
Unjust = not based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair. In this case, making someone else play a game they had no hand in creating, cannot escape from without dire consequences, etc. I see life, what is already setup from historical contingency, and specifically in this thread, the economic aspect of it, as unjust to make others play.
All I have to show is THIS world is sufficiently unfair to make others play..
We can say that much of the day must be taken up by this particular game..
That it is not guaranteed that people will like all aspects of this game...
That one cannot just escape the game EASILY (see dire consequences).
You see, my case doesn't have to be X hours, of precision, only show that this game is sufficiently NOT a utopia.
Let's first make this criteria.. What to you makes a utopia.. Then we can move from there. If you don't answer that question, I am not going to move forward.
Quoting khaled
No no.. how do you get that from what I said? Prior to birth you can prevent harm, period. Once birth happens, you have to immediately start ameliorating greater harms with lesser harms.. You don't want to harm the person more than necessary, but to harm them in the first place, is unnecessary.
But, when you do this:
Quoting schopenhauer1
That would be ameliorating greater harm with lesser harm clearly, so is this wrong or not?
Also, importantly, is this "greater harm" you're ameliorating just a general measure of utility, or must you ameliorate greater harm from the person in question with lesser harm? So would it be wrong to punch someone so that someone else gains enlightenment? Because depending on your answer this:
Quoting schopenhauer1
May or may not follow. If you think it's fine to harm someone to ameliorate greater harm from someone else, you can argue that having children is already ameliorating greater harms with lesser harms.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is just pushing the definition backwards. What is "morally right and fair"?
Quoting schopenhauer1
So doing this is not morally right and fair? But this also applies to having children in a utopia, which you said you're fine with. So which is it?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Agreed, but I don't see where you did so. All you do is cite specific features of life, that are also present in a utopia, or in other impositions you think are fine.
Quoting schopenhauer1
HA, nice switch. First off, I don't see how it's significant what I think counts as a utopia and what doesn't, I'm pretty sure what you mean to ask is: "What to you makes it ok to impose". Answer: "It's fine to impose something on someone when it is very likely they will find it worthwhile (among other cases that are irrelevant here)". You don't like this standard, clearly. And you try to convince me that it's bad somehow.
I don't use my standard when arguing with you, I try to get you to spell out a standard that doesn't lead to ridiculous consequences. So far, every time you've said "Life is X, and X is wrong", X is in common with utopias, or gifts, or other things you consider moral to impose, meaning X isn't a good standard for you. You did this in the last comment too:
Quoting khaled
And when you say "Life is too much X" you fail to show why it is. In order to do this you'd need to, for example, find an imposition that is "lighter" than life that we think is wrong to impose. Then you'd have a case for why life is too heavy of an imposition. But you haven’t done so.
You are not getting why I used that there. Stop taking it out of context. The reason I said that was that anyone can justify anything in the name of X. Crass utilitarianism isn't a good reason. An unknown "butterfly effect" good outcome that may come of it down the line, means shit in moral terms as a reason for something.
Quoting khaled
Right, you cannot use someone unnecessarily (see my definition).
Quoting khaled
Again, please define to me what is utopia. Start from there and then we can move forward. You haven't defined it.
Quoting khaled
Again, what is a utopia?
Quoting khaled
So with all of these arguments I can always use the "But you can never know" argument. You can never know if someone will find something worthwhile, or change their minds down the line, or simply have on balance not a great life. You just don't know.. But I am making the harder argument from appeals to justice, not statistical outcomes. Rather, it is unjust to impose anything unnecessarily that involves forms of unwanted, effort, annoyance, suffering, and things that you would not do otherwise if you were to create your own universe. You can call that suffering, lack of autonomy, or what not. Either way, you cannot escape unless dire consequences. Just because something is, doesn't mean it ought.
Quoting khaled
But that's just the thing, you pick analogies which aren't life or in this case work. Life and work are not one long gift or utopia. If someone gave me a gift that lasted a large chunk of life or a whole lifetime, I couldn't get out of it, and it causes severe dislike, annoyance, and negative experience in general.. I wouldn't call that much of a gift, even if some positive came out of it too. Gifts shouldn't cause strife, unwanted challenges. Gifts shouldn't be something where you can't get out of it. If you gave me a gift of punches and my favorite X item. The favorite X item doesn't justify the punches.. Even worse, if you kept getting me items (items to live, to entertain myself).. but you kept punching me, but I can take your program of defending myself against your punches.. That isn't a gift either. And you still haven't defined a utopia..
I said earlier we can judge and think.. In utopia can we judge and think about what is going on? Are we always judging that it is good? No? Why not? Is it utopia subjectively, in some objective way? What? Let me know how you want to define your disanalogy to play the game.
"You can harm people when it alleviates more harm" is a perfect example of crass utilitarianism.... But no, crass utilitarianism is bad because....reasons.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I'll take this as a "no" you can't harm someone to ameliorate greater harm form someone else. Now you have problems with the sleeping lifeguard again. You can't wake up the sleeping lifeguard to save a drowning person by this formulation. So again, a terrible standard for you that contradicts your beliefs.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I already did on the other thread, but ok, here is an example of one:
A world where at the snap of your fingers (or a similarly easy activity if you're disabled) any suffering will go away. Also there is no euthanasia option, you cannot leave the game, and refusal to snap your fingers will subject you to suffering exactly as it would IRL.
Let's go with that one.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But this is a terrible argument. Because it would make surprise parties wrong (you never know, they might absolutely hate them) but they're not wrong, according to you.
You keep coming up with standards for why birth is wrong that also lead to things you think are right being wrong, and it's getting very tiring pointing them out. It would be very helpful if before you post another standard you ask yourself "Can this lead to a contradiction in my beliefs". You'll find it basically always does. Because you're just cycling between 5 or so standards, all of which contradict your beliefs.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Literally every imposition fits this description to different extents. And you think some impositions are fine. Again, terrible standard. Sigh....
Quoting schopenhauer1
"Your analogies to life are not life itself", excuse me what? I assume you mean that my analogies aren't like life in any way. Prove that. Don't just state it. If any analogous imposition I come up with to life , automatically becomes not analogous when you realize you think it's ok to impose, then you're begging the question.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Agreed. Problem is, most people would tell you that life is mostly good with the dislike, annoyance, and negative experiences being the side effect. In other words, life is not like that. You think it is, but have provided no reasoning or evidence for why it is.
Look at the context of what I was replying to. Otherwise stop trying to use this. It's not crass utilitarian either. It is caring for the person. As much due care is taken as you can in that case. Unfortunately, more cannot be taken because that window was gone. By NOT doing ameliorations, you are doing the opposite.
Quoting khaled
No, why am I explaining this yet again? It is unnecessary to cause harm in the first place, but once born you can ameliorate greater for lesser harms. One case no suffering has to take place. The other, the person has no choice but ameliorate if you respect the person as someone worth ethical matters (aka you don't neglect them). Of course, no worry of neglect or undue care if someone isn't born in the first place, but that's the truism I am constantly reexplaining.
Quoting khaled
But you are giving me an example, not an explanation of what makes it a utopia.
Quoting khaled
I am tired of answering this disanalogy. Surprise parties aren't life. If you can't figure out why, we are done cause no use arguing with willful ignorance to make rhetorical points. You should lose this one, it's not great. I hesitate to say that because you will probably just pick a worse one cause that's what you do apparently.
Quoting khaled
No you pick bad analogies that you think makes the contradiction but doesn't fit the scenario. A life (or lifetime of work) is not X thing (a one time surprise party, a gift, etc). If it was that, I might agree with you and never even make an argument in the first place, because it's so trivial as to make no impetus. But it isn't trivial. You keep saying, "If it's worthwhile, it's okay to do to someone else". But this is the only thing where you can say that a lifetime worth of X negative things otherwise dire consequences happen.. There is no other real analogy to it.. This game is more like I describe. YOU have to address that at least. This "worthwhile" present is not escapable and brings with it a lifetime of X, Y, Z negative experiences. What kind of gift is that, that you know of? Your gift is a lifetime of overcoming challenges.. but don't worry, some of it you will consider "worthwhile".. Guess what? You have no other choice! There is no utopian alternative. There is only a lifetime of forced given. So I don't accept your analogies that are so dissimilar to what I am talking about.
Quoting khaled
But this is more than an instance of imposition.. Which is why your crappy analogies (to try to make your one trick work) doesn't work.
Quoting khaled
No dude, because unless that gift is a literally a lifetime of a set of negative experiences that you cannot get rid of without dire consequences, your analogies are nothing. You can't try to win this argument by simply saying phrases like "prove it" when it is very clear they are so far off from each other and never even met my definitions.
Quoting khaled
I don't have to prove to you obvious things about the human condition. Life "is mostly good".. what does that even mean? But also, what standard gift ever has these kind of negative side effects? A gift in a category of one, which makes all your other examples disanalogous, as I've been saying over and over.
Quoting schopenhauer1
False. If you don't have children the people who would benefit from your children being around would be harmed. So in both cases suffering takes place. It comes down to whether or not harming someone to alleviate harm from someone else is ethical which you still haven't answered. You could easily argue that having children is necessary harm depending on how you actually answer the question....
Quoting schopenhauer1
That you cannot suffer unless you choose to.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think it's perfectly fine to bring in people to the game you describe and I already stated my standard clearly:
Quoting khaled
Coincidentally, it is indeed very likely a child will find their life worthwhile if statistics are anything to go by. You don't like this standard. So I'm trying to follow your standard here, but you can't come up with one that's consistent with your own beliefs.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Ah ok, so the new standard is "it is a lifetime of negative experiences you cannot get rid of". Ok then, prove that life is a lifetime of negative experiences. What evidence do you have to support this statement?
There is a ton of evidence that shows that the majority of people enjoy their life on a balance, and find it worthwhile as well, and are very much against parting with it. What is your evidence that all these people are lying and that they're all Oscar worthy actors pretending to be happy when in fact they're miserable?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Ah, I see. So having kids is wrong because life is mostly suffering. And life is mostly suffering because.... DUH it's obvious!!!!!
This is exactly as valid as someone reasoning that it's fine to have 50 children he can't provide for because life is "so obviously" pure bliss.
You can't dismiss a point of contention in an argument with "it's obvious I'm right". Especially when you provide 0 evidence for being right while there is tons of evidence showing that people don't think their life is as hellish as you describe.
Quoting schopenhauer1
"I'm right you're wrong, obviously. Yes I'm aware I'm the minority opinion here. Still I'm right you're wrong, because reasons"
What makes you think this is about the human condition and not just your condition? The majority of humans seem to disagree with your characterization of the human condition, shouldn't that cause some doubt?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Oh, so "life is mostly good" is very abstract and difficult to understand but:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Is immediately obvious and clear.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well it depends on the negative side effect, as I have a good analogy for each in vacuum. But you're asking me "What is something that's exactly like life that's not life". You know how analogies work right? They're supposed to highlight one aspect (negative effect) at a time, I obviously can't show all at once.
You cite A as the property that make an imposition bad, and A is present in having kids, so having kids is bad. I reply with a situation where A is the case, but you think the imposition is not bad. You respond by "that situation is not like life at all, life also has B!" (after realizing that "life isn't A enough!" is going nowhere and takes away objectivity from your position) So I respond with a situation where B and A are the case yet you think it's fine. You respond by "that situation is not like life at all, life also has C!" and so on. But when we examine the whole set of properties that make an imposition bad for you, they are actually pretty reasonable.
So why this clinical, bit by bit approach, where you pretend that one or two variables are the end all be all of what makes an imposition wrong? Why not just spill out the whole list? Well, because it sounds ridiculous! The whole list basically reads: "It's wrong to impose a lifetime of hellish suffering on someone" which is perfectly reasonable of course. Everyone agrees with that, but they don't think life is such hellish suffering, that's ridiculous. You realize that trying to convince them that life is hellish suffering doesn't work, so instead you try to pretend to follow some simplistic moral standard such as "Actions that are A and B are wrong". So when I show that you don't actually follow that simplistic standard, you have to revert back to the full set which is:
Quoting schopenhauer1
is wrong to impose. That's what you see life as. Life is purely just negative experience after negative experience with the sweet release of death being the only cure. A "Sexually transmitted terminal disease" and no more as the memes would have it. But when I try to ask you what evidence you have for thinking this, you cannot provide.
So your problem is, when you cite a standard it either:
1- Contradicts your other beliefs by not being sufficiently specific in scope and resulting in things you think are right coming out wrong
2- Is unlike life and so doesn't actually say anything about childbirth.
Of course, you think it's like life, but you don't want to say this, because you know it sounds ridiculous to everyone else. So instead you prefer to have (1) be the case rather than reveal that really, the only reason you're AN, is because you find life: "a lifetime worth of X negative things otherwise dire consequences happen". Yours isn't a rational argument, it's purely emotional, as the claim that life is like this is completely unsubstantiated and there is mountains of evidence against it, yet you believe it. I find it hard to believe that comes from rational consideration.
No.
In contrast to Buddhism, AN works on the premise that death (as is understood conventionally, death of the body) is the only real solution to the problem of suffering. Consider what this tells us about AN's view of life, the universe, and everything: that life is miserable, and then you die. Antinatalism is a blatant case of bad faith.
It's because antinatalism operates out of such bad faith about existence that it isn't and cannot be persuasive.
On the other hand, Buddhism operates on the premise that despite all the misery, the universe does offer a viable path out of suffering. So Buddhism operates out of good faith.
Then list those commonalities.
Causing harm en toto, to alleviate your already existing suffering is what I'm against.
There is no X that suffers anything.
There is a Y that suffers something.
That does NOT mean Y gets to now have an X that will suffer something to alleviate Y suffering something. I don't see how that kind of creation of bad for someone else makes a right.
And I know you will simply go to people born to be blood donors or something like that..
Rather,
If X already suffers something
Y knows that X can be alleviated, and Y is the caretaker of X, then Y can allow a smaller suffering for the benefit of greater.
There are still contingencies like Y cannot do this for adult X, without consent, unless an immediate danger etc. It's all about respecting the dignity of the individual.
This does not give license to crass utilitarian where Y can harm X because there is a vague, unknown possible good (i.e. butterfly effect).
Quoting khaled
Why does worthwhile trump negative experiences? Who gives you a right to start another persons condition for a set of negative experiences?
Quoting khaled
Yes actually, I can list a litany of negative experiences. But "life is mostly good" is not a litany of anything, but an overall judgement laid over everything. But again, I was looking for clarity of the statement, (is it a list of things, an attitude, a report) and if it's a report, what is it reporting on?
Quoting khaled
So yeah this is precisely your problem. Analogies of everything that comprises a set to only one aspect of the set doesn't work, except as a parlor trick. That's my whole contention with this line of argument. Without it though, you don't have much of a defense, and hence your constant insistence that this must be a valid reasoning. Most analogies are apples to apples.. That is one aspect to another aspect.. not a set of all aspects to one aspect. That is false analogizing.
Quoting khaled
So the problem with all of this is we are an animal that can judge things.. I can judge work as an X harm if it is imposed on an individual.. Other animals don't do that, you see. How is it that as a product of the natural world, I have the ability to judge a function of keeping myself alive wrong? Why do I even need evidence at all? What is going on here? Something else is going on in the human condition that doesn't just allow for, "I mostly like life". Nothing would need to be said, judged, etc.. It would just be a state of being. But we are not in that state of being. We are not in that sublime repose or way of living.
Ok, so people peddle in hope-mongering. Buddhism, like all religions offer this. I can agree with that. No one likes the idea of no hope.
Why start the game for someone else to play to begin with? If nothing existed, what is wrong with nothing? Is it just that people conflate that with some sort of darkness or something and this makes them sad and anxioius?
Ok. But does Z get to cause X to alleviate Y if Y>X? That's what I'm asking (for the third time).
Quoting schopenhauer1
That's what it means by definition... You ever heard someone say "It was worthwhile and fulfilling, but I wish I never did it"? Worthwhile literally means that the negative experiences were worth it.
Definition according to google: worth the time, money, or effort spent; of value or importance.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Will you stop? We've been over this. You're doing it again. You're highlighting one part of the list and pretending that's what you use to judge right and wrong, when it isn't, to pretend to have some form of objectivity or simple, righteous moral compass. You're fine with surprise parties even though they are another persons condition for a set of negative experiences. So stop pretending that's what classifies right and wrong for you. And now you'll protest "But Life is unlike surprise parties". Agreed. This wasn't to show that life is fine because it's like surprise parties, no no. It was to show that "This starts another persons condition for a set of negative experiences" is insufficient, and so to get you to show your ridiculous position by requiring you to use the whole list.
Quoting schopenhauer1
And I can list a litany of positive or worthwhile ones.
Quoting schopenhauer1
A report. On whether or not the project was worth it despite the pain. Or on whether or not it is mostly comprised of negative or positive experiences. Depends on who you're talking to.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But it doesn't comprise only one aspect, it comprises most at the same time. But when we look at all of them combined it spells something like "Do not cause hellish suffering for a lifetime on someone else" which is perfectly reasonable, now you need to show that life will likely be hellish suffering for this or that child.
"Life is an unconsented imposition, and those are always wrong", I'll disagree with the second half, it's hard to disagree with the first.
"Life is an imposition that's difficult to escape, and those are always wrong" I'll disagree with the second half, it's hard to disagree with the first.
"Life starts the condition for harm, that's always wrong" (what you said this comment) I'll disagree with the second half, it's hard to disagree with the first.
"Life is all of the above at the same time, and that's wrong to impose" I'll disagree with the second half (utopia example), it's hard to disagree with the first.
And so we keep going until we get to:
"Life is comprised of a lifetime of hellish suffering with no escape and we're all doomed, and those are always wrong to impose" I'll disagree with the first half, it's hard to disagree with the second.
Again:
Quoting khaled
Quoting schopenhauer1
Because you are trying to convince others that disagree with your judgement that their judgement is wrong and your is correct. You need evidence to do so. Your judgement is that life is mostly comprised of negative experiences, and that those experiences are not worth it and so do not justify existing. Basically everyone disagrees with one or both parts. You think they're wrong and want to convince them of that. You need evidence.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I thought you were struggling with what that means a second ago. Now that I see you're past your confusion before my reply is even up (showing you never struggled with what it means), this amounts to: "You're wrong, life isn't mostly good, because it just isn't"
Not very convincing I'm afraid. Again, what makes you think this is the human condition and not your condition? Despite most humans openly voicing that they like life. Do most humans fail to understand the condition they're living in, and you in your infinite wisdom have grasped it fully for everyone for all time? What's your evidence that's the case?
First off, you discount the pain of what happens when one does NOT like aspects of the game, whether or not someone reports "The game was worthwhile". What these setbacks/negatives/pains/harms/sufferings comprise of is what it is, and it is not good. Is starting a series of these plethora of negatives upon someone else good? I think no. It is not right to do to someone whether or not they report that it was worth their while.
Quoting khaled
Ok, but when in a position to not start someone else's set of harms, I just don't think post-facto justifications like "it was worthwhile" justify actually starting those set of harms for someone else. Haven't we acknowledged from previous threads, that this is one of the main dividing lines where we both will not budge? Unless one of us concedes this axiomatic point, the rest is pretty moot.
Quoting khaled
Again, moot if we are discussing whether starting someone else's set of harms is justified in the first place. And of course this will just make you retreat to the one aspect to all aspects one-to-set disanalogy of the surprise party right? But maybe you will be more creative or just drop it, as it doesn't work.
Quoting khaled
I think we are weighing negative and positive much differently. To me, creating pain is more paramount than providing pleasure. No one is obliged to provide pleasure for others, but certainly preventing pain is more important (unless ameliorating, but that is post-facto dealing with consequences of putting someone into this world, not the chief arbiter of starting it wholesale for them).
I am willing to say that if the world was a legitimate utopia I wouldn't have objections. But in THIS world, it is not a utopia, because there is suffering in this world in numerous ways.. both systemic and contingent (see my profile quote for my definitions of these). Someone said earlier that we couldn't even imagine a world without these kinds of suffering. And this is true! We certainly cannot imagine it. That's why I asked about your conception. As for your snapping fingers examples, as long as you accept that pain can be considered any subjective negative state, this becomes the new bar.
So this goes back to our major difference- is it right to knowingly put someone in a position experience a lifetime set of painful experiences (when it didn't have to take place to begin with) even if post-facto they MAY say it was worthwhile? Again, I say this is not right. It is enacting a political agenda- the pain-filled program must continue, and this overrides considerations of starting pain for someone else. Again, you are not able to answer why considerations of pain are justified by worthwhile reports.
Quoting khaled
A set of negative experiences that comprises life is not a surprise party, so no, I am not letting you make that rhetorical summersault and pretend it is valid.. Sorry.
Quoting khaled
Ah, but again, another dividing line either of us are going to budge on. I think that enacting positive experiences for someone else is not a requirement, and especially so if they don't even exist. However, preventing future suffering for what will be someone who will be the recipient of this suffering is more morally relevant. Preventing unnecessary pain is just morally relevant, and creating happiness is not, especially when the possible person in question doesn't even exist to be deprived of anything. What matters is someone could have suffered, but didn't. We did not create a lifetime set of negative experiences. Who (literally) cares that a lifetime set of possible happy experiences did not ensue? And I don't think other people's pain of not seeing a political agenda of someone being born is a valid reason for thus creating the set of negative experiences.
Quoting khaled
But is it then utopia? The bar has just moved.. Hedonic treadmill, etc. You are just going to keep changing the circumstances, because the kind of utopia without suffering is hard to even conceptualize. It's almost like "just being" or "not being" or something like that.. but then if you admit to that, you wouldn't have a bunch of parlor games to play, so we can start doing variations of the current situation but in various gradations. Think about it, if your game was a utopia, subjective views of harm would not even be in the picture.. This isn't even the human condition, which I brought up towards the end of the last post, and you haven't quite put together yet where I was getting at.
Quoting khaled
I mean, for some people it is actually a hellish suffering, so from the (easier) statistical point of view, we can say there are possibly enough people that experience this to not enact this for someone else.. However, I am not going to use that argument here. Rather, it is more axiomatic. That is to say "Life is comprised of a lifetime of [s]hellish[/s] suffering with no escape and we're all doomed, and those are always wrong to impose". Again, one of our dividing lines. I don't think it has to be hellish suffering to not start for someone else.
Quoting khaled
No, you were misreading my intent in asking that. Rather, I meant it rhetorically. Why do humans need to constantly justify their actions? The fact seems to be that we can evaluate and judge life, work, what we are doing at any given time. We don't just do things in a mode of "unthinking" but need reasons, justifications, evaluations, weighing things. This is the feature of being an animal that has evolved (with?) linguistic adaptations. We can't "just be" in the world like other animals. So there is something about being the human animal itself that in a way displaces us from the world, exiles us, in a way no other earthly creature is. The natural world has created us, but we do not seem in the same way "at home" in it in the very fact that since the start of civilizations (and probably since we've had the ability to self-evaluate and use language), we can judge the very process of living itself (or at least aspects in it) and we can judge any action as negative. We don't just experience the negative, but evaluate it, judge it, know it. We can try to pretend we can outwit ourselves, but it is really part of our psyche.. even the "overcoming" of "judging" is itself something that we have to do as an effort, not as an instinct.. So anyways, this is not tangential to the point that there is a "human condition" that is apart from perhaps the more primary/common "animal condition".
Where Buddhism differs from many other philosophies is in the way it deconstructs the very notion of selfhood and the notion of suffering.
But from here on, the discussion would necessarily need to get more techincal.
Somebody has to decide. You could say I must have children because they'll be glad I did; I could say you must not because they won't be. Is one of us right?
If I'm buying you a gift, I subordinate my tastes to yours: the question is not whether I would like this, or whether I think you *should* like this, but whether I think you will. With potential children, we have plenty of reason to expect they will think life worthwhile.
The asymmetry argument should be placed here. If we're right in thinking our kids will think life worth it, all good; if we're wrong, we will feel guilty. Reversing that: if we're right thinking, against the odds, that our children wouldn't think life worth it, then we've spared them that experience; if we're wrong, and they would've thought life worth it, we needn't feel guilty because by not existing they don't experience missing out.
Is this a no? Because you just don't like being straightforward.
If you knew your child would invent painkillers would it be wrong to have them?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well that's not quite enough, is it? I don't care to convince people to have kids. You care to do the opposite. So you must make a case for why post-facto justifications don't, you know, justify, doing something.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well, no. But I will ask you again to justify your position that justifications don't justify. As you're trying to convince people of that.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Remember, I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything regarding having children. So no, I don't need to justify why it's ok to inflict on someone something they'd be fine with. It's an axiomatic difference as you say. But you need to say why it isn't as you're the one pushing an agenda.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting khaled
You take a line out of context to perform a rhetorical summersault where you "bust" me for performing a supposed rhetorical summersault.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I never disagreed. How did you get that from what I said?
However clearly you find that the existence of positive experiences can justify doing an action, like with surprise parties. So, when most people agree that life is mostly positive, why wouldn't that justify life? They're all wrong about the "human condition" and you know it better than them?
Quoting schopenhauer1
That's not what you think. Surprise parties cause some unnecessary suffering. But create enough happiness to justify it.
"Oh surprise parties are unlike life". I never said they were alike. I was establishing that you clearly think creating pleasure justifies inflicting some unnecessary suffering. I'll repeat it again, since saying it once didn't seem to stick last time: I was establishing that you clearly think creating pleasure justifies inflicting some unnecessary suffering.
If you had a pin that would give whoever you pricked by it a million dollars, but only if you didn't ask for consent beforehand, would it be wrong to go around pricking people? That's unnecessary suffering imposed to create a much greater amount of happiness. No, it's not like life, it's not my goal to say that this situation justifies having kids. I repeat: No, it's not like life, it's not my goal to say that this situation justifies having kids.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Good thing mine isn't without suffering.
Quoting schopenhauer1
So how big does the percentage have to be? If life was hellish suffering for 50% I'd agree. If it was 30 or 20% I'd probably still agree. What's your number? Because as far as I know, it's in the single digits.
Quoting schopenhauer1
And again, one you have to bridge as you're the one making the case. Most wouldn't characterize their life as "a lifetime full of suffering". What makes you think this is human condition and not your condition? Everyone seems to disagree with you that it's human condition. What makes you sure you're right despite of that?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Agreed. And most have judged life as positive or worthwhile. Most have judged that having kids is ok. And most have judged that the human condition is not doom and gloom. You think they're all wrong. Show your evidence.
So my point in the last post is that I don't think post-facto estimations of "worthwhile" reports justifies putting someone through negative experiences in the first place.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
But it isn't just a straightforward gift, which is why I denied the validity of khaled's surprise party argument. It would have to be a gift where you had to overcome a set of inescapable challenges, and contingent harms.. I don't think any other type of "gift" works that way.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
True about the asymmetry. Simply speaking, no one misses out, period. Yet no one experiences negative experiences. Win/Win.
If I am to act in such a way that you will be affected by my actions, it is moral for me to consider how you will feel about my actions.
I may not choose to act in a way that you like: my actions may affect another or many others and I might weight their feelings more heavily; I may act contrary to your short-term wishes in furtherance of what I believe are your long-term wishes; and there are many, many other complications.
But not to consider you at all, in fact to refuse categorically to consider how you will feel about my actions, is not to grant you a status equal to my own as a fellow moral agent deserving such consideration, is, in short, not to treat you as a person.
And this is almost exactly the reasoning behind my moral standard in antinatalism. I wrap it all up in the term "dignity". However, where I think giving gifts someone will like is not necessarily moral, I think preventing suffering when one is able, is. By NOT preventing the future person's suffering, one is overlooking the dignity of the person being born. Their suffering is overlooked for other considerations.. Anything that is not suffering (other considerations.. "this will be "good" for them") is simply not moral but other things. It is wanting to see a political agenda (a life being carried out and overcoming all the entailed challenges) and this can be characterized as paternalistic. Either way, the dignity is violated, despite any good consequences.
What makes the negatives especially so bad? All the contingent and systemic harms:
Contingent harms are things likely to happen but are not entailed in a given life including:
1) Individual people's wills and group's will.. Constant jockeying for power plays on when, what, where, hows, social status, social recognition, approval, respect
2) Impersonal wills... Institutions whose management and bottom-line dictate when, what, where.. ranging from oppressive dictatorships to the grind of organizational bureaucracies in liberal democracies.
3) Cultural necessities.. clean-up, maintain, tidy, consume, hygiene
4) Existential boundaries...boredom/ennui, loneliness, generalized anxiety, guilt
5) Survival boundaries..hunger, health, warmth
6) Being exposed to stressful/annoying/harmful environments and people
7) Accidents, natural disasters, nature's indifference (e.g. bear attacks, hurricanes, storms, earthquakes, etc.).
8) Diseases, illness, disabilities, including mental health issues (neurosis/psychosis/phobias/psychosomaticism/anxiety disorders/personality disorders/mood disorders)..
9) Bad/regretful decisions
10) Unfortunate circumstances
11) After-the-fact justifications that everything is either a learning experience or a tragic-comedy.
12) The good things are never as good as they seem
13) How fleeting happy things are once you experience them
14) How easy it is for novelty to wear off
15) The constant need for more experiences, including austerity experiences that are supposed to minimize excess wants (meditation, barebones living, "slumming it").
16) How easy it is to have negative human interaction, even after positive human interaction
17) Craving and striving for more entertainment and "flow" experiences
18) Instrumentality- the absurd feeling that can be experienced from apprehension of the constant need to put forth energy to pursue goals and actions in waking life. This feeling can make us question the whole human enterprise itself of maintaining mundane repetitive upkeep, maintaining institutions, and pursuing any action that eats up free time simply for the sake of being alive and having no other choice.
19) Any hostile, bitter, stressful, spiteful, resentful, disappointing experiences with interperonal relationships with close friends/family, acquaintances, and strangers
20) The classic (overused) examples of war and famine
21) The grass is always greener syndrome that makes one feel restless and never satisfied
22) The need for some to find solace in subduing natural emotions in philosophies that mitigate emotional responses (i.e. Stoicism) and generally having to retreat to some program of habit-breaking (therapy, positive psychology exercises, visualizations, meditations, retreats, self-help, etc. etc.)
23) Insomnia, anything related to causing insomnia
24) Inconsiderate people
25) The carrot and stick of hope.. anticipation that may lead to disappointment..unsubstantiated Pollyanna predictions that we are tricked into by optimistic bias despite experiences otherwise
26) Addiction
etc. etc. etc. ...
1) Systemic suffering includes:
Having to conform to/play a game (like our economic one) that one cannot escape, that one could never have created, and have dire consequences for leaving (death, starvation).
2)Having constant dissatisfactions that can never be full met (the lack game).
3) Human condition as I described above:
Why do humans need to constantly justify their actions? The fact seems to be that we can evaluate and judge life, work, what we are doing at any given time. We don't just do things in a mode of "unthinking" but need reasons, justifications, evaluations, weighing things. This is the feature of being an animal that has evolved (with?) linguistic adaptations. We can't "just be" in the world like other animals. So there is something about being the human animal itself that in a way displaces us from the world, exiles us, in a way no other earthly creature is. The natural world has created us, but we do not seem in the same way "at home" in it in the very fact that since the start of civilizations (and probably since we've had the ability to self-evaluate and use language), we can judge the very process of living itself (or at least aspects in it) and we can judge any action as negative. We don't just experience the negative, but evaluate it, judge it, know it. We can try to pretend we can outwit ourselves, but it is really part of our psyche.. even the "overcoming" of "judging" is itself something that we have to do as an effort, not as an instinct.. So anyways, this is not tangential to the point that there is a "human condition" that is apart from perhaps the more primary/common "animal condition".
The substance of what's in systemic and contingent suffering/harms can be debated but its existence cannot be denied so easily. It is these especially that one is overlooking by not preventing a future person's birth. Anything on the ledger of "good" that is also being prevented, is not immoral to prevent, but neutral. Dignity violation (in the case of people who could be born if you do a certain act), is in the realm of preventing HARMS and NOT preventing goods.
You don't respect someone's dignity by deciding for them whether their life, and whatever they find of value in it, is worth the suffering they endure for it. People choose to suffer for goals they have set for themselves, train to become athletes, practice to become musicians, study to become scholars; it's for them to decide whether it's worth it.
We teach kids to read before they're capable of deciding for themselves whether reading is worth the trouble. Is that cruel? Is that inflicting needless suffering? You know why we teach kids to read; the ability to read enlarges your world. We want children to have access to those possibilities and opportunities that only reading can provide. It will be for them to decide, later, what to take and what to leave. Do people who can read regret having the ability? There may be one, now and then; I can imagine someone having a spiritual objection to symbolism of all sorts, to language as such. But overwhelmingly people who can read are glad they can, and people who can't read desperately want to. And overwhelmingly people who can read were taught to read because someone else decided for them, when they were young, but that decision has this specific form: you will think later that it was worth the trouble of learning. I don't teach a kid to read because I think it will be worth it; it's not a case of inflicting this suffering on them "for their own good", as I judge it, but because I believe they will think, later, when they're able, that it's worthwhile. It's still their feelings that matter. If I don't teach them to read, on the chance they'll wish I hadn't, I cut them off from countless opportunities for experience they might value deeply, I constrain the possibilities of their life cruelly.
There is a difference between being paternal and being paternalistic.
Quoting schopenhauer1
We don't. This whole line of reasoning is patently false. No one justifies everything they do. No one thinks they need to justify everything they do. In fact, there's something a lot of people do unthinkingly that you want to convince them they should stop doing unthinkingly and try to justify. You have this so backwards, it's bizarre.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yeah, we can, and we do, all the time. We do some stuff other animals don't, but we're still animals the whole time and we still reproduce just like animals, without justifying this behavior. You want us to stop. If your description of human alienation were anything close to reality, you wouldn't have to convince people to think about whether having kids might be immoral.
Excuse me, but if no person exists to miss out on the goods of life, why is that immoral if no one exists to be deprived? How is missed goods immoral, especially if there is no actual person deprived thus? However by carrying out birth, SOMEONE will suffer, there the moral issue lies. Indeed, procreating forces the hand for someone not procreating literally forced no ones hand.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So I agree with all of this because they are already born. Why did you ignore all my posts describing the need to amerlioate greater with lesser suffering once people are already born vs creating suffering wholesale for someone else unnecessarily and inescapable.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Ridiculous and false. When you go to work it’s not instinct it’s decision. Supermarket. Write on philosophy forum etc. Unless you are a p zombie, you do internalize things, even if it’s habit.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Who said I said we weren’t animals? In my last post I discussed the difference between animal and human condition. They aren’t mutually exclusive.
I'm taking a break from this. Thanks for the conversation.
Sure, any particular reason?
Exactly. The concern for the diginity of those who will never be makes for a nonexistent concern for diginity. It's like caring about the dignity of a character in a novel.
EDITED for spelling and grammar.
No. It’s caring about not causing harm in a future person. Not hard to tell the distinction between an event that could happen and one that could never happen. In this case you are preventing what could happen.
And one thing that could happen is that that future person might live a more dignified life than you, and certainly a more dignified life than you imagine they could have. And this is a possibility that you're not only willing to cast away, no, you think it's a must to do so.
This "preventing suffering of future people by not creating them at all" business is all just the antinatalist's ego indulgence, nothing more.
And I ask again, Quoting schopenhauer1
Something I have been ruminating on a lot recently are the hoops and ladders that people will go through to justify things. In no discussion of antinatalism have I ever seen an argument for childbirth that was not utterly hair-splitting, counter-intuitive and difficult to understand. Determining the morality of something like this should not be such a mind-numbing matter! The fact that it is so difficult to give a simple and decent argument against antinatalism is prima facie evidence that antinatalism is correct. Like come on, we've had countless threads on this topic, that if it were false, you'd think by now that somebody would have finally vanquished the idea. Yet here we are.
People cobble together these bizarre rationalizations for things that are not rational. The responses we keep hearing against antinatalism seem to me to be fundamentally nothing more than post hoc justifications for emotional attachments to things that would go away if everyone stopped having kids.
Very true.
Quoting _db
Yes, I agree. So the newest post hoc justification is the idea of "worthwhile". I'd like to know your response to that argument. So the argument goes something akin to this:
"Let us say that we can quantify negatives in some way , and a certain percentage of experiences can be considered negative (I call this contingent suffering). Let us also say there are a set of challenges one must overcome lest dire consequences (more of a systemic type suffering)....It is permissible (or justified) to unnecessarily cause (wholesale) the condition onto another whereby all the negative experiences of life ensue and whereby one is put in a position of being in a game of overcoming a set of challenges, lest dire conditions, as long as the person being affected reports that the negatives are worthwhile".
That is the current debate basically.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the underlying premise that leads you to this conclusion seems to be that the ends do not justify the means. If so, AN appears to violate that premise. The end (a life of essentially unknown potential for pleasure/suffering) is used to justify the means (not procreating).
But it doesn’t. Quoting schopenhauer1
How does it not? Your justification for AN rests on a potential future event; an end. It regards taking action now (the means) to prevent a certain end justifiable. IOW’s the end is so horrible that it justifies taking action now to prevent it.
So “who” is being used as a means here? An event?
Well, it’s not really about who/what is being used, it’s about how you justify your actions.
But, if you insist, then whomever you’re trying to convince not to have children is being used to further your agenda. Your success in doing so creates the potential for harm.
How are they being used? Did I force them? Can they choose another option? Can they walk away? Also it’s about not allowing an injustice to incur, from that perspective, that someone is sad an injustice is being prevented, doesn’t magically justify the injustice. Should I respect the sadness of preventing a bully from enjoying their bullying?
Vegans always face this. To them, it is unjust to kill and hence eat animals for consumption. If someone says they are sad for not eating meat, does that justify the injustice in the eyes of the vegan?
Quoting schopenhauer1
What do you make of this Khaled? I've been enjoying your back and fourths on the subject, and would like to know how you would respond. It's true we justify most of what we do "after the fact" or "post hoc" but do you think this really makes a difference for natalism/antinatalism
It would be just as easy to come up with a 100 positive things. Are you for real with #23? Having kids is wrong because of insomnia? Really? Makes as much sense as "Having kids is ethical because they can eat Kit-Kats"
As it stands it's a pointless list. I'd just repeat this:
Quoting khaled
Shope thinks having kids is wrong because he sees life on earth as hell. The disagreement isn't about ethical values, it's about how bad life is. Most don’t think it’s bad enough for having kids to be wrong. He does, but when it becomes an argument about what is or is not bad enough, it’s very hard to reach consensus.
And I say again,
Quoting baker
There's an old story about the committee deciding what to put on Voyager to represent mankind, and a mathematician said, "We could send some Bach, but that would be bragging."
If you start from the position that there is no cosmic meaning to be found, then the only sort of value we know of is value to sentient beings. In a universe with no sentient beings, Bach is just noise.
In AN terms, my argument here has been that the bias in favor of continuing life, which Benatar acknowledges and does not contest, is and should be relied upon in decisions about starting a life. I see that as forcing the question to remain at human scale; we attach value to our lives and we know almost everyone else, including those we bring into the world, does too. The fact that it is a bias, that it's "only" what humans think, and that most likely we think it because we're wired to, makes no difference if our concern is only the sorts of meaning and value that humans know and care about.
All of moral behavior is predicated on the value we all know we attach to life. If there were no people, there'd be no morality and no point to it anyway. If your moral theory requires that there be no people, it's either mistaken, paradoxical, or not actually a moral theory at all.
By being treated as pawns. They’re a means to an end (an AN world).
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is an interesting question. Most people would agree that if you can reasonably prevent suffering, you should. You should save a drowning person if you’re able. AN’s feel that procreating is harmful, so why wouldn’t you intervene if given the option? Stopping someone from having unprotected sex would be like stopping someone from shooting someone else, right?
Quoting schopenhauer1
You feeling like something is unjust also doesn’t make it so. But my point is that you feel justified on the one hand to cause harm (by trying to convince people not to procreate and making those who have feel like they did something immoral) in order to prevent what you presumably view as a greater harm (a clear case of the ends justifying the means), but on the other hand you don’t feel justified to cause harm in order to bring about enlightenment (a clear case of the ends not justifying the means). I don’t see what’s so different in these two examples that warrants they be treated differently; that an exception be made.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don’t know, should you? Is his suffering somehow less important than anyone else’s? If the drowning person is the next coming of Jeffery Dahmer should you still save him?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think in this case the vegan needs to justify why the suffering of animals is more important than the suffering of humans.
On the other hand if anyone can come up with an imposition more egregious than life that you think is ok to impose they’d have a pretty good case to the contrary.
I never said this. I denied it was negative. And you weren’t able to show why it is. “Human condition” you insist despite virtually everyone disagreeing.
Life. I thought you were characterizing life purely as negative.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Obviously not. Maybe take a charitable interpretation if you want to have a discussion.
Not purely, negative X is all negative experiences.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't mind. But so far you seem to be the only one arguing for it. If someone @s me I'll reply (probably).
Quoting schopenhauer1
Then yes, it's ok to start all negative X because statistically they will think it's worthwhile. That's because starting all negative X also comes with starting all positive X (which is what makes negative X worthwhile in the first place) which you conveniently omitted.
What you did is like phrasing sending kids to school as "Subjecting minors to risks of sexual abuse" and concluding on that basis that sending kids to school is wrong. You can't just focus on what harms an act brings and then conclude whether or not it's right or else everything will end up wrong.
If it has already been demonstrated that it can be worthwhile to continue a life but that it cannot be worthwhile to start a life, then it is simply false, or rather unintelligible (like a square circle), that someone's life can be worth starting if they feel it is worth it.
I claim that we can and do have a well-founded expectation that a person whose life we start will wish for their life to continue and they will, insofar as they are capable and interested, consider their life 'worthwhile', 'worth continuing', 'worth the trouble', worth, in short, more than almost anything they can imagine. ('I am willing to die for ___' is the highest expression of value we know, reserved for our loved ones, our core commitments, and so on.) Parents as a rule commit to their children's lives not becoming 'not worth it' and are held accountable by others for doing so.
Do you claim that this expectation is not well-founded? That it is not well-founded enough? That it is irrelevant?
Yes.
Quoting Albero
Quoting Albero
Try our best to make it better.
Imagine I had a magical pin that gives someone a million dollars on condition that they’re pricked without consent. Would it be wrong to prick people? Well the vast majority would probably appreciate it, so yes for most people. Now what happens if we’re wrong about someone and they hate it? Does the fact that someone could hate it make it wrong to impose? Well in this example, probably not right? Because the chance is so small.
In other words: If an imposition is wrong by dint of there being a chance someone will hate it, all impositions are wrong. Period. But no one here has said that I think. So the standard must be more than simply “someone could hate it”
This though is not nuanced and dynamic enough. Is life really a pinprick? There are multi various ways in which people have negative experiences. The question really becomes, at what point does it matter if people report it’s worthwhile that you are not doing something right by the allowing of the negatives? And what if someone changes their minds at a particular time? Circumstances change. Ask someone in s good mood and a bad mood (or good experiences vs. going through bad experiences) and you get varying responses. In other words, is it justified in all situations to base ethics on post facto reports? @_db was mentioning the pre birth post birth distinction of worthwhile. Why should starting negatives (lifetime, inescapable) be good ever? It’s not instrumental here, it’s starting bads for someone else in an absolute sense (unnecessary). Since we get the doubly good outcome, that no one loses out (either), it would seem to be weighted to prevent the negatives, no matter what. @Albero do you agree? Have a different take or objection?
Sorry if I don't have much to say. I just prefer to lurk if that's okay with you, unless this forum has a contribution rule I'm violating. If anything comes to mind I'll add it. I'll say this though (and I think I said this before) I honestly think it's easier to try to convince people of schopenhaurian pessimism rather than rely on these kind of technical arguments. If people accept that, there's no reason why antinatalism wouldn't follow. It would be like deciding if you want to take a boat with holes or a brand new boat out to sea.
No harm there lurking..It would just be nice to hear other views that aren’t just outright hostile or trolling.
As far as virtue ethics, how would you formulate that?
No the point isn’t to say “getting pricked by a pin is fine so having kids is fine”. The point is to show that “someone could hate it” is not sufficient reason to make an imposition wrong. For that would make every imposition wrong.
Quoting schopenhauer1
At every point. I don’t believe there is a scenario where someone can find something worthwhile and it be wrong to impose on them. It’s fine to have a happy slave.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes. And if they change their mind that would also be a post facto report.
Quoting schopenhauer1
You think it’s good sometimes (being born in a utopia will last a lifetime and be inescapable) so let’s not question things we agree on.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again insufficient. What you’re saying here is that it’s wrong to start harms especially when someone will miss out. Using just that qualification, having a surprise party would be wrong. Yes I am aware it is very different from life. The point is, the above standard is insufficient to tell right and wrong. You need to add more conditions.
Once you have a set of conditions that make the statement “Acts that *insert conditions here* are wrong” true such that it isolates only what you actually think is wrong then you’d have a consistent case. You’d still need to convince people why they should abide by those conditions, but so far I haven’t seen what that full set of conditions is. The only time I’ve seen it it was something like “a lifetime of negative experiences” which doesn’t seem to apply to life, you need to show that life actually falls under that category.
Still curious to see your reply to my last post.
But if there's no person beforehand to need an imposition, is that even right to impose with all the baggage we know is it can entail? In other words, it goes right back to "Don't cause unnecessary negatives".
Quoting khaled
Then here is where our axioms are just at odds. I don't believe it's right to start negatives for someone else unnecessarily when the consequences are inescapable, it's lifelong, and there's not much other choice but to go with it or dire consequences.
Quoting khaled
Right, so I don't think they are a basis for this particular circumstance if starting negatives for someone else is unnecessary and that indeed is your ethic.
Quoting khaled
But we don't because I didn't agree to your definition of utopia for reasons I stated in earlier posts. Utopia would simply not have negatives, but I also explained how it's almost impossible to conceptualize. It would be like being everything or nothing I guess.
Quoting khaled
But you admit that the analogy doesn't fit, so why would I agree that this somehow negates what I'm saying? If your gift was a lifetime of challenges to overcome lest dire consequences, then let's talk.
Quoting khaled
A lifetime of all negative experiences that you experience, is what I mean by that. Do you deny that negative experiences exist in life (unless something like a life that lasts a very short amount of time maybe)?
But they're not used. If I gave them no choice and forced them, then I am using them. Contra @khaled even, if I forced them into my agenda and they series of inescapable negatives, and it was unnecessary for me to do that, and even if they said it was worthwhile, that would indeed still be using them, or at least overlooking their dignity. But I am not. I am not a crass consequentialist, so your argument doesn't apply to me as I see it presented.
Life has suffering. There is systemic and contingent forms. This seems to lead to some conclusions.
You might have missed my last post here, but to paraphrase I’m not interested so much in whether or not someone is being used, but rather that someone is being harmed.
You’re willing to go to what most consider extreme measures to prevent harming a future person, even if it means harming a living person to do so. And that’s meant to be just a statement of fact. I’m not judging whether or not that’s morally permissible.
The contradiction I see is that in this instance you’re fine with causing harm because you see it as justified, necessary perhaps, but not willing to harm someone in order to bring about enlightenment (which is presumed to decrease/prevent suffering as well). Why is it ok to harm one, but not the other? The outcome is the at least comparable. Admittedly the enlightened person will not be able to completely eliminate suffering, but then we’re splitting hairs on how much suffering needs to be prevented to make it ok to cause harm to prevent it. Either the ends justify the means, or they don’t, right? If you’re going to make exceptions, then you need to explain why the particular case of AN warrants that, when other, very similar as I see it, cases do not.
I am not harming anyone nor doing anything extreme. I am not forcing anyone to do anything. Where are these extreme measures?
Quoting Pinprick
I didn't say bring about enlightenment, simply prevent harm.
Quoting Pinprick
This all assumes I'm some kind of crass utilitarian. I am not. My ethics is based on the dignity of the person being harmed. In one case you already exist.. It's too late. In the other, you are creating wholesale, harm onto someone else, unnecessarily. Just because you exist, doesn't mean you should do whatever you want to make you feel better or because you think it balances some utilitarian balance of pain (which I think is not equal even in that accounting of things).
Yes. And you think so too for the Utopia example and surprise parties. Neither are needed impositions. The disagreement here is about the size of the “baggage”
Quoting schopenhauer1
Even if they would want you to? Ok. Now why should we think so? You want to convince others if this so how would you go about doing that?
Quoting schopenhauer1
But you’re going back to the standard definition of utopia, not the example I gave. Let’s call it world X then. It’s a world where you can remove all suffering at the snap of a finger. But you will suffer all the same if you refuse to snap your finger. And there is no way of escaping easily (euthanasia). Would it be fine to have kids in world X? There is no person beforehand to need the imposition, and there is a small amount of baggage (having to snap your fingers often). So shouldn’t it be wrong?
Quoting schopenhauer1
It DOES fit what you’re saying. It’s an example where the condition for something being wrong is satisfied yet you don’t think the thing is wrong. Showing that the conditions you set out for making something wrong are insufficient.
Quoting schopenhauer1
No. I deny that life can be characterized as a series of negative experiences as you imply.
Perhaps.. but I can also argue that who needs gifts prior to being born? No one. And this goes to that asymmetry you hate. Positives aren't needed for any one. What's important is the baggage is given to no one, this is good (from the assumption that an agent exists in the first place not the meta tree falls in the woods perspective).
Quoting khaled
Get them to at least question why they would want to start all the negatives of life onto a person and really make them understand what those negatives do and can entail. Why should anything be more important than not making someone unnecessarily suffer? How it hat moral? To me there is just something about creating unnecessary suffering that is wrong, full stop. As you know, at some point it just stops at certain axioms that you try to make an emotional appeal for understanding. In ethics, unlike experimental sciences, you can't go much further, nor can you EXPECT it to go further.
Quoting khaled
What do you think? Does it hold up to my philosophy? I can't say since I don't have full understanding of all this world entails. I know this world.
Quoting khaled
If the utopia involves strife, this too is wrong to impose. Do people ever experience strife? Can anyone judge it as not great? How so? then it's just hedonic treadmill hyper version of this world.. Snapping of fingers is equivalent now to what we do here.. It's all moved up a level. It's really the whole "At least you're not living in X" argument rehashed.. See, you're not starving in the third world, thus life must not be that bad.. Old school comparison switcheroo psychologically. Nothing new here to see.
Quoting khaled
Not contiguous, interspersed, though there systemically speaking it's an overall thing too but that's a more in depth thing that would require its own topic.
If I'm robbed at gunpoint and pistol-whipped, I feel wronged by the guy that did it but I don't feel wronged by my parents. My parents will sympathize and wish that hadn't happened, they'll feel all sorts of things about the guy who did it, and they may even feel some anger at the police or policymakers for 'allowing this sort of thing to happen', and so might I, but they won't feel guilty for having brought me into the world and no one, including me, will expect them to. So it is for any harm done to me by another.
If I skid off the road during a rainstorm and end up in the hospital, I won't feel wronged by anyone, unless some of my injuries turn out to be related to deceptive safety claims by the maker of the car, that sort of thing, and certainly my parents won't feel guilty because I had a car accident and no one, including me, will expect them to. So it is for all accidents and 'acts of God'.
Is it your position that parents have wronged their children? That's a simple yes or no question.
If the answer is 'yes', how do you square that with our moral intuitions?
But you can't argue this in world X. And yes, I hate the asymmetry, because it makes no sense. The meaning of "good" and "bad" is not consistent in each quadrant. If you define them consistently you won't get an asymmetry.
"If you don't have a kid, and they would've like life, that's not bad because no one exists to suffer" if applied consistently would lead to: "If you don't have a kid, and they would've hated life, that's not good because no one exists whose suffering we mitigated"
The "traffic laws are good even though we can't point to who they benefit" that I keep hearing is bullshit. We can in fact tell who benefits from traffic laws. Suspend these laws and cover up traffic lights and signs. Whoever dies while the traffic light was red (but the driver couldn't see it) is the person who would benefit form traffic laws.
But in the case of birth, not having a child that would suffer benefits no one. It's not even a matter of "we can't tell who it benefits" no it literally benefits no one. So how is it "good".
"Good" in the asymmetry is defined as "good for someone" in each quadrant except the one causing the asymmetry. There, it is defined as a "better state of affairs than the alternative". That's why the asymmetry makes no sense. And why I never believed it even as an AN.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Doesn't seem like it. Counterexample: World X. Or even surprise parties. If you are ever at a surprise party and you feel awkward in a conversation, that's unnecessary suffering right there. Your friends could've just not held the party. And yet you think it's fine to hold surprise parties most of the time.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It shouldn't. It fits the conditions that make something wrong for you. It is lifelong and there is a lot of suffering that you try to mitigate. But you think it's fine to have children in those conditions:
Quoting khaled
Quoting schopenhauer1
So your problem seems to not be purely with how long the imposition lasts or how badly it can go, since both of those variables are the same in the real world and in world X. So those two variables are insufficient, as here is an example where they make something that seems fine to you wrong. So you tell me, what difference between the real world and world X makes having kids in world X fine but having kids in the real world wrong?
Quoting schopenhauer1
It does, but you said it's not wrong to impose. If I had to guess, it's because said strife is very easy to escape (snap of a finger). That seems to be the variable you're missing. It's not just about duration and amount of suffering, but how easy it is to escape said suffering.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The "at least you're not living in X" argument is used to tell you to quit complaining. I am not saying something like that. I'm giving an example to illustrate that you care about more than just whether or not the suffering is unnecessary or how long it's imposed for.
And is "snapping fingers is equivalent to what we do here" supposed to indicate that it's wrong to have kids under those circumstances?
I keep telling you, that by these examples I'm not trying to say "This imposition is fine so having kids is fine". So could you stop interpreting it that way? It's getting tiring repeating that "No, I am not implying that this imposition is fine therefore having kids is fine" every time.
You’re falling for the tree falls in the woods idea. All you need is an agent who knows that preventing harm is good. The person who would benefit need not exist, just someone. If no one exists, ethics itself obviously ceases to matter anyways so is a moot point.
Quoting khaled
But yet notice we don’t need to actually make this bad scenario happen to know someone would be harmed, and we have prevented that someone from the harm.
Quoting khaled
It simply falls to the axiom that prevented bad is always good, where prevented good is only relatively bad. The weight is there from the beginning with intuitions about the goodness of prevented bads and the neutrality of prevented goods. HOWEVER, there DOES have to be an agent to recognize this. If you don't believe this to begin with, then it is correct that the asymmetry will not follow.
Quoting khaled
I don't think it's fine. Read last post again about treadmill.
Quoting khaled
I mean, yes but the challenges and escape are part of it. If snapping fingers becomes the sticking point, we got a problem. If literally no one has a problem snapping their fingers, then perhaps it's permissible. Not this world though, so I don't see where that would lead us except to confirm, "Yep that world is not this world".
Quoting khaled
Only if snapping fingers becomes the new threshold. As I said previously with hedonic treadmill.. If in this world, a challenge to us is like the relative challenge of snapping fingers to them, it's the same thing. Can it be judged as too much by someone? If so, why? All of a sudden it becomes more like our world.
So in other words, if all that happens is new problems coalesce around snapping fingers, the "set of challenges" of this world just gets repeated as a "set of challenges" in that world. However, if in some absolute sense, all negative feelings, experience, judgement went away towards snapping of fingers, then it would be permissible, but at that point we are no longer at the realm of the current human condition. It would be more like being on autopilot, where negatives don't even exist.
Are you trying to ask what it would take to be permissible? Or are you asking why it isn't currently right/just now? I think I gave a pretty good list.. Inescapable without dire consequences, unnecessary to start the conditions for negatives for that person who will be the recipient of negatives, set of challenges, judgement of negatives in the first place, that only humans are really capable of through linguistic self-reflective abilities. All of this is overlooking the dignity of the person to "get an agenda done" for that person. Wrong in my estimate.
By this formulation: That same agent knows that preventing pleasure is bad. Therefore "If you don't have a kid, and they would've like life, that's bad" would follow. Still no asymmetry. It's Good/Bad vs Good/Bad. And that's what happens when you apply one formulation consistently.
Quoting schopenhauer1
In the case of traffic laws, yes. In the case of not having kids, we know that we benefitted no one. We have prevented harm from no one. If you want to say we prevented the "future harm" of someone, and that's good, then by the same token, we prevented the "future pleasure" of someone and that's bad. Again no asymmetry.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But by this axiom we should never do anything to anyone. Anything we do has a chance of harming, and a chance of benefiting. If we do it: It can be good or bad depending on which there was more of (harm or benefit). If we don't do it, it can be good (if we prevented harm) or neutral (if we prevented benefit).
By this axiom the asymmetry exists when doing literally anything that involves other people and so we should not do such actions. Even you posting here falls under this. It would make every act wrong. It's a shit axiom that no one believes no offense.
Quoting schopenhauer1
So having children in a world where they can only experience pleasure because they snap away any suffering is wrong? If you want to bite that bullet sure.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It would lead us to recognizing that the ease by which you can escape suffering is also an important variable. But if you will deny having kids under these conditions is wrong then not much can be said. At that point it just seems like a reductio ad absurdum of your position. Especially since you were fine with it at first.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That is the point. I didn't think anyone would say it's wrong to have kids under those conditions but if it is, kudos, you have an internally consistent system! Not that that's saying much, even Nazism is internally consistent.
Now that you have said consistent system what's left is to explain why everyone should abide by it. Why should everyone think this:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Is wrong? Sure if you asked someone if they agree that impositions described as above are wrong, they'll probably say yes, but that's cheap. It's again like saying "Are you in favor of exposing children to risks of sexual abuse". No one would say yes to that. That doesn't make sending kids to school wrong. The above quote seems to me to be as accurate a depiction of life as "exposing children to risks of sexual abuse" is an accurate depiction of schooling.
Wearing my 'moral sentiments' hat, I would add that doing good for another or preventing harm to them gives rise to a feeling that you have done good. If a stack of boxes is about to fall over on someone and you help them shore those boxes up, they feel relief and gratitude toward you for your help; I think Adam Smith would say you imaginatively share in their feelings and that's why you feel that your action was positive and moral.
I think, in general, this sort of thing reinforces the reciprocity of our moral duties and expectations. We help them in part because they would have helped us, or because they should even if they're not the sort of person who would. You also set an example by your behavior, and demonstrate what virtuous behavior is.
In the case of children, there are long-standing customs of filial piety; it's one of the central virtues and duties of Confucianism, and the ancient Hebrews even claimed it as a commandment from God. It is the complement of the duty of parents to care for their children, and the virtue of being a good parent.
Antinatalism cannot, by definition, include this sort of reciprocity. Your duty is to no one; the good you do is for no one. They cannot learn from your example to become more virtuous.
I’m just meaning AN is considered to be excessive (or extreme) by most people.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I was referring to this comment…
Quoting schopenhauer1
My point is that bringing about enlightenment does prevent harm (the enlightened person will no doubt experience less harm since he’s enlightened, no?), yet you’re unwilling to cause harm (by putting him in crutches) to bring about this reduction of harm (enlightenment). Yet with AN you’re willing to cause harm in order to prevent future potential harm. I think you said something to the effect that the harm you cause someone in order to prevent a greater harm is a necessary harm. Since you make a moral distinction between these two events, I’m asking you why. Not being a crass utilitarian isn’t an answer. It still doesn’t explain what specifically about these two cases warrants them to be approached differently.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But it’s not too late. You can prevent harm by putting him in crutches and thereby bringing about his enlightenment.
Quoting schopenhauer1
What are you referring to here? I’m not talking about the harm caused by procreating, if that’s what you’re referring to.
I don't focus on blame. Let's say you've been eating meat your whole life and then you become vegan. Should you focus on what you did prior? What you say is more about blame, and I think that's not really the aim of AN. But to answer your question more directly, many sensitive existentialist types, don't necessarily blame their parents, but life itself, the circumstances by which the negatives ensue. This is why there is existential literature going back to ancient empires. I don't think we learn how to blame things by intuition as much as habit. We usually look for the most immediate cause. Again, AN isn't there to point blame at people, just recognize what is going on and to prevent the harms onto a future person.
Let's take an extreme example of what your logic is saying. There is a sociopath that is really messed up. And that sociopath feels tremendous loss at not pursuing his preference for bad stuff. He is depressed, his whole life is affected negatively. He can't sleep at night, he cries a lot. That's okay, cause that sociopath's doing bad X is prevented. Not being able to pursue bad x is not a grounds to allow bad x. This is what I mean by crass utilitarianism. Besides the fact that these sufferings are not equivalent. EVEN if you found out the sadness of the sociopath is actually greater than the pain he would pursue (he's not a complete monster let's say), then he should not pursue it. That is ridiculous and not right.
So what is the key here? It's being done to other people. The sociopath can be masochistic as he wants (though I would advise he get help), but not as sadistic as he wants.
Now granted, this is an extreme and not like the scenario in a crucial way that the sociopath is intending violence. However, I don't see a material difference in knowing that bad will happen to someone else, but pursuing it anyways because it makes you happy, even if one hopes the bad is not too great, or perhaps simply tries to ignore all the possibilities for bad that will incur. Ignoring known bads, discounting unknown bads, is not a great response to, "Sure I will allow this to happen to that other person".
Except it is a specific claim that you should not have children, isn't it? That to do so would be wrong, would be blameworthy. Benatar does not just say, "If and only if you have children, they will be harmed," which is surely true, but also, "Therefore you should not have children."
So, then it’s justifiable to harm someone (sociopath/potential parent), even cause greater harm to that person, if it prevents that person from unnecessarily harming others (sociopath’s victims/children)? Is that right? I feel like I have to be missing something, because if that’s the case then you are justified in physically intervening in order to prevent childbirth, which essentially justifies eugenics. It also means the same for other scenarios; preventing a doctor from giving a vaccine, the use of lethal force for petty crimes like shoplifting, etc. But maybe that is what you mean? As long as you’re preventing someone from harming someone else your actions, regardless of severity, are justified.
Oh right, I didn’t think I had to bring up the idea of consent and ameliorating greater harms with lesser harms but doing that now.
Also, why is it we can even have this debate of suffering or life in the first place. A straetegy for antiAN is to pretend that there isn’t even a debate to be had. Yet here it is proven as I type. How it that we can even question what is going on? We are not like other animals in that sense. But this very conversation belies a constant evaluation and struggle of justifications. We need reasons and those reasons are never justified with simply. “Well we tend to think this way”. We change our minds, find different reasons, etc. Simply using circular reasoning of “its right because we do this” doesn’t fit in this open system of ours.
But why make Frankenstein go through it in the first place? Careless and didn’t think it through.
Frankenstein was, in some sense, a natalist - he was, at the end of the day, father to the "wretch" and it (the "wretch") was the culmination of his life-long passion to give life.
Plus, the "wretch", despite the abject misery of his condition, wished to live on.
This is the paradox: Life is misery but people still want to live. Absurdism: our desire for meaning in a meaningless universe.
Man, you try really hard to avoid giving direct yes/no answers. We’ve already discussed greater/lesser harm.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Although, you do keep trying to divert the questions away from your own actions and onto parents/sociopaths. So all I can do is assume. Therefore, I interpreted this to also mean that “Even if the harm I cause someone is greater than the harm they would have caused, if my actions prevent them from committing harm, I should act.”
As for consent, I don’t suppose you’ve obtained consent from the people you try to persuade/prevent from having children. IOW’s you’re not concerned about the harm your success at convincing others to not procreate may cause. So you must not think potentially causing harm to others without consent is wrong. However, your justification for AN is that it potentially causes unnecessary harm without consent, therefore it should be prevented, but attempting to prevent it also potentially causes unnecessary harm should you succeed in your attempts to convert others to AN. This is where you contradict yourself.
If I am causing someone to be affected for a lifetime of harm, then lets talk.. But making an argument that might harm someone because they don't like it is trivial. They can walk away, ignore, go away. I am not forcing it on anyone. Get that??
Quoting Pinprick
"Converting" doesn't harm them if they are doing it voluntarily..Obviously they agree with the argument even if it causes them sadness. So you are creating a classic straw man or red herring.
It's not about blame. It's simply about what counts morally. Does giving happiness or the chance to be virtuous to someone else count as moral? I don't think so. I think it is neutral or non moral. It's something one can pursue, but not something one is obligated to pursue.. Not causing harm UNNECESSARILY, and not causing challenges to overcome only to be escaped by death or starvation and all the contingent harms (like oh let's say a lifetime's worth of harms which de facto comes from being born) is in the realm of morality. It doesn't matter who caused what.
If one is committed to not causing unnecessary and inescapable harms and impositions...
We disagree as to happiness-making and virtue-making being moral. I think it is something to pursue if you want, but is non-moral. One is not obligated to give happiness or virtue, but one is obligated to not cause unnecessary, inescapable, harm/impositions/challenges.
I think one can judge how much of a prick or asshole or miserly someone is for not bringing happiness maybe.. but that's a character judgement.. value but not obligation.
“Happiness making” and prevention of harm is indistinguishable in my experience. It’s a conclusion I came to recently, though I haven’t explored its consequences fully. Anything that can be phrased as happiness making can also be phrased as harm prevention and anything that can be framed as happiness “removing” can be framed as harming. If so the distinction makes no sense. I’m sure you said a similar thing before but I can’t find the quote since I’m on mobile.
For instance, say A sent B a new computer as a gift. Note that B is not suffering on account of having a bad PC. You hear of this transaction and decide to destroy the PC. Have you harmed B? Have you done anything wrong to B?
All you did was prevent happiness making, but since that doesn’t factor into morality, surely you haven’t done anything wrong to the happiness recipient right?
Or simply: How do you distinguish the two. Can you come up with a definition for when an act is making happiness as opposed to preventing harm?
Quoting schopenhauer1
If you can save someone’s life by making a very inconsequential sacrifice are you obligated to?
Quoting The Link Between Fertility And Income
A paradox, if you ask me? It's as if the more miserable one is (low income) the more children one wants and, on the flip side, happier (high income) you are, the smaller your family size.
Really? I'd love to know who are those people.
There are probably some nearby.
I mean, it's one thing if they condemn you (or anyone) for 1000 years to push a damn boulder up the mountain. Then I can sort of understand being happy once you get the boulder to the top, because you defied the gods for that day.
But if the punishment is eternal, I cannot imagine a situation in which someone could be happy, even if Camus supposes this to be the case.
It’s possible that you may be. Do you think the pain of not having a child will simply go away? Besides, the amount of harm caused is irrelevant, according to you.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is exactly like the argument that we’re not forcing someone to live because they can always just kill themselves. You’re still creating the conditions of their suffering.
Quoting schopenhauer1
If it causes sadness, then it’s harmful. Being sad is a form of suffering, right? And it isn’t like one can’t voluntarily suffer.
Too bad these happy sisyphuses refuse to share their secret to success!
And he made plans to get baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. So much for his integrity.
Being able to calmly endure all kinds of hardship is the holy grail for many people.
Those who seem to be succeeding at it do so by relying on distractions, and not because they had found a way to master hardship. Their success" depends
The real feat would be to face the boulder and the mountain sober, focused, fully aware of the futility of the task.
Humility can take one only so far.
I thought it was that the pushing is pointless. It just rolls back down. I think you just need to doodle on the side of the rock as you go, or pick up mud and paint poignant pictures of sloths in astronaut suits or whatever. You can get lost in it and the pointlessness doesn't matter.
All animals endure hardships to get their holy grail. Even worms!
I think I get that. But eternity is a bit much. The "saving grace" for people in this world, is that there is no hell that exists which they must endure forever, for at least they can count that eventually they will be at peace from troubles.
But, one can still recognize futility and try to do something, just for the sake of doing it.
That's a bit like my thinking about it. I mean, say the gods told me, you're going to push that boulder up that mountain forever. I'd be like, really? I can stay still, try to go to sleep. Eventually I guess I'd realize that pushing the boulder is the one thing I can do, along with what you're pointing to.
The forever part of the myth makes it less relevant, in my eyes. I don't think that pushing the boulder till' you die of old age is the same as pushing it forever.
Then they don’t have to follow it. Being pained for not causing pain is my point. If that doesn’t compel you then I’m not forcing. It’s not forced. It’s not inescapable.
So that justifies you causing harm?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Your opinion is presented to people without their consent, and that opinion could be harmful. Sure they can walk away, but that’s after the harm has already occurred. The fact that we can kill ourselves (thereby ending the suffering) doesn’t suffice to justify having children in your view of things. So the escapability of harm seems irrelevant, or at least it doesn’t justify taking the risk of causing harm to someone else.
Then how is it harming them if they don't have to follow it? I don't get it?
Quoting Pinprick
Oh I see.
Quoting Pinprick
If a bully cannot get to bully others, and this makes him suffer. Does he get to bully others?
It isn’t about the bully (who I assume represents parents). It’s about the justification for causing harm by stopping the bully. How do you justify that without undermining your justification for AN?
I also continue to be perplexed by your claim that the amount of harm caused by such an act is irrelevant. Isn’t the point of preventing harm that there’s less harm in the world by doing so? But if by preventing harm you cause more harm than you’ve prevented isn’t that defeating the purpose?
Really? What is the holy grail of worms?
Worms cover North America, but they aren't native. They eat all sorts of stuff. I feed them cardboard.