All things wrong with antinatalism
After a couple of years of spotty discussions on anti-natalism I've decided to combine some of the points I made against it over the years. The anti-natalist position is, paraphrased, that living causes suffering and that therefore it's better for people to never have been born.
The position and metaphysical limitations
I will address a position of anti-natalism that I think makes at least some sense, to avoid the metaphysical nonsense of "people never having been born, being better off than if they had been born". I consider that obvious nonsense because we are comparing nothing with actual, or possible, people. Since non-existing persons are basically nothing, we cannot ascribe properties to them.
We cannot imagine a person's suffering "as if" they don't exist because that is to assign properties to "nothing" (it's akin to saying something exists that doesn't exist, which is a contradiction). We can imagine a person's suffering "as if" they do exist. And if they would be born into a situation of abject poverty, where the good does not outweigh their suffering or because of a biological defect that cannot be treated, we understand that "poverty" or that "defect" would cause unacceptable suffering and we should not have a child under those circumstances. What we are comparing then is a possibility of existence with other examples of possible lives lived and we find that possibility unacceptable. But this is fundamentally different from saying this "non-existent" child is better off never having been born because when we talk that way, it is neither a child nor a person nor capable of having any properties, because it is nothing.
It is then the following position of anti-natalism that I suggest has some measure of logical rigour to it:
that any possible persons, who will suffer more than is outweighed by the good they will experience, outnumber people who will suffer less than is outweighed by the good they will experience. Or in short form "unhappy persons outnumber happy persons".
A question of causality
If living entails suffering (e.g. philosophical pessimism) then living doesn't cause suffering. Much in the same way that me killing a person doesn't cause his death, killing entails death. Or if I enter a room at noon, I don't cause someone to enter the room at noon. And water, by its mere existence, doesn't cause itself to be wet.
So if the position is, suffering is intrinsic to life then it must necessarily fail as an argument because living then does not cause suffering and the ethical question becomes moot.
If the argument is that it is not intrinsic to life , then it becomes necessary to examine the causal chain. And then you run into problems because living is never a sufficient condition for suffering, merely a necessary condition.
The fact that all living things suffer at some point in time, is not a valid argument to conclude that living is a sufficient condition for suffering so this does not resolve the causal chain. A disease causes suffering, being run over by a car causes suffering, a break up causes suffering etc. etc. Suffering is unique and particular and for an important part based on how a person experiences it and remembers it.
A question of control
We must therefore necessarily conclude that the suffering we should worry about from an ethical point of view is the suffering that is not entailed by living but is unique and particular. Then for the anti-natalist to continue to have a point it must be the case that there are currently more unhappy persons than happy persons because all the unique and particular circumstances cause a superfluous amount of suffering.
However, now that we know that these circumstances are not intrinsic to life, it follows that we have some measure of control over them. We imagine that poorer people are unhappier, so we alleviate poverty. We imagine disease causes suffering, we treat diseases. Even if unhappy persons currently outnumber happy persons, it appears to me that we can control for circumstances to maximise happy persons over unhappy persons. It is, after all, not a lottery when we choose to have a child. See also Nordic exceptionalism with respect to happiness.
So the solution is not to retreat from society but to engage it by taking care of our fellow man. Give to charity, get a job helping others, etc. In short, the only moral act here is to support the creation of societies that brings forth happy persons as opposed to unhappy ones.
The reductio ad absurdums
Finally, two unexamined points that occured to me.
If living causes suffering we should be killing everything on the planet and murder would be a just act.
If the anti-natalist plan is succesful, there would be no moral actors around to judge the world to be a better place, leading to another metaphysical nonsense comparison between what we have now and nothing - or at least a world where there are no moral actors to experience anything and have an opinion on the matter. Saying such a world is better than this one is meaningless.
The position and metaphysical limitations
I will address a position of anti-natalism that I think makes at least some sense, to avoid the metaphysical nonsense of "people never having been born, being better off than if they had been born". I consider that obvious nonsense because we are comparing nothing with actual, or possible, people. Since non-existing persons are basically nothing, we cannot ascribe properties to them.
We cannot imagine a person's suffering "as if" they don't exist because that is to assign properties to "nothing" (it's akin to saying something exists that doesn't exist, which is a contradiction). We can imagine a person's suffering "as if" they do exist. And if they would be born into a situation of abject poverty, where the good does not outweigh their suffering or because of a biological defect that cannot be treated, we understand that "poverty" or that "defect" would cause unacceptable suffering and we should not have a child under those circumstances. What we are comparing then is a possibility of existence with other examples of possible lives lived and we find that possibility unacceptable. But this is fundamentally different from saying this "non-existent" child is better off never having been born because when we talk that way, it is neither a child nor a person nor capable of having any properties, because it is nothing.
It is then the following position of anti-natalism that I suggest has some measure of logical rigour to it:
that any possible persons, who will suffer more than is outweighed by the good they will experience, outnumber people who will suffer less than is outweighed by the good they will experience. Or in short form "unhappy persons outnumber happy persons".
A question of causality
If living entails suffering (e.g. philosophical pessimism) then living doesn't cause suffering. Much in the same way that me killing a person doesn't cause his death, killing entails death. Or if I enter a room at noon, I don't cause someone to enter the room at noon. And water, by its mere existence, doesn't cause itself to be wet.
So if the position is, suffering is intrinsic to life then it must necessarily fail as an argument because living then does not cause suffering and the ethical question becomes moot.
If the argument is that it is not intrinsic to life , then it becomes necessary to examine the causal chain. And then you run into problems because living is never a sufficient condition for suffering, merely a necessary condition.
The fact that all living things suffer at some point in time, is not a valid argument to conclude that living is a sufficient condition for suffering so this does not resolve the causal chain. A disease causes suffering, being run over by a car causes suffering, a break up causes suffering etc. etc. Suffering is unique and particular and for an important part based on how a person experiences it and remembers it.
A question of control
We must therefore necessarily conclude that the suffering we should worry about from an ethical point of view is the suffering that is not entailed by living but is unique and particular. Then for the anti-natalist to continue to have a point it must be the case that there are currently more unhappy persons than happy persons because all the unique and particular circumstances cause a superfluous amount of suffering.
However, now that we know that these circumstances are not intrinsic to life, it follows that we have some measure of control over them. We imagine that poorer people are unhappier, so we alleviate poverty. We imagine disease causes suffering, we treat diseases. Even if unhappy persons currently outnumber happy persons, it appears to me that we can control for circumstances to maximise happy persons over unhappy persons. It is, after all, not a lottery when we choose to have a child. See also Nordic exceptionalism with respect to happiness.
So the solution is not to retreat from society but to engage it by taking care of our fellow man. Give to charity, get a job helping others, etc. In short, the only moral act here is to support the creation of societies that brings forth happy persons as opposed to unhappy ones.
The reductio ad absurdums
Finally, two unexamined points that occured to me.
If living causes suffering we should be killing everything on the planet and murder would be a just act.
If the anti-natalist plan is succesful, there would be no moral actors around to judge the world to be a better place, leading to another metaphysical nonsense comparison between what we have now and nothing - or at least a world where there are no moral actors to experience anything and have an opinion on the matter. Saying such a world is better than this one is meaningless.
Comments (1338)
It makes just as much sense as "You using X product might have inadvertently killed thousands of people". Which is what it was in response to.
Your misspelling of "logic" is telling....
Quoting Cobra
I'm not trying to strawman. But you refuse to explain your position. You just keep saying "go back and read". I do. It doesn't make sense. What IS your argument for AN stated as simply as possible? How do you go from brute facts about life (that people have to play a certain game to not suffer) to "Having children is wrong"? It doesn't compute.
If we knew the next child to be born was going to have a perfect suffering-free life, is it wrong to have them? If so why?
Quoting Cobra
First sensical thing you said. Posts do not, in fact, have brains. Well, second to be fair, after "life is full of strife"
Literal brain damage. You can't even distinguish from me mocking you; and still follow up with strawman's. I know you can't (lack the ability?) to compute anything I said in previous arguments because you wouldn't keep bringing up shit I never said or implied.
You are literally talking about oranges in an apple orchard. Not making sense to you =/= unsound argument, and you reading nonsense and hypotheticals into something in un/intentional bad faith that isn't there does not serve as a warranted refute or counterargument. You quite literally just want to reaffirm your intellectual laziness and hear yourself speak.
You're the one that started with the ad-hom, and general rudeness, and refuses to explain their position. Telling me to go back and read nonsense doesn't make nonsense sensical. Nor is it an explanation of your position.
You still have not responded to the critique:
Quoting Cobra
There is nothing here that leads to "Therefore you should not have children". And I agree that giving birth enables harm. 3 times now I say this. 3 times you can't respond.
Or the hypothetical:
Quoting khaled
Quoting Cobra
I am literally quoting you..... And not out of context either.
I'm down to have an actual discussion if you were to actually make it clear what your argument is instead of "go back and read". If I'm wrong about it, or misunderstanding you, "Stop misunderstanding me you brain damaged idiot" doesn't help. And you blame me for not wanting a discussion, which is hilarious.
I believe they’ve said as much, but I’m not sure I buy it. If it were just a personal choice to not have children, why all threads? Are they not there to try to convince others that their personal choice is somehow morally superior?
And no one should have to suffer in order to stop the species from growing.
This turns an objective debate into a matter of convincing you (i.e. making you understand and convert), rather than focusing on deconstructing impersonal arguments and refuting them in good faith.
Quoting khaled
And something failing to abide by your logic does not mean it is nonsensical nor devoid of sense, and I have no idea why you keep bringing up "logic" when literally every counterargument you make to others does not follow the previous premises; such as the example I just gave. And even more nonsensical is deducing that "surveys," inform public health and public safety, and therefore, "happy people = disproves the objective basis of suffering," that is enabled by being a conscious moral agent. This does not mean life = suffering, as you continue to strawman.
I ignore your lazy critique, because it is not a critique, and I already covered it three times in my previous posts which is how I know your apprehension skills are relatively poor.
Anti-natalism is a position based off these facts - it does not assign nor give instructions, impose restraints to ones biological drive to reproduce, or make "ought" arguments. It asserts that it is a fact that to not give birth means to not give birth to an enabled sufferer. All this other gibberish saying anything but is the same strawman you keep pulling out the sky or getting from anti-natalists arguing the position poorly or in bad faith.
Quoting Cobra
Ok. Didn't expect this reaction. I was only trying to be nice when I said "I don't find this convincing", I wasn't trying to make it about convincing or not convincing me. I should not have sugar coated. Next time I'll just say what I mean directly: "This makes no sense". Noted.
Quoting Cobra
There is no "my logic" and "your logic". There is logic, and our imperfect attempts at using it. I am saying that while you think you have a logical argument, it is not in fact logical at all. As you cannot point to the logical operation used between your premise and conclusion.
Quoting Cobra
No. I admittedly misunderstood you there. I thought you were making the claim that "life is suffering" or similar. When all you meant was that life is a "dangerous game" so to speak. If you don't do certain things, you will get harmed. Agreed there. But I don't see how that would lead to "So you shouldn't have kids"
And how in the world is "I'm not convinced" rude? Cmon.
Quoting Cobra
Admittedly, that was a misunderstanding. I didn't think you were saying "there is an objective basis for suffering enabled by us being conscious". We are agreed there. I thought you were saying that "life is terrible" or something along those lines.
Quoting Cobra
Could you point me to where you answered how "There is an objective basis for suffering enabled by birth" leads to "So you shouldn't have children"? I must have missed it. Should be no trouble to quote it if you have done it 3 times...
No what happened is, you ignored the problem that your premise does not lead to your conclusion. "Your premises do not lead to your conclusion" is not something you can just handwave away.
Quoting Cobra
Huh? Here I thought Antinatalism is the position that says that having kids is wrong. Antinatalism doesn't give "ought" statements? Ridiculous. You just don't know what antinatalism means then.
First definition when looking up the word on google:
"Antinatalism, or anti-natalism, is a philosophical position and social movement that assigns a negative value to birth. Antinatalists argue that humans should abstain from procreation because it is morally bad (some also recognize the procreation of other sentient beings as morally bad)." -Wikipedia
Do I have to point out where the ought statement is?
Also what about the hypothetical? Do you even actually think having kids is wrong?
So, you define anti-natalism as neither [I]anti[/I] some behaviour, nor about giving birth / having children? That seems odd.
So what? Your system has them as immoral because they are using/imposing on others to benefit an aggregate. Just repeating 'they're political' is not an argument. It's like saying, to steal a phrase I read recently “Eating oranges is wrong because oranges grow on trees”. You need to make a case as to why things which are are immoral when not political become OK when political.
You're ethics is leading to more and more worrying consequences the more you explain it. First we have laws and taxation obtaining this weird status where they're basically immoral, but rescued by politics. Then we have this intimation that somehow anything a politician tells you to do becomes morally OK even if it wasn't beforehand (the most serious concern to date by a long shot), add to that latest revelation, the idea that property is sacrosanct and cannot be taken from a person for any reason whatsoever, that we're not even allowed to so much as take a paperclip from someone to save a school-full of children.
Do you seriously not see what you're doing by digging yourself further in here? I know I've been a bit acerbic, but really it's based on the fact that I find it very hard to believe that you can't see these consequences a mile off. So it seems that you're wilfully continuing with your advocacy despite them, which is just antisocial (if not down right sociopathic). But I thought something similar about @khaled too and was revealed to have been manifestly wrong (for which I should properly apologise). So maybe I am with you.
But the more you ignore them and dig your heels in, the less I'm able to to believe that you genuinely can't see these consequences, or their antisocial implications. This latest refusal to engage with the problem of making laws, taxation and the seconding of personal property for greater harm reduction, is not helping that impression.
Don’t we all do that once in a while? Makes for fun discussions... :-)
I would say it's more like "They're wondering how you can not see the conclusion that they see because they assume you share the same premises"
But it's more than a personal choice. Most people who don't have kids don't think it's wrong not to have kids.
I find this a rather sad view of the universe, and boring too. A more interesting approach in my view is to understand the function of suffering, as absolutely essential to staying alive. An animal without a sense of pain would quickly die. Suffering is not really a problem. It’s a solution to a problem.
Unbelievable co-incidence that three brain-damaged people should end up writing on the same thread, because I didn't think your posts made any sense either. It's a good job we've got you around to identify this previously undiagnosed epidemic of mental health conditions. Do you find yourself identifying brain damage in a lot of people you talk to by any chance?
Even people who have kids rarely see anything wrong in not having kids.
I believe that people who willingly try to not have kids do it for a reason. It’s not always philosophical, political or moral of course. Sometimes they are afraid of being tied, of losing their freedom. But even these fears are sometimes expressed in general philosophical terms, disguised behind philosophy. It’s called rationalizing an irrational fear.
I would be fine with saying that we should employ a different set of rules for aggregate ethical dilemmas than we do for individual ethical dilemmas. I wouldn't agree with it but at least it doesn't sound ridiculous to me, sounds like a somewhat reasonable starting point. The problem is the line between "aggregate" decisions and individual decisions is very blurry.
If I can somehow predict the future, and I find every person your future child (were you to have one) would help then I bring them all together in a room, why do you treat harm done to them as "aggregate" but harm done to the child as concrete and immediate. By not having a child, you are in fact harming everyone in that room. There is no "abstract cause" here. It's not like saying "For the country", where you are asked to harm someone for the sake of a fiction. There are real people in that room.
You could argue that we should not impose harm on someone for the sake of saving someone else who you are not responsible for, and I would think that either side there is an extreme. By this principle, you cannot wake up the lifeguard who is sleeping on the job, even while a man is drowning and you can't save him yourself. On the opposite end we have things like: Throwing the innocent fat man in front of the train to save 2 people (or even 1) who were being idiots and playing on the track being completely fine.
I think there is a point at which you can use people to prevent harm on other people, which sets a high, but not unreachable, standard for when it is ok to have children. I'd say we do so all the time. Taxing the rich for example, even though they don't benefit from it much if at all in comparison to what they're paying.
I'd say it's healthy to fear screwing over someone for life. Especially if you have a history of dealing with severely disabled people/family members. Or you come from a 3rd world country and have seen how bad things can get. Or you have depressed family members/friends. Etc
While I may not be AN anymore, the number of people I would think have no business having children is probably greater than most. I definitely still think people in general take the decision too lightly.
I hear you, but some decisions cannot realy be taken based on facts or argument. They require a leap of faith.
I think there is a really interesting discussion to be had here about just how we're supposed to deal with risk morally. All behaviours are risky, so there must be a way to distinguish permissible risks from impermissible ones. This cannot be either just some statistical probability, nor can it be merely that there is a risk-free alternative available, because both of these lead to unsolvable dilemmas that oblige us to travel down indefinite causal chains to calculate risks or find alternative paths.
What we usually do is only consider a specific group of risks, which we try to minimize. This is what traffic regulations are: They are meant to protect against specific kinds of risks, but not all possible risks (so the risk of arriving at the wrong time and place, for example, is ignored). What risks are relevant is then a normative question. What risks should we minimize? What can we ask everyone to do, without it becoming self-defeating or paralyzing? We can ask everyone to give raising kids their best shot. To inform themselves as to the relevant science, and to make sure there aren't any obvious barriers to following that advice. But we can't ask anyone to be perfect, or control outcomes exactly.
Quoting schopenhauer1
So you think, yes. But since in doing so I am not taking anything away from them, nor even withholding something I am capable to give, I struggle to see how what I do could nevertheless be wrong.
Quoting khaled
The problem is that none of these analogies get to really what's happening..
By procreating someone, you are enabling the conditions of harm. That is not the same as some concrete example of breaking someone's leg to give someone else some more beneficial thing. Rather, a whole lifetime's worth of suffering will befall that person. So it is hard to measure. But besides this measurement problem, what I want to convey is that you are not "making do" with what is already here to try to ameliorate the situation in the case of procreation as you would be for people who already exist. So one guy exists and another guy exists and so we are in this inextricably intertwined situation. Rather, now you are making, from complete scratch, another situation of enabling harm, so that you can ameliorate the situation. I just don't see that as right to do, even if it means that you think it will have some beneficial outcome. Enabling harm by creating harmfulness "anew" in a new person, so that you can "fix" something for people that were already born is just not good enough to say, "Oh, this justifies creating the harm for that person". You can keep digging and say, "Why"? And I would probably go back to the dignity argument. You are overlooking that person's dignity for the cause of ameliorating other people. So I never argued straight up that it is all about harm reduction. Otherwise, I indeed WOULD be an aggregate utilitarian, which I NEVER claimed that I was. Rather, I have always maintained in this thread that there is an important element about not overlooking the dignity of that person, etc. So that involves not using them, even if it is trying to ameliorate unnecessary harm. So, if it is to be an ethical claim (and not a political one), then it is not only about harm reduction or some aggregate calculation, but rather how the dignity is recognized in people as well, which we are doing by NOT affecting them negatively in the sense of "stealing from Sam to pay for Sally", or however that phrase goes.
On another note, I also think you have a problem with the aggregate because someone with a better model, that can see the "bigger picture" can simply override your more primitive model of "just seeing what's in front of your face". The better model might actually predict that it was better overall not to procreate that child, no matter how prima facie it emotionally "seems" to bring them into the world to for some benefit. So it is indeed a slippery slope for your own stance.
Again, this “dignity argument” seems extreme. It means you shouldn’t wake up the life guard who is sleeping on the job even if someone you can’t save is drowning. Because that involves using them. And this is unlike the “stop the gunner” example because the lifeguard did nothing wrong. You could argue that “sleeping on the job” is something wrong, but then I’d just modify the example to being about your ex-lifeguard friend sleeping as a relative of his is drowning, you can’t wake him up. Seems extreme to me to mark any form of “using people” as wrong. A simpler example is taxes. But you sort of handwaved that because it’s “political”
Quoting schopenhauer1
Unlikely. Considering that most people are a positive influence. If they weren’t, then as Isaac said, we’d all be happier as hermits. But we’re clearly not. If humans were on average such that we are better off alone and isolated, since we are usually a negative influence to others I’d agree with you, but it isn’t the case. Heck, it that were the case AN would probably be the default position for our species and you’d need to convince people that having children is acceptable.
Also until this “better model” is found this is just idle speculation.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting schopenhauer1
Then I’d reply to you with the same reply I gave cobra. The mere fact that you are forcing someone into a game is not a problem. The problem would be if they will suffer AND that there is a less harmful alternative. Otherwise, if the former is the principle you go by (it’s wrong to put people in games, period), then you shouldn’t have a child even knowing that they will have a perfect life. Because even though they will have a perfect life they’re still playing the game, they just happen to really like it. But I find that conclusion absurd. So that leads me to believe that making someone play a game is not in itself a problem. The problem is if there is a chance they get harmed AND there is a less harmful alternative.
But I don't apply it in extremes. Rather, I recognize that there is a substantive difference in how it is applied to someone not yet born and explain that this is because it a case of absolutely not creating unnecessary harm, vs. people who already exist and recognize that there are compromises in living in groups and socially. It's not ideal, but it can never be ideal once born. Here is a case where the ideal can be applied. Thus it would be a violation to unnecessarily start a life to use them to try to create benefits, vs. people being able to compromise with each other once alive for the sake of survival and mutual benefit. Once born, you indeed would be overlooking someone's dignity if you ignored egregious harm, and didn't make the compromise to recognize this. The dignity doesn't necessarily "look the same way" for each case. I certainly would be not recognizing someone's dignity by not waking up the life guard. I would go further and say, if I had to violently shove the life guard to wake him, to the point of causing a broken arm, I might say that was necessary to preserve the drowning person's dignity. I do not believe breaking the life guard's arm in the attempt to get them to do their job was violating the lifeguard's dignity. Certainly I harmed them in some way though.
I know you are going to say you don't buy it, but I guess that is where the line is drawn. I see the distinction as valid and substantive and you do not. You seem to lump everything together with the aggregated approach without looking at the distinction between starting a life and then living out a life that already exists. It's not a matter of special pleading but a different case.
Quoting khaled
This is simply a variation of the "there is not enough suffering" variant of objection. I mean, I can also say the social relations lead to suffering, as much as we are drawn to them. But what is the case, is that social relations in and of itself, don't mean, that everything is now "not suffering". It's almost an aside. Also, it can be construed as a sort of naturalistic fallacy. Just because we are social animals, does not mean, we must have more people to keep sociality going. As related to my previous statement, suffering occurs despite, in spite, along side, and due to being social.. so it is somewhat irrelevant to the argument of harm/suffering. How much emotional anguish comes from other people along with the joy of relationships? So, while already existing, certainly it is a good idea to cultivate good relationships, to then say that this justifies making other people experience the harms of existence to have this would be violating the dignity, and overlooking the unnecessary harm on a personal assessment of your doing.
As a further argument I just thought about.. In the aggregate calculation, there are always mitigating circumstances if you only care about outcomes. Most likely, no parent was thinking about the real possibility of a deadly pandemic, for example. That should at least give some pause.
Yet all you've done is describe the difference. Which is exactly the definition of special pleading. Nowhere have you explained why that difference is relevant ethically. What else do you see as the difference between 'special pleading' and substantive difference, other than that in the former no substance is given to the distinction?
You say the dignity of the sleeping lifeguard can be imposed upon to alleviate the swimmer's suffering, but the dignity of the imaginary future child cannot be, yet the only distinction you offer is that in one case you are starting a life. You've not given any reason why starting a life should have this special status whereby the suffering doing so might alleviate is insufficient to out weigh the imposition, yet with the already living, it is.
The closest I can find is "it a case of absolutely not creating unnecessary harm", but, as has been shown, this is absolutely not the case. Harm is caused either way.
Quoting schopenhauer1
You could. But you'd be evidently wrong. If it we the case that social relations lead to suffering, as much as we are drawn to them then you'd expect on average about 50% of people to live as hermits. We see nothing of the sort, so the pros of social living clearly outweigh the cons, for most people.
The distinction is right in your very quote. And only pulls out what I was discussing in my very post. That the wrongness in arguments from anti-natalists does not speak to the fact suffer will an does persist independently of ones objections to the existence of it, and I don't definitions as a means of analysis, because definitions are guidelines toward analysis not explanations themselves, and should be examined for their utility, hence the point of philosophy. You give a googled 'definition' as if it explains anything, but all it does is stifle analysis.
I argue in my previous post as an anti-natalist, I believe other antinatalists argue this position weakly when they introduce fallacious ought arguments to the position, and if you understood what I was saying that other anti-natalists deducing that "people should not reproduce," is flawed because it ignores the harm caused by abstaining from an ingrained biological drive to reproduce hardwired within species. Potential parent(s) OUGHT to reproduce if it reduces their own suffering when they deny this desire.
However,
This does not negate the fact that giving 'birth' (i.e. enabling consciousnessness) will almost always "give birth" to an inevitable sufferer subjected to suffering that will serve no utility. Thus, it's not the action of "giving birth" that is wrong, but the LAZINESS is not opportunistically striving to mitigate the suffering of the sufferer. Those that understand this fact, anti-natalists, and have accepted this fact,choose not reproduce based on these grounds. I understand the act of "not having a child," to be altruistic.
No one is arguing about "preventing" any future child from being born because there no existing attributes to stall or prolong; which in my previous post is why I mentioned gestational period. That is immoral.
The rest of your post is a literal repeat of the other strawman's, and I literally couldn't care less about whether you understand it or not.
I could be the most retarded person on this site, and still not care. I am just here to argue my points. If your point is literal brain damage, I'll say. It doesn't matter what my IQ is or not.
I don’t see the distinction. In the case of children, having them is sometimes fine because there are people who already exist (the ones in the room) and compromises are inevitable. Not having the child is harming the people in the room. And since you:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Then you can’t unilaterally say that violating the child’s dignity to not harm the people in the room is wrong.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Sure no one is disagreeing there.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting schopenhauer1
Typo? How in the world is waking up the life guard violating his dignity (I assume violate and “not recognize” are synonymous here) and breaking his arm is not violating his dignity?
Quoting schopenhauer1
You say so but I seriously can’t see how.
In one case, there is someone that will be harmed unless you violate another person's dignity. Wait, no that’s both cases.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It’s more so: There is suffering no matter what you choose and it’s not clear that having the child is always the less suffering option.
Quoting schopenhauer1
What Isaac said.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Which you can’t say is unilaterally wrong, assuming that having them is the less harmful option. Because you think it’s fine to wake up the lifeguard / ex-lifeguard.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, this is idle speculation. You cannot use “But maybe some terrible event will happen” as real evidence that not having the kid is less harmful. Statistically speaking, I would say it’s pretty clear that having children is overall, a positive influence. And this is taking into account catastrophic events.
Sorry I have no clue what this word salad means XD
Quoting Cobra
It explains whether or not you’re misusing the word. You can’t just define whatever word however you like and expect people to agree with you. If I say “Hitler did nothing wrong” and you disagree, it’s ridiculous for me to amend it by saying “Actually, by hitler I mean Timmy, and by ‘nothing wrong’ I mean ‘his homework’ therefore you must agree with me that hitler did nothing wrong”. That’s just being maliciously misleading
When you make up definitions for words that already have a use you end up with ridiculous scenarios like the above.
Quoting Cobra
You are seriously saying that antinatalism is not about saying that having kids is wrong. Wow. Ok guess I’m a vegan then. I’ll go have my beef jerky now....
Quoting Cobra
Quoting Cobra
Altruistic but not necessary? Then you’re not an antinatalist. Just someone who thinks it’s better not to have kids.
Says the person harping about being an antinatalist without thinking that having children is wrong.
There is a difference between thinking that not having kids is altruistic and thinking that having kids is wrong. You can think both or neither at the same time. And neither leads to the other. Antinatalism is precisely the belief that having kids is wrong, not that not having kids is altruistic. You are not an antinatalist.
And stop personalizing the debate to convincing you, it’s rude and entitled. :wink:
I patently think this is an extreme, to create a whole new life for the sake of the people in the room.
Quoting khaled
Because he already exists and so will have to live in compromised situations. One of the harms of coming into existence ;).
Quoting khaled
Compromised once born. There is no "one" that needs to compromise prior to birth. You are making someone from "scratch" that will then indeed be put in these compromising situations. I do indeed make the distinction and see it as real. It is not rolled up into aggregated harm with no distinctions.
Quoting khaled
I don't pay attention to him anymore. I did for a second, and then realize I don't like feeding antagonizing trolls and sticking to my original policy of that. There's a way to disagree without being disagreeable. He has decided not to follow that policy.
Quoting khaled
Again, I make the distinction. To enable a whole new life of conditions for suffering doesn't necessarily follow from "because relationships are enjoyable". Starting harm unnecessarily when one could have prevented it, is that matters here. The life guard is already forced "recruited" on the team. He was already kidnapped into the game. To force recruit and kidnap into the team/game is not justified. You can use the players that have already been created, but don't keep violating the principle.
Quoting khaled
Says you. Wait until the unexpected airborne Ebola happens or something.. It's never a real possibility until it is.
That doesn’t answer the question. How the heck is it that waking someone up is violating their dignity but breaking their arm isn’t? There is a person existing in both scenarios.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Why?
How about waking up the lifeguard for the sake of the person in the water? That was fine. EVEN THOUGH it is a violation of his dignity.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I’ll just quote it then:
Quoting Isaac
Quoting schopenhauer1
It’s not unnecessary. It’s for the people in the room. Who already exist.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Then having a child who will have a perfect life is not justified. But you have stated before that it is. So this cannot be your principle. It is not the simple act of forcing someone to play the game that is problematic. It only becomes problematic if there is a risk they get harmed. But if you’re only looking at risks that people get harmed then you cannot ignore the people in the room either.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Says you. Wait until aliens come down and lead us to a new age of technological prosperity. It’s never a real possibility until it is.
Again, idle speculation.
Maybe I didn't understand what you were arguing for.. Did I have a typo? I'll have to look back. I meant that, waking the lifeguard up to save the person is not violating dignity.. and even if by mistake I broke that person's arm, perhaps if that was violating his dignity (though if he had good intent to have wanted to save that child, would he think so).. this is exactly what I mean by the compromises that we have to make for those already in the room (but not necessary for new people to endure).
Quoting khaled
Yes, I accept that the ideal will never be realized for the people in the room. Almost all social decisions are compromises of some sort, even ethically. However, not bringing a new person into the world is preventing wholesale all suffering for that person. I consider that a win at least in terms of realizing the ideal.
Quoting khaled
It's unnecessary to cause it for that person being born. The lifegaurd exists, and the drowning person exists. The future child, does not exist. If I had the capacity to completely prevent the situation of the lifeguard's indignity and the child drowning, I certainly would. Here is a chance to prevent all harm, period. So I will. Certainly, I will not enable all harm on his behalf for the people already existing. But if you already exist, there's no other choice unless you want to commit suicide or something. Ideally, no one's dignity would be violated. In reality, it can't work that way as it is at odds with living communally. This is not the situation with possible future people. They don't have to be unnecessarily violated like us who are here and must make do.
Quoting khaled
The people in the room in the perfect life would presumably also be experiencing paradise no? So force recruiting in a perfect life.. is that violating dignity? Not sure. Certainly force recruiting in a non-paradise is.
Quoting khaled
Aliens.. unless you pay attention to the historical conspiracy theories, aren't proven. Deadly viruses have been. And famines, and wars, etc. etc. True story (and continuing to this day). But anyways, it doesn't negate the fact that a better calculation could indeed show that not having children is the best course for the least harm.
Why not? It is a harm (though a very slight one) inflicted for a purpose outside of the lifeguard. You are using the lifeguard as a means to an end.
Quoting schopenhauer1
No. Perfect life =/= paradise. The situation is that you know your next child will not suffer at all. But it’s still the same game. It’ll just happen that your next child will never suffer while he is playing this dangerous and potentially harmful game called life. In this scenario, it is ok to have them, as they won’t suffer, and you yourself said this. Which leads to the conclusion that merely forcing someone into a game, even a dangerous one, is not problematic. What is problematic is that they are likely to suffer. But again, if you are concerned with preventing suffering you cannot ignore the people in the room either.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Who cares if it COULD? Until this better calculation actually DOES show this this is just idle speculation.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It’s never a possibility until it is :cool:
Quoting schopenhauer1
There is a very important distinction here. Is your problem with enabling harm, or is your problem with someone being harmed?
Because if your problem is with enabling harm, then having a child you know will not suffer in an imperfect world is wrong, as that is still enabling harm. But I find that an absurd conclusion.
I don’t see why “enabling harm” should be worse than harming the people in the room. And it’s not even an argument of magnitude, you’re not arguing that “enabling harm” is nevertheless the more harmful option, no, you’re saying that “enabling harm” is fundamentally worse than directly harming. I don’t see why it would be. Why does the fact that a person doesn’t exist yet, make enabling harm for them fundamentally worse than harming people who do exist right now? The outcome is the same: someone gets hurt. Why does the fact that that someone doesn’t exist yet give their hurt some special value as opposed to the suffering of people that are here already?
Fair enough. Doesn't really change the compromise that takes place in the room and bringing someone into the room who wasn't there before, so that they will now have to compromise, "for their own benefit".
Quoting khaled
So you are looking for something that has never taken place, a completely charmed life? If you knew that was a guarantee that is different than if you know that it is definitely not.
Quoting khaled
But that's the thing.. have you consulted the best calculation? I mean, you have your own. You care about outcomes right? You are serious about this, no? Are you really an expert in this kind of statistical analysis? Have you really factored in everything? With this kind of thinking, the person with the least knowledge is still justified, because they didn't care to look into it a bit further.
Quoting khaled
So there is a precedent for alien invasions? I mean I guess if you want to put that in the equation, I'm not opposed. Doesn't hurt the argument one way or the other. But certainly there is a precedent for war, disaster, pandemics, and the like.
Quoting khaled
If you absolutely "know" they won't be harmed, then you aren't violating dignity. That is not the actual world. If the possibility exists, that someone can live a charmed life, show me proof. With the almost near 0% chance the person born will have lived a life with no harm, this indeed would violate dignity if you knew how the world is. I just don't believe a charmed life can ever be the case based on that no life has ever been so charmed as far as I know.. That's not the same as having a "happy" disposition or what not. Let's keep that in mind.
Quoting khaled
It isn't. Ideally we should not unnecessarily harm anybody. However, there is only one case where we can ideally prevent this, procreation. It is bringing more people into the world who will then be harmed. For those of us already here.. we have to compromise our ideal of causing unnecessary harm to be able to survive.
Just some thoughts...
Quoting schopenhauer1
I agree, but because death itself is a harm. So even if someone was born and experienced no harm, when their life ended they would.
In my last response to @khaled (not sure if he missed my post, or just hasn’t responded yet), I brought up a point that I think could pose a problem. Should someone be resuscitated knowing that they will end up suffering if brought back to life? And for the sake of argument, we’ll say that you are not able to obtain consent, have no idea how they became deceased, or whether they want to live.
Also, a couple other questions.
If there was a button that could sterilize everyone, would you push it? AN’s have to consider this a net positive, right? It eliminates all future suffering.
What is your position on suicide? If killing yourself prevents more suffering than it will cause, should you do so?
Quoting schopenhauer1
So you are saying that there ARE cases where you would violate dignity to reduce harm.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That is the hypothetical yes.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Isaac’s argument is convincing enough. I have consulted statistical analyses of happiness. They all come back positive. This means that the average person is a positive influence. Your critiques against this have not been convincing.
Quoting schopenhauer1
False. You’re still forcing them into a dangerous game. Just one you know they’ll enjoy.
To use the gaming analogy, you’re still kidnapping them, taping them to a chair, and forcing them to play the game, they just happen to enjoy this whole process. And you knew they would enjoy it.
Quoting schopenhauer1
“Near zero percent”. I’m saying that we know this very minuscule probability is what’s going to happen for your child. That’s the hypothetical.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, false. You keep saying this but by not procreating you are harming the people in the room. And if harm done to the child should not be treated differently to harm done to the people in the room, then there will be cases where it is acceptable to have the child. And you can’t use the dignity argument either because there ARE cases where you would violate dignity to reduce harm as we’ve gone over. There should be no reason the dignity of the child is in any way different from the dignity of anyone in the room. So if you are willing to violate dignity in “inter-room interactions” there should be no difference between that and violating the child’s dignity with the goal of reducing suffering.
AN should be big suicide fans, in theory, but there's some unpleasantness about it. So let's remove the unpleasantness in this thought experiment:
One demon come to you and say: 'If you want I can erase you from this world. You won't feel anything. Your dear ones won't remember you and therefore they will not miss you at all". Would any AN here take the offer and chose inexistence over existence? :-)
I didn't respond because I changed my mind so thought there would be no point to.
Yet I predict they won't. Because IMO their beef is not really philosophical. It's about their own personal fear of having kids, which is rationalized into some philosophical blah or another as a protection.
False. They think life could be full of harm. Which is a fact. And it is wrong to bring in children because it risks them having a life full of harm, and there is a non-risky alternative (supposedly). So this:
Quoting Olivier5
Doesn't follow. They would only take that bet if they were miserable. But people are mostly not miserable.
If life could be full of harms, and if that risk justifies not giving life to a child, why should the lives of AN be an exception? Why should they opt to live, when "life could be full of harm"?
"[I]Do as I say, don't do as I do. Children can't take the risk of living but I can[/i]."
This doesn't even make sense on a first read, let alone the second that you should have given it before posting. That a thing could be harmful is completely resolved once immersed in that thing. "the water might be cold!" [gets in] "Oh no, it's fine".
It's not about the risks it's about the reasons to take them. The argument presented is that once living you may have reasons to take those later risks (the things you actually know that you're actively enjoying) whereas the potential child is not currently enjoying anything and so cannot be presumed to have any reasons of their own to take the risks associated with that enjoyment.
Really it would be better if you just read the thread before rehashing the arguments from pages back. We don't need to go over them all again, the argument has very much moved on.
It's more like "You shouldn't take the risk of harming others but do whatever with yourself". This is common sense. For example: If there is a button that has a 98% chance of giving you 1000 dollars and a 2% chance of killing you, is pressing it for yourself wrong? No, if you see the odds are worth it go ahead, none of my business. Is pressing it for others wrong? Absolutely. Because there is an almost perfectly harmless alternative called "Not pressing the button"
Your first argument against AN is basically "If you don't like it kill yourself". Your second is "Because I wouldn't take the risk for others that means I won't take it for myself". Maybe you should read up on the subject matter a bit before presenting ridiculous arguments. Sincerely, Not an AN.
Say the human population is exactly 100 people. I can buy that those 100 people having children and increasing the population to say, 250 would overall reduce harm on the entire group. But I cannot buy that continuously having children can ever compare to the original suffering prevented by the first act. I cannot buy that a population of billions is suffering less than the original 100 suffering due to childlessness. As shope said: It's kicking the can down the road. In the end, if you look purely at consequences, having children is always the more harmful option.
Edit: Nevermind it doesn't really work as a rebuttal. Because if everyone abides by the rule: "Only have children when it is likely that doing so prevents more suffering than the alternative" then it becomes sustainable. Even a population of 1 billion would suffer less than the original 100 if everyone abides by the rule. Though we'll likely never get to 1 billion doing so. Which I think is a win-win honestly. And saying "But there is no way everyone abides by the rule" is not an argument against this as it can also be used against AN (much more effectively).
I'll just leave this here if anyone thinks of arguing along the same lines.
If you don't find my posts of value, simply don't respond to them. Simplify your life. The reason I'm insisting is I don't think very highly of your intelligence. You could have missed something in your exploration of these matters. As I know you, you probably did.
Quoting Isaac
These reasons might evaporate tomorrow. The people and things you like may be taken away from you. These reasons to love life may become reasons to hate it. Yet you and I are ready to take that risk. You and I prefer pain to inexistence. At least in some measure, and that says something about life and pain.
A life without pain is not a fancy of the imagination. It's doable: it's what you get when you take large amounts of morphine, and it can kill you. Pain exists for a reason: to keep us alive. Pain is 'pro-life'. It's not the definition of "morally wrong". It's an incentive to live better, and thus it's the price to pay to live. Total quietness = death.
We all know about this equation, and we all go by it when we chose to continue living a life of dreads and boredom and pain, in the hope it will get better. Life is better than the alternative, most of times. And there's no life without pain.
So the whole utilitarian idea of assessing the value of life based on pain and pleasure is misconceived, because pain and pleasure are an incentive system to try and make life better. It is just an indicator, a compass. You break your compass at your own risk.
Put in this (IMO biologically correct) framework, the fundamental idea of AN is absurd and contradicted by their own life choices. This idea is that, because any hypothetical child will be born with a (useful) pain compass, and it will be put to use during his life, therefore we have no right to give life to this child. Meanwhile we'll continue living, thank you very much!
And yet we take decisions that affect the life of others all the time. You do it when you drive a car, you do it when you wear a mask in public (or not), when you teach others, when you take decisions for a collective (e.g. a general deciding to attack or something). It's called taking responsibility. I don't see it as always morally bad.
When I was a kid, one of the first philosophical idea that came to mind was: I could have been born elsewhere, in a different country, time, background... Then I realized that, had this been the case I would not be me, but somebody else, so the thought morphed into: I could not have been born; the world would just exist without me. And such a thought led me to a sense of gratefulness for being alive, for existing. And I haven't lived a blessed life but I'm still grateful my parents took this decision for me (or didn't, I mean my mother wasn't taking the pill back then, but that too was her decision I guess).
Quoting khaled
You never responded to this argument though. Suicide is only a bad thing if life is conceived as inherently good (as I do). But if you truly disagree with that, if you can put the life of a future child in a balance and conclude it's not worth living, why can't you apply the same logic to your own life? What so wrong about it? And why is that such a horrible horrible argument, pray tell?
Your own shock at the suicide argument only proves that you agree that life has inherent value, and should not be weighted in a purely utilitarian way. To assess the value of life in terms of potential harm and non-harm like you guys do here is to belittle life, to show contempt to it.
Yes. But you make a good point nonetheless. I don't think there's nothing good to take away from antinatalist arguments (of the kind you presented anyway). In some respects I worry that arguing too hard against antinatalism (again, only of the variety you presented), might be itself problematic for this exact reason. There definitely are serious ethical considerations to be taken into account when contemplating having a child and these shouldn't be swept away in any attempt to counter the less palatable arguments of antinatalism. The problem of excessive population growth is certainly one such issue. I think a certain amount of population fluctuation is inevitable as people try to estimate what birth rate is required to ensure a new generation given their circumstances, but making private decisions to have a large number of children in a country where the birth rate far exceeds the death rate is, I think, unethical. There's clearly already going to be a sufficient next generation to serve the community's social needs, there's no need to increase it, and thereby increase the demands placed on the following generation to supply for.
In all these cases NOT doing these things is more harmful. That's why we do them.
Quoting Olivier5
And it would be very irresponsible to push the button for someone else. We use the word "irresponsible" when someone makes a decision for someone else that could harm them, when a safer alternative is available. Example: Pressing the button, wreckless driving, using other people's stuff without consent, playing with fire in a forest, etc.
Quoting Olivier5
Cool. Has nothing to do with anything. I am also grateful to be alive.
Quoting Olivier5
False. It is also a bad thing if death is conceived as bad. I never understood what "life is inherently good" even means. That it is enjoyable for most people most of the time, I get, but what does the word "good" even mean here.
Quoting Olivier5
Quoting Olivier5
Yikes.
I did. "If they don't like A they can kill themselves so it's fine to inflict A upon them" is a terrible argument because A can be anything. From rape to torture. So the argument is absurd. Not only absurd but also disgusting. What's your reaction to reading this: "We'll rip his eyes out and if he doesn't like it he can just kill himself". There is nothing that cannot be justified by this "argument".
Quoting Olivier5
Just shock at how idiotic and disgusting the "argument "is.
Quoting Olivier5
Who is "you guys"
Quoting Olivier5
Are you seriously not seeing the point?
For the same reason that I would not press the button for someone else even if I would press it for myself. It is irresponsible. Or so the argument goes. Because there is (supposedly) a safer alternative.
Yes, there are some distinctions to be made to my argument:
1) There IS a difference between bringing a child into existence vs. being alive currently. The distinction is about absolute and relative prevention. For a possible child, we are preventing that harm for that future person, as it wholesale can be prevented, "right off the bat". There is no having to compromise anything to do with violating harm or dignity.
If I was to say to you, in situation 1) You have no choice but to do mini-versions of "kidnapping" someone against their will (causing indignity by overlooking the harm you do to someone), but you can try to do this as little as possible.. and 2) You have the ability to completely prevent kidnapping someone against their will if you simply don't do a certain action.. Cannot 1 and 2 be right at the same time? I think they can.
Quoting khaled
Yes the other distinction to be made...
2) The indignity comes not just from the kidnapping (the decision made for the other) but kidnapping with knowing of harm.. The indignity is putting someone else in a position of harm, putting other considerations above this.
Quoting khaled
I think this can be answered with understanding the distinction of 1 and 2.
But I think you might be right before the edit.. In this scenario, you are worried about outcomes. "Only have children when it is likely that doing so prevents more suffering than the alternative". Well, you did say "likely" which lives some wiggle room, but if it is outcomes you are interested in, then perhaps you want the best estimate of probabilities. If someone did indeed realize that the best scenario was the the least people being born bringing the least amount of harm, and this resulted in eventually no people born, would you accept it? For example, if it was found that all the models noted that when you ran it completely, everyone suffered more by continuing the next generation rather than abstaining from continuing it, would you accept that model?
I think that there might be a "hidden assumption" in the model...something to do way back with how community is above and beyond the consideration of the child that will be affected here. So this presents as a straight up utilitarian thing, but is really more of an argument to "keep the community going at all costs".
Because you choose to only look at the child in your "system". We compromise the wellbeing of the people in the room, as well as the parents. There are people who exist already that would be harmed by the decision.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Both of these are true but only one is a moral claim. 1) says that you are obligated to cause indignity to reduce suffering elsewhere. I would disagree with this actually. My point is not that you must wake up the life guard or save the drowning person, I don't think there is an obligation there. My point is that you could. And that a system that has it where you cannot wake up the life guard or save the drowning person is ridiculous, I think we can agree there.
But 2 is only a statement of fact. Yes you do in fact have the ability to completely prevent kidnapping someone against their will. But in doing so you harm others. So it is not clear from this fact alone that the action should be taken (not having children) as we know there are cases where harm to others trumps "kidnappings" -as you called them- as a consideration.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, true, but only a statement of fact. This does not lead to it being wrong to nonetheless do that thing that enables harm, if the harm alleviated elsewhere is enough.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Cool. But you don't mind doing this with the lifeguard. Why not with children?
My point is your argument is not unilateral. You cannot conclusively say "having children is wrong". Since you do not mind violating dignity elsewhere for the sake of preventing harm.
Unless you would argue that the child's dignity is somehow "special" and different from the lifeguard's dignity. I don't see a reason it should be.
Quoting schopenhauer1
If he's correct sure. Have thought so for 2 years. But I doubt he would be. Since we have evidence to suggest that the average person is a positive influence. And especially since I only care about the "remembering self" as opposed to the "experiencing self" if you remember our first disagreement.
Quoting schopenhauer1
There is an important point here I think you're missing. I think you're comparing the antinatalist ideal with the reality of my rule (idk what to call it, "careful natalism"? I'll just use that for now: CN).
As I said, if everyone applies CN, every generation suffering will decrease. With AN, there will be a massive "surge" of suffering before going to zero. And they are set up so that, ideally, everyone applying CN is less (or equal) suffering than everyone applying AN, by definition.
But what you are doing here is comparing the ideal AN scenario with the realistic prediction of applying CN. Which is not fair. I am aware that if someone has children there is a good chance those children will not be CN, and so will result in more suffering overall. But on the other hand, even if we were to somehow try to enforce AN by force, this will realistically never work. All it will do is drastically reduce the population for the people who follow it and whoever remains who is not AN will make it all for naught. All the while all the followers suffered for nothing. We both know that realistically, most people would not able to actually enforce AN. But this cannot be used as an argument against it. So similarly, you cannot use the difficulty of enforcing CN as an argument against it.
This is what I meant when I added "much more effectively" here:
Quoting khaled
Realistically speaking, AN is much less likely to be enforced than CN. And half-assing AN is worse than half-assing CN. Because with half assing AN, you end up with the current generation suffering severely, and the next generation still going on anyways. If you half ass CN at least the current generation doesn't suffer.
Quoting schopenhauer1
There is no such thing. I have argued for why it can be expected that having a child can be expected to be the less harmful option a lot of the time (It was Isaac's argument). On the other hand you predict with no basis, that there is a "better model" out there that would come out with having children always being worse. It's like saying "I know God exists, because eventually there will be a scientific theory that incorporates him".
I agree that there might be a hidden assumption. But you have not presented any evidence that there is. Whereas all the evidence I presented only references suffering/happiness of real people. No considerations given to "the community" as its own entity.
That's not a fact. You don't know for sure when you take the wheel to go do some shopping, that you will not kill a dozen people in some horrible accident. People take chances with their life and the lives of others all the time.
Quoting khaled
As would your kids, most probably...
Quoting khaled
My reaction -- as already posted -- is that destroying somebody's eyesight is an act of violence, of life destruction. It is not comparable to act that affirms life, it's the opposite.
Quoting khaled
Death is generally considered a bad thing because life is generally considered a good thing. Death if just the end of life. If life had no inherent positive value, why would death have any inherent negative value?
Quoting khaled
You misunderstood my argument. I am asking an hypothetical AN -- got it that you're not an AN anymore -- to do to herself what she does to others, not vice versa. More precisely, I am asking why she cannot apply to her own life the same analysis she applies to a hypothetical child. Certainly that is a reasonable demand.
IF an AN argues that the hypothetical life of a hypothetical child entails risks that are too great to take, why can't the same AN proponent conclude that her own life entails risks that are too great to take?
So if a demon told this hypothetical AN that he had the power to make her disappear in an instant, would she take the offer, or would she try and stick around a little longer? I bet the latter, for most. And this points to a logical contradiction, a fundamental dishonesty. Do as I say, not as I do.
You say that one IS MORALLY ENTITLED take a risk with one's own life, and I agree. I'm not saying AN are not morally entitled to live, God forbid. I am saying that all the AN proponents I know cherish their own life, and hold on to it hard enough. They'll keep living for as long as they can, and that says something about the REAL value they attach to life. They prefer it to the alternative, by far. They take all these risks in a heartbeat, without even thinking, and would not consider ending the game before the bitter end. They like this world of grief quite a lot, often, but they are not sure they are morally entitled to bring a new person into it.
My guess is that a hypothetical, yet unborn child, would most certainly feel exactly as this hypothetical AN proponent (and you and I) do about life. It would feel grateful to be alive, given the chance. Cause it's better to take chances than to have no chance at all.
But I can reasonably guess that I won't. The odds of this happening are so slim that the harm I bring to myself by not going to the store and doing that shopping is probably greater.
Quoting Olivier5
Handwaving. You never said anything about "life destruction" and "life affirmation". All you said was "If ANs don't like it so much they should just kill themselves". And I explained to you why that's a terrible argument.
Quoting Olivier5
Neither of these logically lead to the other.
Quoting Olivier5
Because, for the third time, there is a difference between risks worth taking for YOURSELF and risks worth taking for OTHERS. Pressing the button is an example of a risk that you may find worth taking yourself but is wrong to take for others. Any risk is wrong to take for others, unless not doing it is the more risky option.
Quoting Olivier5
Key word: Most certainly. What justifies taking the risk.
Again, we don't take risks with others unless the consequences of not doing so are worse.
Quoting khaled
Is false. A more accurate statement would be "Each generation would suffer less by implementing CN rather than AN". But this is only true of one generation at a time. Say we start from a population of 100, and out of each 100 people 2 are miserable. If the 100 apply AN, they will all be miserable, then that will be the end. If they apply CN, and each have 2 children say, then the next generation (comprising of 200 people) will have 4 miserable people. 4 is a lot smaller than 100. But the number only grows. That is the problem.
So it is the case that having children is always the more harmful option. Even though having a child is the less harmful option most of the time only considering the current generation, overall it will eventually be more harmful. This small percentage of people that "slip through the cracks" leading miserable lives will eventually outnumber the number of people whose suffering we wanted to prevent in the first place.
@Isaac How would you respond to that?
First, I'm not sure I completely follow you, so this may not really address what you're saying but...
It seems as though you're applying a different weight to the harm reduction in the new population. If you have two children the risk you took of having miserable ones will have reduced harm in the 98, so still an ethical choice. But the problem you're raising (if i've understood it correctly) is that in doing so you guarantee another 2 miserable people (assuming a fertility rate of exactly 2), yet your actions were only justified by benefitting an original 98. The further you look into the future the worse this balance starts to look.
But, barring either genocide or a 100% compliance with AN regulations, you know there's going to be a generation 2, and a generation 3, and so on. So your actions ensuring two further kids to supply these further generations with sufficient numbers are justified by the same logic. Having a child now reduces suffering in their generation, but it also ensures that there are people willing to have children themselves to reduce suffering in the following generation.
Since you can be almost certain that no matter what you do, these generations are going to happen anyway, you can be almost certain that setting in motion a chain of events to ensure a continuous supply of harm-reducers is a moral choice.
This is still subject to, and makes even more clear, the it requires a reasonable assumption of at least average quality children, and no action to significantly worsen the miserable/happy ratio, or, for that matter, the extent to which people are more likely than not to reduce harm by socialising. None of these are a given.
Key word: probably. What justifies taking the risk?
How do you know what consequences you acts will have? You make a probability calculation?
If you can take chances with the lives of others because you need to do some shopping, you can take chances with having kids because you need kids.
Quoting Isaac
Yup. Good point now that I think about it. Ignore my previous response.
Since there will be future generations regardless of what you do it’s good to try to create a “family tree of harm reducers”. Since by doing so, by following CN strictly or near strictly, at every step you will always be reducing harm. And since genocide and AN compliance are both impossible then NOT having that family tree around is the more harmful option, since every generation the number of people in the room grows ad infinium, and so does the number of people that you harm by having the child but a lot more slowly (by definition). Would be a pretty small one though due to the nature of CN.
Quoting Isaac
But the point is: it is still not good enough. Compare the suffering that Adam and Eve would have had to endure due to childlessness to the suffering of all mankind thus far. It pales in comparison. Even though Adam and Eve reduced the suffering of the population by having children. And even though at every step, having children is likely the less harmful option, in the end, their decision to have children resulted in way more harm than they would have had to endure at step 1. Adam and Eve can be Jeff and Janis and the result is still the same.
AN increases harm significantly, then goes to 0. CN keeps a mostly steady level of harm going forever. It is clear which is more harmful overall.
But considering real conditions, and not idealizations, it is clear that the next generations will exist anyways. In this case it also becomes clear that new people are added to the room each generation you consider. So applying CN is better in real scenarios, applying AN is better in ideal scenarios. A bit of a weird conclusion but one I can swallow.
Quoting Isaac
Well put. Otherwise by not having children, you create an ever growing room. Which is worse than the alternative.
No you can’t. Because you not having kids is less harmful than you having kids. On the other hand, you not shopping is more harmful than you shopping.
Quoting Olivier5
That I need food or I’ll die. So I’m going to go buy it.
You have less harmful alternatives than driving a car: you could go shopping by foot or bicycle; you could order your groceries on the internet; heck, you could grow your own food. You could live as a hermit and eat grasshoppers. It may be less harmful than what you do now to procure your food, less convenient too though...
Moreover, you could assess the food you buy to make sure its production, processing, storage and transportation don't involve too high a health, social or environmental cost for you as well as for this and future generations to come... You could calculate the harm done or avoided by eating vegan, shopping local, buying only fair trade or organic, etc. etc. etc. Most people do a tiny little bit of that here or there, some people more than others, but most of us don't agonize over it. We do what seems right, and reasonably convenient.
Not everybody can buy all organic food, so we buy stuff that has pesticide residues in them, pesticides that are basically nerve gases and other niceties killing insects who happen to share a lot of our own biology... These pesticides are carcinogenetic but the dose is low so we consume them, and serve them to others. We take risks about other people's lives, all the time, without ever calculating them because it's impossible to do so accurately. We just figure it's gona be okay.
So all this talk about not risking it when it's about other people? It's BS. You and I do it all the time. Because we want a life too, and living involves appropriating and consuming stuff. It involves taking decisions with insufficient information. It involves taking the risk of harming others. And yet we go on living. Not many of us become hermits either.
So harmful to me?
Quoting Olivier5
Too much of this is literally the definition of irresponsibility.
Quoting Olivier5
Agreed. Where did I imply that we are not part of the calculation? If I purely wanted not to harm people I would kill myself. But I don’t. Because that would harm me. And I consider myself part of the calculation. Heck, I treat harm done to me with more weight than harm done to others most of the time.
Quoting Olivier5
We have sufficient information to conclude that not having children results in less harm than having them. So to go on to have children anyways is irresponsible and immoral. Is the argument.
Can you present this argument in different terms somehow? When you put it like this, it makes it sound like this person benefits by not existing, but of course that's not the case and I know you don't think that.
On the other hand, you've made a point in this thread of rejecting approaches that aggregate "happiness" or "fulfillment", so I'm not sure how you could phrase this to avoid attributing something to a non-existent referent, while at the same time avoiding aggregation (something like, "not adding to the net suffering of the world's sentient beings").
Expressing your position in terms of tenseless indicatives is not only misleading, it's unnatural: there should be a future tense in here somewhere, or a subjunctive. ("If you have a child, they will suffer." "If I hadn't been born, I wouldn't be suffering." "If you were to bring a new a person into the world, they would suffer.")
But of course then you would have to describe a possible future world that includes the hypothetical person, and they would then hypothetically have exactly the same standing as everyone else, the same rights and duties, the same potential for good to their fellows or evil, the same potential to be helped or harmed. In describing that world, it's not clear why one person is singled out for special consideration above all others.
Well, this being the AN argument, my argument is that life is far more important than a mere accounting of harm and joy, and that its complexity is beyond our capacity to predict. You cannot know in advance the amount of joy and harm a person will create in this world, you cannot even compute it post facto.
Were the lives of Cleopatra, Genghis Khan, Emmanuel Kant and Alexander Fleming overall positive or negative? Did they generate more harm than joy? Even God doesn't know that.
Everything you say is obviously true.
However, @khaled (before his conversion) argued specifically from this uncertainty: not knowing means you are taking a risk with another person and you have no right to; @schopenhauer1 seems to hold a position that, even if we knew for a fact that life is always and only pure bliss, it is a violation of that person's dignity (or perhaps "autonomy") to force them to lead such a blissful existence without so much as a "by your leave".
I'm with you: this whole "summing up" of a life is a bizarre and pointless approach. But even granting that, anti-natalism claims to be, as it were, defending someone's rights, albeit in the strangest way imaginable. That's a whole different confusion.
And I have pointed out that living, at least in society, involves taking chances with other people's lives. By that I don't mean that it's okay to be reckless, so there should be limits, but one cannot live without taking a few risks for himself and others, therefore the injunction: "live without taking any risks with other people's lives" is simply not doable in practice. It sets an unrealistic standard.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Technically, it is not true that one forces life on anyone. Life is a gift that can be and is sometimes rejected. A non-existing person has no dignity to lose, and as soon as she exists, her primary objective will be to stay alive. If her dignity does indeed require her annihilation, then there are many different options available to her, some as benign as social death by isolation.
More harm, but also more joy. Why are you not counting the joys that life brings? If your only measure for life is the amount of tears shed, of course it's always going to be negative.
Because I find that we never use joys to trump considerations of suffering irl. And we never make duties out of providing pleasure but we make duties out of not harming. For example, no matter how happy I would be to have 3 dollars, you don’t owe me 3 dollars. However you do owe me not to rob me, as that is harmful.
We make duties about not decreasing other people's joy though. It's not okay to be a killjoy.
?!
I find that we do this all the time. Dunno what you're talking about here.
Didn’t claim otherwise.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Example?
And yet you would want Adam and Eve to have killed all the joys ever to be had by the whole human race.
We must not have the same things in mind because examples are infinite. I didn't enjoy being a young-ish hyper-stressed broke father and husband, but the joy my kids bring me more than makes up for it. Most adults who enjoy playing the piano didn't enjoy practicing scales. I hear BUD/S sucks big-time but many find being a Navy SEAL rewarding.
What are you talking about?
We're not. I'm talking about joys and sufferings as considerations for doing things to other people, not for yourself. We make joy/suffering calculations where joy wins out for ourselves all the time.
But we don't have cases where A would be really happy if he did X to B but B would be harmed and doing X is ok.
Example: Bullying is wrong, no matter how much pleasure it gives the bullies. Illegal fighting pits are wrong, no matter how much joy they bring the spectators (assuming the participants are being coerced to participate). Etc
A killjoy is someone who decreases people's joys as you defined it. That clearly doesn't apply here. As there are no people.
If you want to count not having children as being a killjoy, and being a killjoy is wrong, you run into the absurd scenario where sometimes not having children is wrong.
Quoting Olivier5
The AN argument is precisely that having children is always reckless.
Quoting Olivier5
So are you of the opinion that having a child is ok under any circumstance? If not then how do you explain it?
Okay, cool.
Curiously, we find the reverse of your scenarios particularly praiseworthy: that is, risking harm to yourself or knowingly sacrificing your own well-being in order to benefit someone else.
What do we make of all this?
All the examples I gave are actually nearby: delayed gratification is precisely a case of present-time you accepting something negative to benefit future you.
Yes because you could have chosen to take account of your own suffering and not done the heroic act, but you went above the call of duty and helped people when you knew you didn't have to. Pretty praiseworthy.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You tell me. You're the one that expressed surprise at my statement but it turns out to be pretty mundane. In everyday language I'm basically just saying "It's wrong to hurt others for your pleasure"
Okay so accounting for future harm of hypothetical generations is something you can do but not accounting for their future joy, for some mysterious reason. Therefore you take only the harm in consideration, and conclude that Adam and Eve should have known better than procreate.
The result of your computation is determined by your frame of accounting. Mine is different; unlike you I include future joys in my computations. Therefore if I were the last man on earth, and if you were the last woman, I would think it our moral duty to procreate. Even though I'm quite sure you're not my type.
How many bullies do you require before the pleasure they get from bullying someone trumps the suffering they inflict and therefore makes it ok?
Or better, how much pleasure must I derive from getting a new PC that it becomes your obligation to get me one? My laptop is pretty old....
Quoting Olivier5
I think it's ridiculous to think this in any scenario. As ridiculous as thinking that because I would be overjoyed at having a new PC that that obligates you to get me one. And for the same reasons. Also I'm not a woman FYI, I remember you referring to me as "she" before too but I might be misremembering.
But additionally, since you accept pleasures as a basis for moral obligation, then the person getting bullied in the above example would have a moral obligation to continue to get bullied, as him not getting bullied would be denying people pleasure.
A whole lot of things start to go wrong when you say that harming people for joy is acceptable, nay obligatory.
Quoting Olivier5
No. I am accounting for both. However you clearly defined a killjoy as someone who "reduces people's joy". That does not apply here. There is no joy getting reduced. There is joy not being created. There is a difference. The same difference between me taking 3 dollars from you, and me not giving you 3 dollars.
Oh sure, neither of us is saying anything out of the ordinary. I'm just struck by how specifically the terms match up. There's a scale on each side (self and other): doing good for another at no cost to yourself is good, but even better at great cost to yourself, and vice versa, and the more good or harm on each side, the stronger our judgment of the morality of the act. Not a big deal, but interesting.
Not sure I agree. Just more praised to do so at great cost to yourself. I am reluctant to say that self-sacrifice is a good thing in itself. There is nothing good about flogging yourself.
A person who jumps into the water to save a drowning person despite being a terrible swimmer himself is not any more "heroic" than the person who calmly wakes up the lifeguard who is sleeping on the job. The first is just being stupid.
Of course. I wasn't suggesting absolute rules -- there are all sorts of things to take into account in a specific situation. Still, there's a pattern to at least part of what makes an action praiseworthy or blameworthy. Not claiming anything more than that.
FWIW, it's a pattern than anti-natalism passes right by.
That is not true. It was not your position yesterday at least, which was that only harm should be accounted because your only moral imperative is to reduce harm. I can point you to the precise post if you don't remember.
But you are not able to understand anything I say right now, obviously. You just want to think of life as a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate. Which it is, objectively. We all die in the end. Our children will die. The earth herself will die one day. And the sooner the better of course, from your point of view. Thanks for cheering me up!
But you are assuming that I follow this aggregate model. There are two scenarios here. One can absolutely be prevented. One can only be relatively prevented. Always do the absolute if it's available. If it's not available, that is indeed an impossibility.
Quoting khaled
Only if that is your assumption of what is right. If you are in the game, and the game has harm, I must follow the rule of alleviation of harm, which goes contra to the ideal of not causing any unnecessary harm above the individual. However, this game does not dictate the rule that thus if unnecessary harm for someone is attainable, it is now justified to have the child.
Quoting khaled
But then you are not caring about the distinction between the two scenarios. It has nothing to do with aggregated harm. Again, I see ethics as person-affecting, not aggregate. Once born, we live in a society where in order to survive, we need to ameliorate suffering. However, if we were starving, I am not going to justify killing someone from a different tribe and eating them as the solution to our problem. That is essentially what you are doing here. I am not going to create a whole lifetime of suffering to another person for the calculus of some aggregated summary of those who already exist. At the same time, do you see there to be a qualitative difference in (since I'm already born) waking up the life guard, and then kidnapping the life guard and forcing him to save everyone I can think of? Maybe that is the better outcome, right? I mean.. maybe I have a cult where I kidnap all the life guards and make them into an emergency service or something that is meant to help the most people possible. But no, that would be violating his dignity in a MAJOR, reckless, and unnecessary way. It affects that person by violating their dignity and it mattered not that it helped the aggregated masses or technically led to less suffering.
I've gone over this prior in the thread. The parent can prevent the wholesale suffering of a future person by not having them. As you mention, no "one" is losing out. However, no one will suffer either. I had a couple reformulations of it to make it pass this language barrier you describe. If you can, please try to look back in the thread for that discussion as it came up many different ways.
Yes, but with the caveat that if you know that life has suffering for everybody (it's not a paradise), the indignity comes not only from violating consent (which I think there is a case for), but the unnecessary "overlooking" of harm on someone else's behalf. Any cause outside "don't cause unnecessary harm" in the case of procreation would indeed be using that person, and violating that person's dignity as your need for seeing X play out was more important than preventing suffering (and no person to even exist to be deprived of anything either).
That's quite the understatement you got there. Life is unmitigated, absolute HELL. That's what it is. I can't wait for it to stop, personally.
Yeah?
That is not true. I am accounting for both, instances of harming people and instances of "reducing pleasure". Because the latter is a harm. Sorry if I was being cryptic.
Quoting Olivier5
Doubt it. You said you take pleasure into the calculation. So there will come a point, where the number of people benefiting from one person's suffering trumps the consideration for that person's suffering. It's one of the most classic critiques of utilitarianism, which negative utilitarianism doesn't suffer from.
Quoting Olivier5
No problem.
This is effectively special pleading though. Because in no other scenario is it possible for harm to be absolutely prevented. I don't understand why the child's dignity and suffering should be placed above the dignity and suffering of the people in the room, just because one can be prevented entirely and one partially.
Quoting schopenhauer1
There are people in the room, not some mass of goo.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yup. To a much smaller extent.
But that is also what you are doing when you wake up the lifeguard to save the drowning person. It is only a matter of extent, not principle. Though you make it a matter of principle (in the singular case of having children) by saying that if suffering can be prevented entirely, then that for some reason makes it more valuable to prevent than suffering that can only be partially prevented. That's something I don't agree with.
Quoting schopenhauer1
No. Quantitative difference.
Quoting schopenhauer1
So the difference is between a major violation and a minor violation. That is a quantitative difference not a qualitative one. The this is on the same spectrum as cannibalism and having children. We both have points on the spectrum at which we consider this type of action ok (that being, harming someone for the sake of reducing suffering elsewhere). Yours for example at least includes that it is acceptable to wake up a lifeguard who is sleeping to have him save someone. And does not include forced kidnappings of lifeguards (neither does mine for the record).
However you take having children off this spectrum entirely by proposing a rule I don't agree with:
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't see why the fact that harm can be absolutely prevented in an instance makes it more valuable to prevent than harm that can be partially prevented. You make it a qualitative difference when it is a quantitative one in every other scenario.
I'm afraid I didn't get a chance to properly read your previous response (other than to spot that this one is a slightly edited version), so consider it ignored (by chance).
Quoting khaled
Yes. Oddly enough, even though I don't have the same ethical system as you, this is very much the picture that I come to also. For me it's more about duty derived from natural virtues, than it is about reducing harms. I know we could get into these differences, but all I really wanted to point out here is that it's noteworthy that our two, quite different approaches, have landed on a similar outcome. Although it may be nothing but a meaningless coincidence, of course.
Quoting khaled
Yes, I think that's right (within your system). It's one of the reasons why I don't hold with that system alone, it leads to conclusions I find unpleasant, so I assume something must be wrong somewhere. I use my sense of what 'feels' right a lot in ethical decisions, partly because calculating it rationally is fraught with potential errors, and if I went against my gut but later found I was wrong, I'd feel worse than if I went against my calculation but later found it was right. I don't know why.
Quoting khaled
(I like 'CN' - good coining of a term!). Yes, whichever angle you approach this it seems to lead to the same outcome and I think that's fundamentally because we are a social species whose reproduction of new generations is continuous, rather than sporadic. If either of those two factors didn't exist I'd have a much harder time arguing against AN on their own terms. If we all got together at some point and said "shall we have another generation?", then I can well imagine ANists being at that meeting making a strong case for "no", but as that's not what happens, the arguments don't really apply.
The same critique does apply to negative utilitarianism. There's no universal metric to measure harm, and therefore one cannot actually compute harms. So the whole idea of 'bean counting life' like this is at best shoddy theory, at worse an illusion.
There's a story about a zen farmer whose horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically. "We'll see," the farmer replied.
A few days later, the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How lucky you are," the neighbors exclaimed. "We'll see," the farmer replied.
The following day, the farmer's son tried to tame one of the wild horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. "We'll see," the farmer replied.
The day after, a recruiting sergent came to the village to draft young men into the army for a war. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out for his family.
"We'll see," said the farmer.
For the reason I wouldn't make a society of life guards to defend the public or cannabilize a person from the next tribe to help my tribe out.
Quoting khaled
As is the case with the life guard recipients and cannibals.
Quoting khaled
Because in the procreation decision, there is only one way to violate dignity- overlooking harm of that person for any other reason. The person does not exist, so anything outside considerations of harm violate the dignity. However, if someone exists, that person has interests etc. once born. Presumably, those interests are things like not drowning. It starts getting complicated in terms of what "violation of dignity" means for people with interests, needs, wants, experiences, and the like. That is a qualitative difference, not one of degree.
But you would wake up the life guard. How come? This is a quantitative difference. You only make it qualitative in the one case by giving harm done to people that aren't here yet special value over harm done to people that are here.
Quoting schopenhauer1
False. What about overlooking harm of the people in the room for that one person? What's the difference here?
Quoting schopenhauer1
That I don't think should matter. Just because my child isn't born yet, doesn't mean he gets special treatment in the calculation.
For the same reason that just because the lifeguard wasn't doing anything wrong doesn't mean he gets special treatment in the calculation. I won't absolutely abstain from harming the lifeguard at any cost just because he did nothing wrong. And neither would you, as you would in fact wake him up.
That's not the critique I'm talking about. I'm talking about the "Colosseum" argument. "How many spectators must there be in the Colosseum before their pleasure from watching someone get mauled by a lion justifies having someone get mauled by a lion". We don't have Colosseums anymore so I changed it to bullying.
Incidentally, this also applies to pleasures. And you are supposed to be calculating with both.
Quoting Olivier5
I know the story. However it is crazy to use it as a justification for stealing people's horses. There may not be a universal metric here but we can make pretty good guesses on which is more harmful, to steal or not to steal.
And, again, you supposedly use both harms and pleasures in your calculations, even though there is no universal metric to measure them by. Doesn't stop you though does it? So why use a critique that can be used against your own position?
Quoting khaled
Because you are pinning the people born back to violating harm as the only way to overlook dignity. You don't look out for certain interests of people already born, like letting them die, you are violating the dignity. It's the same thing as a parent who needs to make sure the child is doing stuff that doesn't kill them or makes them survive better in society. However, in deciding on procreation, harm is the only consideration for that child, not whatever else you might want to "see" happen from its birth.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That is what I do when I consider the people in the room.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is the exact point I disagree with.
Because it leads to things like: The lifeguard did nothing wrong, therefore when considering whether or not to wake him up, the only consideration is harm for that lifeguard, not whatever else you might want to "see" happen from waking him up. Anything else is violating the lifeguard's dignity.
Point is you consider it fine to violate dignity sometimes, and to consider harms outside of the lifeguard. Why not the child?
In other words, how many spectators must there be in the Colosseum before their harm reduction from watching someone get mauled by a lion justifies having someone get mauled by a lion.
It's the same idea: one cannot measure the harm made to John and compare it with that made or avoided to Peter. That's what I mean when I say, in mathematical terms, that there's no metric there. One cannot measure and add up the feelings of several people.
Does the life guard exist? Does the child exist? Their interests are more than "not being woken up". A child not born, has no such interests like "not dying". Rather, it becomes a much more stark, "Do not enable harm, if it can be prevented".
Edit: rephrase "a child not born" to fit the linguistic threshold of making sense.. ya know what I meant.. in other words.
Depending on the circumstances, there may be cases where stealing a horse would be the right thing to do. But that's not what the tale means. It means (to me at least) that a joy or a harm are transient, and one can be intimately tied with the other in a cause to effect relationship. So don't count your beans too soon, or too often, like the neighbours keeping a tally day after day. These things go up and down, like a pendulum, or ying yang style.
In other words, you can't actually compute harms and joys because the story never ends, and is not predictable. One thing leading to another, an event that looks good as and when it happens may lead to unsavory consequences later, and vice versa something that feels wrong or painful can help cause a good (or harm reductive) consequence later, and nobody can tell for sure. We're all guessing. And even if you reduce the computation to the negative, any joy can be described as 'harm reduction' thus it doesn't help.
Yup.
Quoting Olivier5
Sure.
Quoting Olivier5
But the point is to not guess ridiculously. I can't justify killing someone because "maybe it's actually gonna be a good thing later". ANs think that guessing that having children is fine is akin to that, is guessing ridiculously.
Though I'm not sure why I'm even arguing with you anymore tbh seeing as I don't agree. I think I'll stop now.
I don't think it should matter. Never have. I don't think that just because the child doesn't exist his suffering gets special value in the calculation.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But that IS one of their interests. But you consider more than just their interests and so wake them up, for a purpose outside of themselves. But refuse to do the same with the child because the child doesn't exist yet, but again, I don't think that should matter.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't agree that "enabling harm" is the problem as I said. If it was then having a child who would lead a perfect life would be wrong, because harm is still being enabled there.
And I think that's ridiculous, as an absolute statement. I think sometimes it may be "guessing ridiculously" (whatever the threshold for that is), and sometimes not.
I do. If the lifeguard can prevent all harm for a future person, then he should. No other things are required to consult. But I don't think ethics involves aggregation when considering something that does not exist yet because that is a case, where one does not have to ameliorate but rather, where one can prevent all suffering for someone else.
Quoting khaled
The issue multiplies exponentially once born. It isn't a simple if/then, as no "one" exists prior to existence. The only consideration here that would violate what would be the child's dignity is putting anything above harm, as there is nothing to "ameliorate" for the child.
Once born, we ameliorate all the time to survive. We might make lesser harm for a greater good. Honestly, this seems like classical trolley problem as applied to AN. Does the individual count that you are harming? I am saying, while the aggregate could matter due to the constraints of being alive with interests, no such thing is the case for considering a future child who is not born.
Who cares? There are people in the room. Similar to how you didn't care about violating the lifeguard's dignity because there is a person in the water. But we're just going around in circles now, the main disagreement is this:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Your premise that if all of the suffering can be prevented then that somehow makes it "special" in comparison to partial suffering prevention.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Of course.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is just bizarre to me. Who cares if the child doesn't have interests? The lifeguard didn't have an interest in saving anyone either (because he was sleeping). But you didn't care. Once he woke up, he probably would, but that's not an argument for the same reason that "Once the child is born he probably would like life" is not an argument.
But for some reason, the child not existing makes his interests "special" and impositions on him worse than on anyone else.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Don't know what to say. However, recruiting someone into the game with suffering so that I can help the people already in the game is a no go. The lifeguard is already in the game. Sleep is not being not born.
The problem I find here is that these analogies often create a false narrative. They are useful to a point, and then they don't become illustrative but obfuscating. You have somehow narrowed a lot of arguments I've made into a lifeguard that is woken up. A clever trick, but it's like summing up someone's whole life story in a one liner joke.
Before I was born, did I have a right not to be born?
There was no you, but could someone have prevented harm by not having what could have been you? Would you have been born to be deprived of anything "good"?
You're not going to answer the question?
There was no you with a right to not be born prior to your birth. Once you are born, then a violation has occurred as unnecessary harm could have been prevented.
A violation of what?
The principle to not cause unnecessary harm on someone else's behalf.
I'm sorry, the English there seems a little garbled.
Do you mean something like, "Don't hurt people if you don't have to" -- where "have to" is a pretty high bar to clear -- or maybe just "Don't hurt people if you can avoid it"?
I guess the latter.
This is about the parents then, right? When you say, "a violation has occurred", you mean someone has violated this principle. They hurt someone when they could have avoided hurting them; they could just choose not to be parents.
To be clear though, having a child is not generally a malicious act. The parents-to-be don't intend to hurt anyone by having a child, certainly not their offspring-to-be. There may be horrifying exceptions, but generally not, right? They may even think they're doing something good, and in particular doing something good for the future offspring.
Of course people can do evil believing they're doing good, no question. On your view, people who have children and think it's a good or at least an unobjectionable thing to do fall into this category, yes?
The principle, then, will not excuse someone for performing a harmful act they didn't have to just because they didn't intend the harm that results, right? It's not about your intentions, but about consequences. Is that right?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Maybe I shouldn't have made this sound like such a sharp dichotomy.
We can all agree on "Don't be cruel" -- don't deliberately hurt people when you know exactly what you're doing, what the results will be, and you don't have to -- but we'd probably also all agree an even better rule would be "Don't be cruel or callous": we want people to pay attention, to be aware of how their actions affect others. Even if you lack the specific intention of hurting someone, being indifferent to whether you're hurting them is also pretty bad. We have general expectations, that you will know the sorts of things most people know, that you will recognize when you're hurting someone.
That's not purely about your intentions or purely about the consequences of your actions, so there's some middle ground available, and where I'd figure a lot of us land.
Yes agreed.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But harming the people in the game for the sake of other people in the game is fine?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Because I needed to keep reestablishing that you find it fine to harm people for the sake of other people in the game, to show that you need an extra premise to take having children off the spectrum. That premise being, that for some reason they get special value in the calculation because they aren't born yet.
Around the edges, I'm not sure what to say. Cruelty is dead center, certainly. And there is a sort of genuine and committed callousness that's practically cruelty -- I don't know because I don't care, doesn't matter to me if I hurt someone. And there's every degree of indifference from there down to perhaps blameless lack of knowledge. Even the judgment of whether you "should have known better" will vary a bit, maybe sometimes a lot. For instance, a lot of white folks are pretty stupid about race, but if you get out in the world or see the news much at all, you don't have much excuse for that ignorance.
So parents are somewhere in here, right?
Most people don't think having children is wrong because they don't think having a child hurts anyone. In fact, that's pretty clear from the exceptions, I'd think: if you worry that your family can't support a child, or that you may be incapable of taking care of one, you may think it would be wrong to have one, or others may think that about you, and similarly if your community or your country is poor, or in the middle of a civil war, etc., then it might be common to think that having a child is not in itself wrong, but wrong given the circumstances.
I think those sorts of judgments might even be pretty common: that wonderful couple is having a child, hurray; that awful couple is having a child, I feel sorry for that kid; and so on.
Take just an average couple, let's say decent people, and with the resources to raise a child; as far as they're concerned, and the people that know them, there is nothing in their circumstances that would make having a child wrong. No guarantees -- maybe both parents will die in a car crash and the children will be miserably orphaned. Since that's not the sort of thing anyone can foresee, no one would blame them for having children even if that's what lies in the future. That's very far out on the rim from callous indifference, and way past "you should have known". No one knows the future.
I mean, if people are going to say, "We shouldn't have kids" or "They shouldn't have kids", they're going to want something specific, something concrete to support such a claim. Poverty, illness, civil war, "you're a whore and your husband's a drunk" -- something specific.
So what do you have in a typical case like this? What do you know that they don't?
That's totally unfair. You've not been 'talked over'. No-one's cut you off mid proposition and @khaled has dissected your posts practically sentence by sentence. Look back over the responses Khaled has given. Every single point you make has been addressed, and if you disagree with any of those points, or if you think any specific point has not been addressed you've had ample opportunity to just say so. If you can't argue your case it's either because your case is weak or because you're not expressing it well. It's just absinthian to dismiss all that as 'a clever trick'.
But, on the off-chance that I'm wrong, let's have the full justification. Quote the sections of @khaled's responses to you that you think have qualified his approach to be dismissed as 'a clever trick', so that we can all see the underhand deception he's trying to get away with, because to the rest of us it looks like an intelligent, dedicated, patient, unabusive, and diligent dissection of your argument.
This sounds far more 'real' as a situation than a lot of the metaphors and wild computations evoked on this thread, lifeguard included.
Another real-case moral dilemma related to the consequentialist arguments put forth on this thread, is about a mother discovering that her fetus is suffering from a grave genetic disease or disability. Should she abort or proceed with the pregnancy? I don't know the correct answer, if there's one. But that is a real life question, unlike "Should Adam and Eve procreate?"
Similarly, in India many female fetuses get aborted because having a son is seen as leading to better consequences for the child and the family. Is abortion based on the sex of the fetus a moral course of action? I don't think so, even if the families doing so would be absolutely certain that a girl would suffer more than a boy.
I would go as far as to say that if she is pro-choice, her not doing so is outright wrong.
Quoting Olivier5
I don't mind it. If abortion is considered not harmful then why you do it shouldn't matter.
Because that's treating human life as a commodity. If the market values boys more than girls, the supply of girls is reduced until such a time when the market will reassess the value of girls due to their rarity compared to boys.
I guess my problem with that (and other forms of eugenism) is that I disagree with the view that the 'desirability' of a human life should be assessed purely based on its likely market or social worth, or any other material consideration of future consequences.
I don't think the market or society is a good judge of future genetic fitness, or future happiness levels for that matter. If you allow parents the choice of their children eye and skin color, many will chose 'perfect kids' with fair skin and blue eyes. And yet if ever the earth ozone layer rips off, even a little, the added UV will kill these 'perfect people' with fair skin and blue eyes faster than the rest... High levels of melamine is a genetic strength yet put you at a social disadvantage.
I don't think so. This has a lot to do with the heuristic we are using to analyze the moral case. You are using a purely aggregate heuristic and I am using a dignity violation one. This is the same reason I don't like the "world exploder" argument for AN. Imagine you were to end all life painlessly (and harm) with a big red button. To press that button would, in aggregate prevent the most harm, let's say. But what is it about this argument that doesn't sit right? Something to do with things like rights and consent. They are alive, they have interests, they have ideas, and feelings, and dignity. It's of course, not all about preventing harm at all costs. It is more about how one treats the people being affected.
So as far as how dignity is applied in the two cases- not born and already born:
Once born, there is an inevitable utilitarian element because there are already interests of people that will be violated. There is already someone who has an interest not to die. This utilitarian element takes the form of balancing harms with each other to look out for each other's interests.
So with this in mind, the drowning boy has an interest to not die. The lifeguard has an interest to keep sleeping. So "dignity" in this case is not just purely surveying harm above anything else. In the world of already born, the interests of the people involved are a complex, relation of balancing. To protect people's interests we have certain duties to each other.
However, in the case of the child not yet born, indeed, there is no person who exists for which there are interests of things like "not dying" needs to be protected. This person is not in the "room" to have anyone look out for his interests and he look out for there's. However, in this case, there is a perfect opportunity to not cause harm to that person who will exist, and that opportunity can be taken. Not only that, but you are not only preventing harm, you are preventing that person from having to be in a situation of being compromised like the people that already exist. Here is a case where no "one" exists to experience ALL the harms of existence. Indeed, anything beyond this would be violating this for some other consideration, like preventing aggregate harm. It would never escape the fact that this person would thus be used, because there was no interests beforehand for which there needed any amelioration to take place for this person. It is purely for a reason outside of the person in question where people already born are a balance between all parties.
Quoting Olivier5
Well, I think I disagree with you on most things, but as far as arguments like @khaled that use aggregated harm as a basis, this indeed does become the case. People are "used" for their market value, purely, and without any reason as there is no person prior to their existence to have mitigating harms to reduce. Rather, the people already born do have interests of to ameliorate and reduce harm for each other. One is a case of being completely used, one is a case of relative use once already born for each other's mutual interests that the people born presumably have by being humans surviving in the world.
There's a lot of stuff already discussed in this thread, so anything I say now is liable to be taken as the sum of all arguments I have made.. So keeping that in mind, let me get you a "piece" of the philosophy..
The person being born is like being "kidnapped" into a game that you either must keep playing or kill yourself. It indeed is the "only game in town", but does that justify putting someone in the game?
Also, here is a case where you could have prevented ALL harm to a future individual. Why would it be good to NOT prevent ALL harm when one could have? Why would you make a decision that will enable the conditions for ALL harm for someone else? On top of the axioms there, there is another axiom of not using people because clearly any answer you give seems to be unjustified.. YOU want to see something play out. SOCIETY wants to see something play out. etc.etc.
I'm familiar with the, let's face it, abstract argument. I know the analogies.
But you want to tell typical folks considering having a child that they ought not, that to do so would be wrong. What will you say?
Won't they promise to do everything they can to protect their child from harm until they're able to protect themselves? Do they have to provide you an absolute guarantee that the child will never suffer so much as a skinned knee or an afternoon's boredom or a broken heart?
If that's your approach, I don't think you'll be taken seriously. Are you actually interested in convincing anyone not to have children?
BY PHILIP LARKIN
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Among those interests figures the desire to perpetuate and transmit something, a culture, a way of life, a heritage, to leave something behind, rather than fade quietly into the night.
But then you are contradicting yourself as far as using people. Look at my argument above regarding that in the case of the future child (as opposed to people who already exist and actually have interests). It is never for the sake of the child, and all harm will befall it, putting it into a game it could not ask for.
Not the way I see it. You admitted that waking up the lifeguard is a violation of dignity right? Yet you are fine with doing so.
You seem to be using an aggregate heuristic for people that exist, and a "violation of dignity" heuristic for people that don't. As in, once you exist, it's fine for your dignity to be violated left and right if it is to prevent sufficiently greater suffering. But before you exist, the initial violation is for some reason a tier above the others and is completely taboo.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Not in the way I define it. Harming someone is simply doing to them something they don't want done to them. Most people don't want to die.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Neither were there any for the lifeguard. The lifeguard didn't have an interest in saving anyone before you woke him up. But you didn't care because there was a boy drowning.
Yet you refuse to apply the same logic in the case of birth. The "unborn person" (you know what I mean) has no interests, but when I say "But I don't care because there are people in the room" you bring up that the child is not born yet, which is supposed to matter for some reason.
Quoting schopenhauer1
False. There was no balancing between parties for the lifeguard. You favored one party (the drowning boy) completely over the other (the lifeguard). You used the lifeguard for a reason purely outside of himself. There is no getting around that.
But you refuse to apply the same logic for having children. Which I think is fine, but you need to make it explicit that you consider the initial violation for some reason much more grave than all the others. Because that is a premise you require for your argument. You need it to matter whether or not the person whose dignity is being violated exists yet. Because that is the only difference between the lifeguard situation and birth. Unless you can show some other difference.
Answered that here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Also here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting khaled
Okay, but this is an example of aggregate above dignity of people already existing.
Quoting khaled
For the reasons I highlighted above, but will put here again to reemphasize:
So with this in mind, the drowning boy has an interest to not die. The lifeguard has an interest to keep sleeping. So "dignity" in this case is not just purely surveying harm above anything else. In the world of already born, the interests of the people involved are a complex, relation of balancing. To protect people's interests we have certain duties to each other.[/quote]
Also here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting khaled
False. I balanced the harm done to the lifeguard against the harm done to the child. The life guard being "in the room" has interests that can be balanced against others now. There is no one "in the room" whose interests are balanced or needs to ameliorate or be ameliorated.
Quoting khaled
I believe I have again here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
And probably better stated here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
But you refuse to balance the harm done to the child vs the harm done to the people in the room. Why? Because the child isn’t born yet? I don’t see that as an important difference. And I can’t detect any other difference in your responses. And if that’s the only difference you go by then I think we won’t get anywhere. I don’t think it matters but you do.
I don’t have a problem with using people for the sake of other people. I have a problem with using people for “causes” like “for the country” which are abstractions that cannot suffer, so shouldn’t be considered when talking about morals.
But you also clearly don’t have a problem with using people for the sake of other people, or else you would not have woken up the lifeguard. It’s not the case that having children is “using someone” and waking up the lifeguard is not. They’re both cases of using someone for something outside themselves. So your problem cannot be with that. Your problem is with using someone that doesn’t exist yet for a purpose outside themselves. But again, I don’t care if the person to be used is here now or not.
In not drawing a sharp distinction there, you join both the pro-life movement and @schopenhauer1, who are comfortable extending concepts like "rights" and "dignity" to persons who not only don't exist but may never exist.
Because the people alive already have an interest. You are now introducing an interest (and ALL harms for a person) in order to resolve problems for people in the room. The people in the room already HAVE interests and are already harmed) so the balancing of interests in a society takes place.
No. I don’t mean it literally. Me and shope understand each other. And I didn’t say anything about rights or dignity, those were introduced by him.
The lifeguard did not have an interest to save the person in the water. But you didn’t care. It is true that the lifeguard had interests in general, but the only way to NOT have any interests or intentions is to not exist. So the difference again boils down to: “Is the person to be harmed born yet? if so, it becomes wrong to do unilaterally, if not it’s ok to balance”. Which I disagree with. Because it is special pleading.
I never said anything about using people. People use one another constantly. It's called a society. What I object to is any materialist computation of the worth or desirability of a human being.
First off, just as a meta-analysis of this whole debate, I sometimes lose track of my own argument(s) when it goes on this long and takes this many avenues. I just hope you can understand that at some level. Some posters on here just want to gnaw your face off no matter what, so they wouldn't care, but I think that is important because these debates become very modular really coming down to the last thing someone says rather than referencing 20 pages earlier. That takes too much time to reference all the time. In a traditional debate you have either a set time or it's done in a series of articles, but since this is continuous, you can keep on going and going, and there is no finality. I am not saying that's bad as obviously I keep going back to the debate forum, but I just want us to keep that in mind a meta-level of how these online debates go.
Anyways, keeping that in mind and knowing we are now in this particular phase in these debates, I would say that looking back at my axioms we have here an idea of "Don't cause unnecessary harm to another person if you don't have to". I related this to the idea of "dignity". So this becomes an interesting distinction between for me between what happens after birth and prior to (possible) birth. So I think that the caveat that we are stuck on is "if you don't have to". You are applying that to the whole picture. Everyone is aggregated in your view when applying this. Thus, the child being born is "necessary" for you because it might cause some "net positive" (this is assuming we can even calculate that which is another problem). However, "if you don't have to" in my argument is more connected to "person-affecting" view. That is to say, each individual is the target of "if you don't have to". While born, "if you don't have to" involves the community as well as the individual. But that does not mean I don't discount the people involved. Quite the contrary, if I took a baseball bat and whacked the lifeguard to wake him rather than nudge him, that would indeed be unnecessary. I am weighing some harm at a community level, but I am not completely ignoring the lifeguard's dignity as well. It was necessary for the drowning victim to be saved to respect his dignity, but that does not mean I can do anything I want to the lifeguard, and that his dignity is completely ignored.
However, in the case of the not yet born, what does "unnecessary" mean? Well, it would be unnecessary to bring about a whole lifetime of pain to ameliorate the people who already exist. Rather, to respect the dignity of the child, I would not put any of those considerations above the idea that I am enabling a lifetime of harm onto the child because maybe he would cure cancer or be someone's friend in the future. Rather, that would indeed be purely using that person for that cause. Notice in the case of the already born, that the weighing of dignity has to consider each person's interests and balance them against each other for the least violation of dignity. However, there is no "person" in this case to weigh these interests in this scenario. Rather, all we can do is apply the logic to its absolute logic of "don't cause unnecessary harm if you don't have to'. We are not weighing any mitigating factors here because there is no "person" who is the target for this. We are purely, that is to say, "absolutely" creating from "scratch" ALL instances of harm for a person rather than mitigating and ameliorating something.
And here is the important thing, we are actually creating the less absolute scenario of having to put someone in a position to have to need mitigation and amelioration in the first place. Now, you did put someone in the position where they will have to compromise, balance, and mitigate against other people. Now, instead of no new person who has to be a part of this "game" is recruited a new player, who has to play the game. That would be violating his dignity once born.
So there is a sense that each case needs to be looked at for "unnecessary harm". In the case of the not yet born, "unnecessary" becomes "not being born into harm" as it was unnecessary at the level of hte interests of that person for that person to be brought into the game. In the case of those who exist, unnecessary becomes "least amount of violation when possible to play the game". The lifeguard, being in the game of life already, has to already play by the rules of the "human survival/living in society" game. So, this compromises "absolute" rule of not violating dignity, but relativizes it to "the least amount of unnecessary suffering for that individual's dignity while balancing the other's people dignity". It becomes intricately caught up in playing in the game of survival in the social sphere. No such need exists prior to actually bringing the person into the world, and thus the absolute and ideal following of the rule would be the de facto application of the "Don't create unnecessary harm to someone else if you don't have to". No amelioration needs to take place for that person to balance against other people unlike the lifeguard and people already born.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting schopenhauer1
Is the disagreement. The distinction between what “unless necessary” means for before and after birth is what I don’t get.
Quoting schopenhauer1
We are doing both.
Yes that is the main distinction here.
Quoting khaled
But there is no "one" prior to birth that is part of that has interests that have to be ameliorated. The only people that have interests are the people already in the game. So I guess "dignity" for something with "no interests" (currently) is "Continue to not enable condition of any harm or that would be a violation". Once born, there are interests that are mitigated against other people because both have interests that can be ameliorated and balanced (currently).
If you are right, then the concept of euthanasia is absurd.
We are currently having a similar debate here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/525114
I have to disagree.
In some theoretical and hypothetical Utopia we can think, that life doesn´t cause suffering. But that´s Utopia, not the real world.
Antinatalism, however, as policy is totalitarian, almost theocratic (pace Mainländer). Eliminating the human species in order to eliminate human suffering is a reductio as insipid as "destroying the village in order to save the village". This means undermines its ends. Antinatalist fundies seem incorrigibly blind to this point; they've somehow lost the ethical plot – maximal reduction of suffering for already born sufferers – which has the distinct advantage of being desired by the vast majority of people (et al).
Actually that is a very good response to @180 Proof
But as you point out, much of antinatalism is a sub-section of overall philosophical pessimism. Fundamentally, the problems are incorrigible. If you don't believe in throwing people into a game you can only escape with self-harm, if you don't believe in exposing new people to suffering.. that is the conclusion. Certainly though, giving to charity and helping out people in some capacity is noble to reduce harm, but that doesn't negate the causes that antinatalists focus on.
As @Gregory just stated, you think it narrow-minded that antinatalists have solely focused on their dissatisfaction with the current situation and its incorrigibleness, but the non-antinatalists have not focused on it enough.
I'll put it here too since you seem to want to espouse it in both threads.
Conception is unique - it's not like throwing people into a game you can only escape with self-harm because there are no 'people' whose will we can consider prior to birth (even a few months after birth there's not a sufficiently complex will for such a consideration), so contrary to what you say it is not the inevitable conclusion for people who do not like throwing people into a game you can only escape with self-harm. Such people may well hate throwing people into a game you can only escape with self-harm with a vengeance, but still consider the unique situation of having a child to be morally acceptable.
There are no other circumstances where the person who would experience that which we expect for them does not exist to be asked (or have their will considered) in our lives. Birth is the only one. So we have no intuition on the matter other than the one we use for birth, and that is 99.999999% in agreement that it's morally acceptable.
In fact, the closest we get to it in other aspects of life is resuscitation, and here we almost universally make the assumption that the person would want to live.
Not at all because in euthanasia there is still a population of humans living in a world with less suffering in it as a result. The completion of the hard antinatalist program results in a world where the absence of suffering is of no consequence at all because there are no humans to enjoy living in a world without it.
It's simply not dire or exigent enough for natalists (or conscientious antinatalists) to advocate wholesale human extinction.
Let´s assume there is entity called God. God created the world. God created also two billion human beings to live in the place called Hell. Living in Hell is living in extremely miserable place forever.
Let´s assume there is an alternative option. God didn´t exist. There was a world. And there were no people or place called Hell.
Are you saying that both scenarios are analogous?
The world without people suffering was not better world than the Hell?
(Because there were no people to enjoy the absence of suffering.)
Yes, that's right.
It's just nonsensical to say the alternative would be 'better'. 'Better' is judgement, a state, of a human mind, without the human mind to contain the judgement it simply can't exist. It has no mind-independent existence such that it would still be 'better' even if there were no person to hold that thought. 'Better' in whose opinion?
That kind of thinking reminds me from some comments on language theory.
Some people say there are no non-linguistic thinking (Temple Grandin would disagree).
But at least in some cases the language acts as a nomination.
Therefore there could be values without the valuer.
Or at least there could be anti-values.
Lots of things could be. The important question is whether they need be, how useful it is to assume they are, what problems arise if we do etc.
So with values (without a valuer) - what advantage does seeing things that way give us? If it does give advantages, what are the disadvantages and are they sufficiently outweighed? Where would the values reside and what form would they take? If a value can exist without a valuer, then what happens when the values we know exist with a valuer contradict them?
I can see more problems than are worth it with a dualistic realm of 'values', but if you've got a good defence of the concept I'd like to hear it.
Sure. If people don't buy the argument, it's not worth beating them in the head with it.
In his case, however, I don't think it's possible to distinguish his anti-natalist views from his own way of being or personality. I'd have trouble believing he did not suffer from very severe depression.
It's not at all to imply that because of his outlook, his views are wrong. Not at all. But I can't help but wonder how he would have been had he not been a tragic case. Maybe he would not have written his philosophy.
It's interesting that such a person can elaborate extremely interesting and insightful epistemological and metaphysical philosophies because of his conclusions about the origin of existence. Yet one can reject his conclusions while accepting his other arguments. But he would not have elaborated this arguments absent his nihilism. It's very strange.
Maybe there are optimistic AN perspectives in that, one can be an optimist about the future while thinking that not being born would have been better. Maybe.
Let´s call the Hell scenario as Scenario A, and let´s call the alternative option, where nobody exist, as Scenario B.
You say it is nonsensical to say the alternative would be "better".
Let´s assume that in Scenario B comes a time, when Hell simple disappears, and also all people in it (so the Hell wasn´t eternal after all). But one bystander remains alive. His life is mixture of joy, despair, pleasure, some pain - but nothing like Hell. Some midlife crisis etc. now and then. Some rainbows to look for.
According to your logic, this one bystander makes the Scenario B better than the Scenario A.
And when this bystander dies, according to your logic, we cannot make separation for these Scenarios.
We could not say the Scenario B is better than A, vica versa.
Quoting Manuel
Maybe so, but I agree with Camus: There are no optimists (or pessimists) in foxholes; only the courageous survive and thrive from the struggle. Amor fati.
Honestly, this is the fuckn shit that makes me not want to answer you. Do not "throw sand in my face" before you make your argument. Just make your argument. How many times do I have to tell you about etiquette. I made a whole thread on insults if you want to use it for reference. This is on here because I saw someone else wanted to open this thread and of course I am interested in the topic. Stop being so aggro bro ;).
Quoting Isaac
Right, and my point is that its seeming uniqueness, is not different. It is another case, just with a time displacement from conception to birth or whatever other place you want to consider "valid" (consciousness, self-consciousness, etc.). It doesn't change anything because of the displacement.
Quoting Isaac
I mean, I can then make a case that because this is so unique, it defies things like, "waking up the lifeguard to save the drowning child" because in this case the person is absolutely being used for X reason and never for its own sake being that it doesn't exist yet. Thus the suffering is completely unnecessary for that person, and there isn't even a greater harm for that person being ameliorated for a lesser harm. Again, completely causing conditions for unnecessary suffering upon that person born.
As you know, I am not advocating for wholesale human extinction other than people choosing not to procreate. We may be closer then.. I would say it's "anatinatalism at the margins". Once you get to the "World-Exploder" things like that, it is not antinatalism proper, if you ask me- it's some form of radical negative utilitarianism or some other broader philosophy. It certainly doesn't take into account the dignity of the individual person as I am trying to defend.
That is very complex case.
"It is logically absurd that a part – private life – is important and meaningful, but the whole – life in its entirety – is insignificant and dispensable." (Pentti Linkola)
The fact that private life is important and meaningful, which is also my point of view, is a state of affairs (or, to be more precise, the state of affairs affecting as the viewpoint of a certain creature), which is in relation to a state of affairs within another sphere of life. Regarding these values as ”good” is in some cases of course rational, but not unambiguously logical as such.
I want to point out here that I see value in life myself. It is also the case that life contains indirectly valuable things whose value is based on their instrumental value for life - if there were no life, there would be no need for these indirectly valuable things. One could even argue that life in general has value over non-life. Rational reasoning does not give any support to this argument. Anyone, who sees a contradiction in my position, correct me.
I want to emphasize, that I am antinatalist, not pro-mortalist. I´m not advocating terminate the life, which already exists.
A Linkola-spirited argument to this could be: "Only what is can have value. Non-life cannot have value." A possible response could be: "Maybe so, but similarly only what is can have non-value." And I mean this so, that suffering, which would be too well-known for too many, will appear at least in some cases as anti-value, very negative and sometimes as extremely bad things. Something to really avoid.
However, I accept a point of view that for some human being life could be better option than non-being. At least theoretically. But we could never reach any kind of certainty at any case, any circumstances, any place that life is better for any unborn, potential person.
Finally, nobody will absolutely (in word´s purest meaning) know is it better for human being born to this world or not. However, we know that if child will born to this world, her/his life could be painful, perhaps she/he will suffer really hard. And we also know that we make the decision for her/his life, the unborn child not having any kind of veto-prevention to ignition of her/his life, which she/he only has to live.
These are sufficient arguments not to reproduce, not creating human life to this world.
Cool insights. One can have two ideas in one's head at the same time. I bet you you can find some happy-go-lucky philosophical pessimists. Not all PPs are necessarily dispositional pessimists too.
Yeah, this is true. Camus point is rather fair concerning the present.
On the Sisyphus front, if it were for a few years sure but I mean, for all eternity rolling a up a rock. Damn. :meh:
Edit: Quoting 180 Proof
Nice story btw you linked in the previous post.
I did have a brief question, what do you mean here by "conscientious antinatalist"?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Not an insight, just a comment, would like to find an example of such a person. I was referring mostly to Mainländer.
But sure. One can also agree with Gramsci too in "Pessimism of the intellect. Optimism of the will." Or anything else.
I was looking for some support for that position. As it stands it's not a common intuition, nor have you given any reason why we should think this way. Putting the word 'just' in front of the thing you want to dismiss doesn't constitute an argument against it.
Quoting schopenhauer1
You can't invoke the person's dignity but not their interests. That's just selectively imparting properties on the hypothetical person. If e can consider their dignity on the grounds that they will soon have such a thing then we can consider their interests on the same grounds. Since most people wish to remain alive and happy we can assume those same hypothetical interests of the not-yet-existing child.
If you want to say that we can consider their dignity but not their interests you'll have to make that case.
We currently feel that the non-existence of the subject is sufficient ground to treat infractions against their hypothetical will very differently to infractions against the actual will of an existent person. You feel we should change that intuition to treat them the same. I'm asking why you think we should. All you've provided so far is that you think we should, not why.
Well no, they're not.
We know that if that child is not born we could also bring about much pain and suffering (in fact are much more likely to), so the pain/suffering argument doesn't work.
We do make the decision without consulting the child but we make decisions for people without consulting them all the time in life and consider it perfectly acceptable in many circumstances, so that argument doesn't work either.
I'm actually not sure what your problem with the idea of the cause being displaced from the consequent. You plant the device, and then it blows up later..
Quoting Isaac
Considering someone's interests by forcing X, Y, Z on them is still violating dignity/autonomy for X cause. Quoting Isaac
Actually not really. I think procreation is very different in a way. Once born, then we have to start weighing suffering against dignity violation and various thresholds. In the case of procreation, this is a case of extremely high degree of causing conditions for unnecessary suffering AND violation of dignity/autonomy. So this case isn't unique in it's being assessed by the rules, but rather to the degree to which the threshold is met for their violation.
I know it is hard for you to agree with my assessment because of this idea mainly:
If 75% of the lifeguards kidnapped identified with their game.. what's wrong with that? Am I right that this is pretty much in line with your greatest objection?
Quoting 180 Proof
Yeah, saw it.
But what does that mean? I understand the phrase "conscientious objector" in war time, but can't make out what it could mean in the antinatalist case.
The essential in this case is what is good for the child. If we think, for example, not having child will cause despair for child´s potential parents, we then use child as a mean - as an instrument for something - not as something valuable in itself (Immanuel Kant).
I´m not Kantian, but I have to agree with his assertion of the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as means.
Quoting Isaac
But having a child or not having a child is not a trivial everyday task, which doesn´t have any severe influences.
It´s a question about human life.
My conclusion about having a child or not having a child is not necessarily same as Benatar´s (the foundation of the argument). Here´s my conclusion:
The basic argument is as follows: we have no moral right to cause something that radically changes the existence of another individual or – to be more precise: from non-existence to existence or vice versa (in other words, from a non-individual/+ non-existence into existence or vice versa is also regarded as a change here), or to directly affect the existence of another human being if it is not possible to hear this individual in the matter.
OK.
So with harm the bad thing is harm. No harm can befall the non-existent child. But the child will be harmed in the future.
Now with deciding something for someone against their will. The bad thing is a decision being made for you against your will. That can't happen to the non-existent child, they have no will. When will that bad thing happen - the decision being made against their will?
Not at the time of conception (there's no will for it to be made against), not at any time after their conception (there's no decision to be made then). So when is the device you planted going to blow up?
With the breach of autonomy there is no cause and consequence. You don't breach autonomy at conception because there's no will to act against. You don't breach it any time after birth because there's no decision to be made against the now existing will.
Quoting schopenhauer1
No, not in the slightest. My objection is as above. When considering harms it is normal to weigh greater goods against them so that argument fails on its own. When considering dignity/autonomy there is no will to oppose at the time of the decision and no decision to be made once there's a will to oppose, so there's no consequence of one's actions to consider so far as dignity/autonomy is concerned. My actions now in conceiving a child will not result in a future situation where their will will be opposed in any but the normal ways we all accept already.
He is saying that it is a personal position but it should not be implemented as a Stalinist social directive.
I would say birth. You may place it at some sort of level of consciousness. That is when it goes off. There is now a will at that time, no? A decision was made that (eventually) affected that person born at that time.
Quoting Isaac
This seems like being born is just an inevitability. But as you know, I don't agree that autonomy is not violated by thinking in terms of the average way we look at future tense. Someone will have X, Y, Z happen due to this prior decision. Is a decision made for a person that affects them greatly? In this case, yes, a whole lifetime of the game of life and overcoming challenges is being imposed and assumed as good for another.
Yes this is along the lines of what I mean by "dignity/autonomy being violated".
Quoting Antinatalist
Yes, and I was arguing that the threshold is extremely high for both rules of unnecessary suffering and violating dignity.
Quoting Antinatalist
So I agree with this 100% but what they are going to do is say, "What is the foundation of this specific act"? They will say it is special pleading because in other cases, X, Y, Z causing harm or force on another is necessary... For example, would it be wrong to wake up a lifeguard to save a drowning child? It is "forcing" the lifeguard.. So my response for the foundations includes two rules:
Not violating dignity and Not creating unnecessary suffering. Both would violated in the case of procreation.
But honestly, being that there are only two cases of what you describe (changing states of existence) I don't see how this really has to apply by a broader rule anyways.
The only thing that someone may demand is why this is wrong, in which case you may need a broader rule that explains why there is no moral right to cause something to change the existence of another individual.
Let´s compare the act, having a child, with another question on existence, the termination of life.
Let´s assume that an adult human being seems to outsiders in their right minds to be willing to die and to clearly and unambiguously state “Kill me!” Is this sufficient justification for killing this human being? Juridically surely not, but what about ethically? In my opinion, NO. I believe that a vast majority of people hopefully agree with my view (even though this is no basis for justifying the value of the action).
Nonetheless, in the above example case, the actor has more information on the tendencies of the object of the action than in the example on bringing about life – i.e. in the active deed that aims at creating a new human being, a child. Hence, there is some information available on the desires and intentions of the object of "mercy killing". As for the object of conception, there is no information available on the desires of the(forthcoming) individual. This is also true in the likely case of the (intended) object of the action not existing yet. The fact that it is impossible to have this necessary information when creating
Quoting schopenhauer1
I agree.
Ah. Gotcha. Thanks.
What decision is made against a child's will at the time of birth?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yep, but no decision is being made at that time against it.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yep I agree. I was asking when a decision was made that went against there will, not when one was made that would eventually affect them. There's nothing morally wrong with making decisions that will eventually effect people, we do it all the time.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, that something will happen to then as a result of the decision is not in question, the 'bad' thing, the intuitively immoral thing here is making a decision for someone against their will. That is not something that's going to happen in the future.
The form of your argument about cause (bomb planting and bombs - as you delightfully put it) is
if B will cause A in the future, then B is morally bad.
where
A=bad outcome
B=action whose morality we're trying to establish
Substituting with future harms...
A=the child being harmed
B=conceiving a child
if {conceiving a child} will cause {the child being harmed} then {conceiving a child} is morally bad.
Substituting with making a decision for someone against their will (kidnapping to play a game)...
A=making a decision for someone against their will (kidnapping to play a game)
B=conceiving a child
if {conceiving a child} will cause {making a decision for someone against their will (kidnapping to play a game)} then {conceiving a child} is morally bad.
But conceiving a child does not cause, in future, a decision to be made against someone's will.
The best you can say is that a decision is made (to conceive a child) which might be against the will of that child if that child existed at the time and could express a preference). But since that contains a contingent which clearly is not the case, the situation it mitigates never arises.
This is what I mean by equivocating between harms and force. You can't use the 'will happen in future' argument that is associated with harms when talking about force because that is not something that will necessarily happen in future. The harm will happen in future, but the force won't.
Well, I'll bear that in mind next time I ask a cobbler to fix my shoe - 'must not use him as means to an end'. Don't know how I'm going to get this sole re-stitched, but still, we can't go around ignoring the half-remembered edicts of dead eighteenth century Germans now can we?
Quoting Antinatalist
So you're positing that there is a non-existent individual? You see the contradiction there?
Quoting Isaac
I think Kant´s point is still valid.
The cobbler has at least at some kind of choice, what she/he will do in the world in general. The forthcoming child has no choice, whatsoever.
Quoting Isaac
As a matter a fact I´m saying:
Scenario A: There is no individual as an object in the moment of the conception.
Scenario B: What we call "non-life" really isn´t non-life. In some kind of reality, there´s living an individual. She/he doesn´t exist in our world, but when the conception will happen, it starts the process that she/he will born to our world.
The Scenario B is very unlikely, I don´t believe it in myself. I think it is some kind of esoteric BS. But arguing years and years on the topic, I have thought and heard many unlikely scenarios. This one is one of them.
So, personally, I don´t believe there is a non-existent individual at the moment of conception.
Yeah, that wasn't your disagreement. You were trying to make an argument that because the decision was made prior to the "existence" of the person, it was somehow invalid because there was no "person" when the decision was made. So you admit that this argument is no longer worth pursuing, and I would agree with at.
Quoting Isaac
Yes I know what you are saying, but I disagree with it. When the child comes into existence and there was no way for the child to decide this, at that time the violation took place. The decision was made at which future time, the person's dignity was violated. If I do something in the past that causes something in the future to bring about a bad state of affairs, it is still a state of affairs. At conception there was no "person" (maybe), but at birth there is. How did the child become birthed? The decision and actions of the parent of course, and at that time of birth, those decisions and actions brought about the violation regardless if the decision was made in the past. The person did not get "birthed" magically by no action occurring prior. So your whole argument doesn't make sense when you claim:
Quoting Isaac
The decision was made which caused dignity to be violated at a future point. That is the point.
How was dignity violated at a future point? What is the dignity violating event that's happening at this future point?
Time 1: No state of affairs exists where a baby is in a net that I set in the sand, hidden.
Time 2: A baby is in now in the net.
Time 1 caused the violation at Time 2.
But being in a net is a bad thing, so we're talking about harms here not dignity. I accept that one can set up affairs such that some harm will befall another in the future (even if that other doesn't yet exist). I'm asking you about the dignity argument.
I can explain this better with your oft-used kidnapping example.
What's bad about kidnapping a person to play a game (even if you think the game is brilliant and they'll really enjoy it) is that you're treating them as if they didn't have a will of their own. Their own choices of their own free will have a value over and above how 'right' or 'wrong' those choices are (sometimes).
But we can't apply this to conception because there's no person to have a will, to possess their own choices, until after we've conceived them. A non-existent being doesn't have a will or make any choices of their own.
Once born they will have a will and choices of their own, but we're not doing anything to violate them by then. It's a one-off decision and it's made at a time when there's no will to violate by making it.
We're deciding whether to bring a will into existence, so we can't possibly be violating that will at the same time as deciding whether to create it.
Yes I get what you're saying and I can see why you might think that, but I think this is really the same as the causing unnecessary suffering rule.
Well first off let me acknowledge that I wasn't sure if dignity violated or suffering was a subsection of another, so this is something I am working out, the way I am using "dignity violated". However, I think it can be defended as a separate thing. I actually was thinking suffering would be a subsection of dignity violated but may be just a special case of suffering.. etc.
First is, if we are defining dignity as ONLY equating to autonomy of will, then this is still no different than the unnecessary suffering rule. At the time of birth, there is a person's will. That person does not exist in that situation by magic or fiat. Something put them in that situation. Once that situation has started, the dignity was violated. It doesn't matter that the act that caused the violation happened beforehand. Once there is someone experiencing the world, we have dignity being violated. Is there a "will" did this "will" have autonomy to be in the situation it finds itself in? No. That to me is dignity violated.
But here's the thing, I don't think "dignity" just covers autonomy of will, but a basic unfairness or injustice that might be more fundamental (you don't need a will involved at point A, let's say). That is to say, finding yourself in a game you cannot escape, and that was not of your doing, is an injustice.
However, both these things are sort of saying the same thing.. The injustice one finds oneself in, is basically also not having the ability to make a choice for the injustice one finds oneself in. So at the end of the day, it could be the same thing without much distinction.
Agreed. And if the very situation itself was overall negative then we'd have a problem, but since it isn't we've no problem at all ... yet.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is just plain wrong though. Once born, no dignity is being violated. You can't change the past. You're literally saying that a situation which occurred in the past changes once the kid is born in the future. For something which did not violate anyone's dignity at the time to change as a consequence of something in its future breaks the rules of causality. Something from the future cannot cause a change in the properties of something in the past. So if it wasn't a violation of dignity at the time (which it wasn't because no will existed to act against), then some future event can't change the circumstances of the past to make it something it wasn't.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That doesn't make sense. Autonomy only means anything when there is a will. The concept can't be applied to the pre-will possibility, you might as well apply it to a stone. Possibilities don't have wills. The act of conception is the act of creating a will, so it cannot possibly be judged against the autonomy of that will, nothing can will itself to be created nor will itself not to be, so there's no view on the matter to take into consideration (or unjustly not do so).
Quoting schopenhauer1
Most people don't think so, so just saying it is isn't going to be sufficient. You've said before that you can make your case from common intuitions. This isn't one.
To be harmed is to lose one's dignity.
Maybe, but I was referring to the specific use @schopenhauer1 made in his kidnapping for a fantastic game example. No-one harmed at all, but 'dignity' trespassed upon by ignoring the kidnaper's will.
So this is about procreation as entrapment: To procreate (here meant broadly, to conceive and carry a pregnancy to term) is to set up a trap for another being. The evil is in doing so intentionally.
I think this is actually a good enough point, but I don't think many people will be convinced by it, because when presented by this argument from entrapment, they could (secretly) be operating out of a belief "Others have done it to me, so I'm going to do it to others, as revenge" -- an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
It could be that for antinatalism to be more convincing to such a population, you'd need to first find a way for those people to forgive their parents for giving birth to them.
In this case, it's about the intention, and it's the intention that is evil. Setting a trap is already evil. The fact that nobody got trapped so far doesn't change the intention to set the trap, it doesn't undo the evilness of setting the trap.
Again, the focus on intention applies only insofar as people really carefully think through why they want to have children. (But which they usually don't seem to do, so the point is moot.)
Yep, agreed.
Quoting baker
Again, agreed.
Neither are the point at hand though, which is the argument for hard antinatalism.
So we definitely disagree there, because once the situation is "inescapable game, that 'hey you might like some aspects'" I believe there to be a problem, even if it has 'hey you might like some aspects' qualities". At that point, what other choice except suicide or slow death is there of course.. It's not like there's a button that we can just say.. "Next!".
Quoting Isaac NOpe.. but let's continue...
Quoting Isaac
The thing that occurred in the past is going to affect the person in the future..that developing fetus will become a person at some point. It's just like suffering.. I have a board ready to smack you in the head when a you step in a certain spot.. you step there, as intended, and it smacks you in the head...
At time T1, you are not on the spot.. no violation.. At time T2, nope.. T3 you step on the spot, smacks you in the head THERE is the violation.
Let's now make this dignity of lifeguard...
T1.. sitting there on the beach.. T2, sitting sipping a lemonade.. T3 wham.. Isaac has a net set, buried in the sand meant for the lifeguard to step on.. Isaac drags him to lifeguarding academy where he will sit there teaching his students.. At no point before T3 was there a state of affairs of dignity being violated.. Right at the time T3 is when the violation occurs. Yet the actions for this to take place happened prior to this state of affairs..
Now let's turn it up a notch..
Isaac has a machine that puts the lifeguard in and out of existence whenever he wants. All of these existences require some sort of challenge/overcoming challenges game-aspect for his prey/contestant/subject. At the moment a person was put into this scenario, that is the violation of dignity.. Could that person be asked whether they wanted to be in this game? Is it something less than a paradise for that individual and they weren't consulted? Was that individual put in a situation where he cannot easily escape? Then dignity threshold has been crossed.
Quoting Isaac
Doing an action that affects someone is messing with someone else's autonomy. Any point where someone's existential situation is assumed for them, would be a violation once someone exists to be the recipient of that existential situation. Besides which, I never originally defined dignity in terms of autonomy of will, so if that is a sticking point for you (because you limited it to this definition) then refer to my broader point here: As I said...Quoting schopenhauer1
These are like arguments people make with the definition of "is".. Was someone put in a situation that they could not control? Was this a substantial enough situation? Things like that.
Quoting Isaac
I think these ideas of fairness and injustice of kidnapping into a game are actually quite common. Rather, this application is what is not.
I mean forcing someone to work for you is wrong. However, people used to think certain people could be forced to work.. But this changed. They applied the same application differently.
"It's evil to act on evil intentions" -- this seems to be the basic argument for AN here.
"To intend to procreate is to set a trap for another person. Setting a trap is evil. To procreate is evil."
Yes, ?
I would agree with both of those statements, though let's parse out several things here:
1) Some people do not intend evil when they procreate, but they are setting up a trap nonetheless. They just feel the trap is not necessarily a "trap". Many of my posts argue that it is indeed a trap.
2) For the sake of argument, Isaac has at least acknowledged that one can cause the conditions suffering to another by procreation because an event at Time 1 can become harmful at Time 2. (This by the way is a huge acknowledgement, because of the main foundations for my AN is the not causing unnecessary suffering aspect).
3) However, Isaac is not willing to concede that my dignity argument is valid. He has (too narrowly) defined "dignity" as only to do with one's autonomy of will. He is saying thus, if there is no will that is being violated at the point of conception (because presumably there is no person with a will yet), then there is no autonomy of will violated, and thus no dignity violated.
4) My response has been two fold..
1. Even if there is no "will" at conception to violate, the instant someone is born into a game that is inescapable, that is the beginning of the dignity violation.
2. Even if we were to not agree to that scenario because there was no "will" prior, then the definition need not include "will" for dignity, just a general "injustice is being done". In this case the "injustice of being put into an inescapable game". That injustice would then be violating the person's dignity.
At no point was there any choice. There are no yet-to-be-born souls wishing someone would ask them. If people really truly don't want to be in the game any more, they can always opt out. For someone who really does not like the game, it would be nothing but a brief inconvenience. It would be ridiculous to argue that causing people minor inconvenience is immoral. The problem is that most people contemplating suicide do like the game, they just wish they could experience it without the pain they're feeling.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I've just explained how it's not like suffering and you've ignored all the arguments there and repeated the assertion. The bad thing in your example is being smacked by the board - that's the harm - and that is in the future - a consequence.
With making a decision against someone's will, the bad thing is ignoring a person's autonomy. That is not going to happen in the future, as a consequence of your actions. What's going to happen in the future is that someone is going to be created, with a will (that's not bad), someone will find themselves in a game they may or may not like, but that's just the harm principle again and so suffers from the same problem - we risk minor harms for people all the time for the greater good.
Quoting schopenhauer1
No person was put into the scenario. There wasn't a person beforehand.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yep, but since there is no person on whom the act of creating them is being performed this doesn't apply.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, this defies the law of cause and effect. You can't have a point where it's state is determined by some other point in the future. It's physically impossible.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I know. But without the dignity-as-will argument your point collapses because we do things to other people all the time for the greater good, taxes, punishments, schooling etc. You need the dignity argument to counter those. IF all you've got is life contains suffering and we shouldn't cause people to suffer without their consent then your argument's rubbish, we do that all the time and nobody thinks anything of it. It's clearly not a moral intuition at all.
The reason why we're here is because the only way you could answer @khaled's sleeping lifeguard example was to invoke a threshold of consequence above which we ought not act against someone's will. You can't revert now to arguments just about the harm principle, they've been lost already - life is mostly a good thing - most people enjoy it - having children creates more good than it causes harm, and if someone really truly doesn't like life, the way out is only a minor and passing inconvenience. The harm principle alone simply doesn't work with our common intuitions about harms. We cause people minor harms all the time for the greater good.
The reason I'm so strongly opposed to antinatalism is this. Underneath it is essentially the same hyper-individualist, neo-liberal bullshit that's rotting our civilisation at the moment. "I shouldn't have to suffer even the tiniest inconvenience to benefit others"...that's what I find so offensive. Peel away all the post hoc rationalisation and that's what you inevitably find underneath, just a plain old sociopathic refusal to suffer any inconvenience for anyone else's benefit.
Now you may well be an exception, and I really am trying to see how that could be the case. But the more evasive you are about the arguments, the more you return to things like the harm principle, the more difficult it becomes to believe that.
@schopenhauer1 has already dealt with the main substance of this so I won't repeat too much, but basically, yes, it is evil to act on evil intentions and yes, setting a trap is evil.
Life, however, is not like being caught in a trap. Life is generally perfectly nice, being caught in a trap is unpleasant. Life is useful to others whose intentions are morally neutral at worst, being caught in a trap is not useful to anyone whose intentions are morally neutral.
Basically you've just come up with an analogy which is unlike the thing you're trying to analogise.
Yeah, it's important to emphasise (and I should have been clearer in my post really), that I'm making a hypothetical argument. I don't really think there actually exist many people in that situation, of truly hating everything about life.
Most people who contemplate taking their own life do so at moments where the pain they're in is occupying too much of their thought for any rational weighing exercise to take place. It's often only temporary (which is why removing opportunities works) and it's almost never a result of having calmly balanced the harms against the benefits.
So that said, in @schopenhauer1's hypothetical example where life is seen as a game one might rationally decide one would simply rather not play, in that specific hypothetical, the way out is only a minor inconvenience. I'm not going to get into the methods.
The reason it seems an odd thing to say is that it's almost never the case, but that's because the person doesn't really want out of the game, they're glad there's a game, they just want the pain to go away. It's possible for that to happen. If, instead of being self-absorbed whingers (I'm referring to modern society here, not antinatalists specifically), we actually got out and helped each other, far fewer people would be in such pain.
Hear hear. Especially during these fucking lock downs, we need to take extra care of each other.
To other posters; my interest in debating antinatalism really goes up and down. Just two days ago when we're debating a point and someone's rebuttal is based on issues discussed years ago (getting into the metaphysical problems of ascribing states to non-existent people) my interest deflates to negative 100. I'm just reading at the moment.
So what, you're God?
For some (many?) people, life is like being caught in a trap. You can say that for you, it isn't; but for some, it is.
If I attribute weighting by assuming a 1 = -5, 2 = -4 etc. and starting from 6 =+1 up to 10 = +5, I get a weighted happiness score of +264.7. If we have no people, the weighted happiness score is equal to 0 (people) times whatever score you want to apply to it, equals 0. Therefore Dutch people should be fucking like bunnies.
Yes, indeed.
Quoting Benkei
I get what you mean. It is fascinating though, to me, the way beliefs interact with the articulation of them in the shared space. We create this 'public model' of what we believe which has a purpose, at times detached from the actual belief. Like the recent sentence "Once that situation has started, the dignity was violated." It can't possibly express an actual belief because it doesn't make sense (it's in the form 'some consequence of an event at time t2 causes the event at time t1 to change properties'). It's simply not possible to believe that and believe in normal causality. So what is it doing in the public model being constructed? Those are the interesting bits, the bist that keeps me posting, trying to figure out what the other person was trying to do psychologically, what their process is.
Nice that someone's reading though.
Quoting Benkei
Ha! Are they not already? (Everyone in the Netherlands is basically Marlon Brando to us repressed English stiffs, we think you're constantly at it. I've only known one Dutch person, the parent of a client - and she was apparently a sex therapist. Did little to undermine my prejudices I'm afraid!)
That must have happened when I wasn't looking. :cry:
On suicide.
The possibility of suicide of course exists. Once born, however, a human being is highly unlikely to have the sufficient skills to commit suicide before the age of five – often, in fact, not before turning ten or even fifteen. When this wish arises and the individual aims to fulfil it, surrounding people strive to prevent the suicide almost without exceptions if they only can.
Furthermore, a vast number of highly retarded people exist who, due to their condition, will never really be able to commit suicide. One must in any case consider the possibility of having to live a perhaps highly agonizing period of life before suicide, due to a choice – that of creating life – for which the individual him/herself is not responsible. And most importantly, not even suicide guarantees that the individual will achieve the state or non-state where s/he “was” before the decision of having a child was made. (Be it complete non-existence, for example.)
Non-existence is of course "state", where is no he or she.
This is metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. Nothing doesn't have properties or states. The ability for a thing to have a property presupposes that it exists.
That´s why I put the word "state" on quotation marks.
But this is of course where I say dignity is violated.. And we don't have to use the narrow definition of "will" either. Just the state of affairs of X will do (being trapped in a harmful game). The indignity is overlooking the person who will exist for some other cause, but in some egregious way. But what is this egregious way? It is a whole life time of playing this game of challenges/overcoming challenges, etc. That egregious overlooking is the indignity. It is the same as the lifeguard.
Now you can ask two things here, and I think it would be legitimate:
1) What would make something egregious?
2) Is there a sort of calculus where something meets that threshold?
I am trying to work out the intuitions.. because there is definitely something wrong with forcing the lifeguard into lifeguarding school EVEN if relatively speaking the lifeguard lives a "normal" life.. other than he is forced to teach lifeguarding and nothing else.
I will say though, that your indignity at my indignity of being thrown into the game would be less indignant if you were to see the game as more harmful than it is. My thoughts are that anything less than a paradise for that person is now using that person for some ends that were not for that person. Obviously after birth, mitigation occurs between lesser and greater harms.. but here is a case where no harm could ensue and hence, no one's dignity was violated for them as well. I've also written many posts elucidating JUST the "mundane" harms, not even focusing on the possibilities for the more egregious ones. That's why I asked if your main beef is whether the lifeguard identified with the forced lifeguarding lessons 75% of the time. I think that seems to be your real sticking point. But lets move on to your main critique of "will" that you have defined awhile back to try to meet the conclusion of "can't work because undefined" etc.
Quoting Isaac
Consequence of having birth is dignity violated too... At nanosecond 1 that a person exists (and that can be during fetus, birth, or later) a person "finds themselves" in a game. THAT right THERE is when dignity is violated. "Who" put them in such a game? How did they get there? So in a way @baker was right to mention intention. Someone intended and also the consequence was that a person has been put in a state of affairs of a nearly intractable, harmful game. I already mentioned that your real beef is with the "intractable" and "harmful" part.. and I know you will definitely disagree with my harder "not paradise" thought, but it is far from that, so empirically we can hash that out.
Quoting Isaac
And if someone finds themselves born into terrible circumstances (more than what you consider "normal" life) and the person knew they were going to birth this future person there..That potential person cannot be considered in any meaningful way? In an odd way Benkei, you are invoking some sort of "soul" theory of being.. Very Platonic and Christian of you. You as well @Isaac.
I do think there are meaningful ways to talk about "potential state of affairs" that are more meaningful than say, some state of affairs that can never happen, even potentially. Those potential state of affairs will affect someone at a future point if X, Y, Z actions are not addressed currently. That is a common understanding of how stuff works. You don't need to invoke "non-existence" to make this a "therefore all talk of potential state of affairs of a future person don't matter". That becomes an ad absurdem. All you need to do is recognize that a person will exist who will be affected by the action.
As if that resolves the fact that it's meaningless.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That's neither here nor there with the specific comment I was replying to. Read the OP, which already dealt with this shit.
Why don't you run me through the 50 steps you went through in your head to go from "you can't attribute states to nothing" to "you're invoking some sort of soul"? That's some serious bullshit right there.
Because you don't think in future conditionals based on there not being a "person" existing at the moment you make a decision.
Okay, gotcha. It is that last part I disagree with then because it is assuming an aggregate utilitarian approach... It looked like you were agreeing with Isaac that you cannot meaningfully talk about counterfactual future states of affairs where people will be harmed or dignity violated.
I believe when someone is born, at that time T, that is when someone's dignity was violated (put into a harmful challenge/overcoming challenge game). It also causes the conditions for all suffering to occur. Granted they can be loving parents, they can try to mitigate as much as possible, but all instances of suffering occur from being put in a position where the conditions occur..
So yes I note your objection that every instance of harm is not caused by birth, but we I think are also in agreeance that antinatalism is asking us not to put people into conditions where unnecessary harms come about for people...
For the dignity argument you will say that this isn't an issue because you don't think putting people in this game is a bad thing. For the unnecessary suffering argument you will say that people can mitigate most forms of suffering. I just disagree that it is okay to put people into a challenge/overcoming challenge game and I think it is not just to unnecessarily start for someone else the conditions whereby any form of suffering can or will ensue. This is where we are going to disagree. No one "needs" to be born and there is no one prior to birth to mitigate harms for anyways.
This is just a rephrasing of "caused by" which I've thoroughly debunked ages ago. Not going again there. Existence doesn't cause suffering. And I don't need metaphors of a game to make my point. But if you want, you're not avoiding losses by not playing the game. Losing presupposes playing, so if you want to avoid a loss, you need to start playing first. Anything else is just nonsense.
Also note that the data for the Netherlands is a strong utilitarian argument to have as many babies as possible.
Couple of pages before in this same thread I answered to Isaac. After all, he didn´t agree with me.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/525339
If you think the way Isaac does, I just have to wonder the logic of both of you.
:rofl: You're funny (unintentionally?).
Quoting Benkei
Right because you don't read the word "conditions of suffering" and replace in your head with "cause".
Quoting Benkei
ABSURD. In order to avoid X, you must enter X so THAT it can be avoided. In order to avoid having someone else eaten by a lion, you should put them in situations where they can be eaten by the lion....Nope.
Quoting Benkei
I am not a utilitarian, at least in that aggregate sense, so wouldn't matter for my argument. That is where dignity comes in anyways, to prevent a person being overlooked for some greater good idea.
Nothing absurd about if you stop replacing meaningful terms with meaningless ones. There's no presupposition between X and second X, so of course, THAT results in an absurdity. But only because it's an obvious straw man.
Oh yes, let's return to where you never proved living causes suffering (not a sufficient cause) and just kept repeating "but you have to live to suffer", which coincidentally reinforces my previous point that suffering presupposes living. Just like any property of a person really. God, this is so fucking tedious it isn't funny anymore. Just some idiots with a belief and forgetting about basic logic.
@Benkei
@khaled
I haven't read the whole debate, but I think the fundamental disagreements here are over what choices would be unreasonable and what choices would be reasonable to decide on behalf of another. For the philosophical pessimist, they have good reasons to believe it will never be reasonable (Like Schop1s many posts on structural suffering etc). Like any argument I think thats perfectly fine, but if other people also have collectively good reasons to believe in optimism and that lives are worth starting and living, why is their decision on behalf of someone else unreasonable? It's true it seems wrong to force someone to be a lifeguard for the rest of their lives because of the greater good, but if we lived in a world where everyone would enjoy or wouldn't mind such an imposition, it wouldn't be an unreasonable decision. This is how I view birth. I actually agree that given climate chaos, the scourge of neoliberal capitalism, and the rise of authoritarian governments that having kids is a decision on behalf of someone else that will be unreasonable in the near future. But this still doesn't get us Hard Antinatalism, only "don't have kids under predatory capitalism and severe climate breakdown" which seems to be popular given how lots of people aren't having kids. If the world didn't have to deal with these things, I think it would be an extremely reasonable decision on behalf of another. The disagreement will then be that putting people into situations of challenge where they didn't need to is wrong , but I just can't intuitively accept this.
My example was like that to show how absurd conclusion the idea "If we are in a position where we cannot ascribe propositions such as "people are suffering" or "people are not suffering" then the absence of suffering is not a moral good because it's not enjoyed by anyone." will lead.
I think there are very good reasons not to have kids in specific circumstances. I had to think long about it myself because of global warming, pollution, over fishing, corporate capitalism etc. but quite frankly I've managed to work myself to the side of the equation where I can insulate myself and my family from most of these issues if needed.
Okay, let´s try again.
In my point of view, it´s relevant to say it is better that there is a world without people suffering, than a world with people suffering in it. Or even that there is no world, no people, no suffering - and I concern this better than the world with people suffering in it.
Okay, you may say that is senseless to use word "better" the way I used it.
This can go along to Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, and so on.
How you speak - or denote - of nothing?
I think that natural language makes us to make many errors and lead even to philosophical problems. We may need formal logic here, but I´m not expert on it.
But I stand my ground - and I think, I have accurate reasons for that.
Quoting Benkei
You keep replacing "conditions of" with "causes". Your choice to misquote all the time.
I can take this several ways:
1) In a universe with potential harm, but that harm was not realized by anyone, that can be said to be good.
2) Even if it is person-dependent, that someone will not be harmed is good.
And yeah throw in "exposed to conditions for known and unknown forms of harm to be caused" so that you don't throw a hissy fit with the word-games.
Also if you make it about the parental assessment of what is good.. then that is fine but the dignity rule is violated once you make that assessment for another person.
You still don't get it do you? Who isn't harmed?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yeah, same difference. Look up necessary and sufficient causes and then look up necessary and sufficient conditions. But sure, let's talk about "conditions", in which case I'm really not causing suffering by procreating, because we stopped talking about morality in its entirety. If I'm merely causing one of the conditions, which isn't a sufficient condition, then I'm not causing suffering either.
If I put a pan on the stove I'm not causing the water to boil. That still requires water, gas and fire.
No, because a trap, by definition, restricts free movement, removes choices for activity which would otherwise be available. That's the whole reason why it's bad, the people in a 'trap' want to do something else (or might want to, if they can't be asked for some reason)
Life itself, however, is the very necessary pre-requisite for free movement. There's no 'other option' people within life might prefer to do because life contains all experiences.
What people who feel bad in life want is a better life, not no life.
And it's possible to provide with that better life, but the push to do so is significantly watered down by this nonsense about non-existence being a preferable option.
Nonsense, it's incredibly easy, just run out into traffic. Under fives do not have the desire to take their own lives (thank goodness), and if you think parents would just stop them, then you need to explain the thousands of road traffic accidents involving under fives every year.
Quoting Antinatalist
Again, I didn't say anything about there being no barriers to circumnavigate. We put people in situation it is inconvenient to get out of all the time without considering it immoral, you need to explain why this particular situation (the 'game of life' as you want to put it) is an exception.
Quoting Antinatalist
Just going to repeat here what @Benkei has already said. This sentence is incoherent.
Why bother with the asymmetry then? If there ever was a utilitarian argument... :chin:
Quoting Antinatalist
Yes, this fallacious intuition is shared by many. Unfortunately there's nothing logical about it. Better for whom?
See my response to @Antinatalist. Life is not analogous to being trapped in a game. Being trapped entails that there are other options you'd prefer but cannot obtain (the trap prevents them. If a trap left all options open to you that you might desire, it's not a trap, by definition. There are no states one could prefer other than states within life because when not alive one cannot prefer anything. People who do not like their current state of affairs want that state of affairs to change to some other state of affairs. Existence is a prerequisite for experiencing any states of affairs.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes. If we could just stick to exploring this I'm sure the conversation would be more productive. Your kidnapping the lifeguard example.
It is possible to imagine what life would be like for a future person and reasonable to take steps to avoid their suffering. I think we all agree on that. It's the basis of any long-term social strategy, making the world a better place for future generations.
It is also possible to use people to achieve ends which are not solely (or even partly) for their direct benefit without acting immorally. We do so all the time - taxes, waking the sleeping lifeguard, imprisonment of criminals... again, I don't think there's any disagreement here.
There is, however, a threshold of using someone for the greater good which we seem to cringe at. Forcing the lifeguard to attend lifeguarding school for decades even if it would save thousands of lives. Here the waters are a little more murky because to explore this instinct we have to create scenarios which don't seem to exist in real life. Maybe we would feel OK about the lifeguard school if it was normal, maybe not. Personally, I'm inclined to think not, I favour a view that personal autonomy has a value in itself to be weighed against other values like the greater good.
We all also seem to agree that some people can have weird intuitions about what's right and wrong (psychopaths, sociopaths, saints), but that's not all that philosophically interesting, though psychologically fascinating.
So for those people who feel there's a balance of autonomy against the greater good to be made (and I'd count myself in that group), the only question is whether conception qualifies as such a balance and if so, in which direction does it weigh out.
I'm arguing that it doesn't in either case.
It doesn't count as an autonomy vs greater good balancing exercise in the first place because the root intuition about not ignoring someone's autonomy is that they might rather experience some other option. It is not possible for a pre-existing possibility to consider experiencing another option, nor are there any other options it is possible to experience. So I don't think autonomy needs to be weighed against the normal balance of harms we might consider when imagining future generations.
Even if we were to circumvent the first objection, I don't see how giving life could possibly weigh out negatively when considering the harms wrought on a person for the greater good. The harms within life are mostly outweighed by the benefits anyway, so creating someone you know will find themselves in that situation, for the benefit of society at large, doesn't weigh out badly. The greater good is large, the net harms small.
The sticking point, and the point at which I'm afraid I have, and will, lose my civility, is this neo-liberal bullshit about individual harms being the only matter in moral decisions. I'm afraid I just find that kind of view toxic and can't just discuss it as if it were a reasonable option. We're social creatures, we don't just think for ourselves. Even a six month old child shows degrees of empathy and concern for others, it's deeply ingrained in our core being. It matters. I mean, how many great stories have been about people caring about their own suffering and screw everyone else?
The problem with this is that it is almost an inevitability that some people will have kids. There will be a next generation which will have to live in those conditions. As such it is only necessary for you to think of yourself as an above average parent and your children will be more likely to help that next generation that they will to worsen it. Given that, even in these difficult times, most people still prefer to live than not, the harms you imagine your future child will have to suffer in order to bring about this benefit are relatively small (relative to the benefit, that is).
Some projects which benefit society take more than one generation to complete. Benefiting society is something which most people think is good and worth a little sacrifice to achieve, most people also enjoy life more than they hate it. Put those two things together and (assuming you're a reasonable parent) having a child is not an unreasonable risk. They'll probably grow up liking life more than hating it and glad to contribute toward the multi-generational project of making society better. If they really don't, then with only minor inconvenience, they can opt out (but see my comments about suicide to understand what I really mean by this - I'm talking hypothetically because I don't believe most suicides are a rational choice to 'opt out' at all).
It's really not that unfair a position to imagine the person you'll create will find themselves in.
So, what about euthanasia?
Isn´t the same situation there? It is not enjoyed by anyone, at least not the object of euthanasia. Because after euthanasia she/he doesn´t exist anymore.
I have mentioned this before, but I don´t think you have answered for this.
Sometimes I hear comments like this on other subjects:
"It´s not much of a loss for him, because he didn´t know of better."
This kind of statement assumes, that there is anyway something better for him, but it´s not much for a loss for him, because he didn´t know of this betterness.
After all, this statement presuppose that there is better state for the person, does he know it or not. It is only additional annoyance, if he know that he could be in better state but doesn´t.
On "betterness":
I don´t think that is kind of a problem that you present.
I think it´s more about limitations of the natural language.
This has always been your beef. That no one will suffer is good is unacceptable to you, leading to absurdities like, people have to live so that "they" don't suffer. You try to dismiss things like potentialities, conditionals, and counterfactuals like they don't exist, but they do.
Right this is the Benkei absurdity of "You have to live so you can not like suffering". But it's preventing another person from suffering in the first place and being in the game in the first place. And once born you can definitely wish or prefer a type of existence that this life is not, so I'm not sure about that objection either.
One of my posts a little while back is the odd difference in our species to be able to evaluate any task we do as negative. This is especially odd when it is a task related to survival. But that is possibly one of the harms is that we bring in people who can at each point evaluate negatively that they "rather not be doing this". Other animals just "deal". We know that we deal. That puts us in a unique situation that can never just have us happily humming along following the "project" of this or that socioeconomic agenda. There's always a need for justification and recalibration for why we do anything. That becomes an individual's existential project. The community can only provide sort of "memes" to try to anchor oneself, but they can never actually force an individual in their own head to use those justifications and find them legitimate and satisfying at any given moment, length of time, etc..
Yes, you have to exist to not suffer or suffer, because it's something people do.
You are PREVENTING a future person from suffering. It's about the decision for another person.
And so then I'll just keep saying:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Absurd that you think that you cannot consider the person who would be born if you do such and such
There is a state of affairs that did not take place. It could have. You chose not to bring it about.
I agree with this, but how do we draw the line at who is able to parent? Can they only parent if they have good reason to believe their children will only be harm reducers?
Benefitting you. If you believe that producing children is evil, and you refrain from producing children, then you have successfully omitted an evil action.
It's possible to take pride in refraining from evil actions, to have a sense of dignity based on refraining from evil actions.
In any case, this assumes the conclusion (begs the question) that having children is bad, which is the entire point of the discussion. No dice, just another fallacy.
Yeah. I think that there's no reason to assume our intuitions will not ever prove contradictory if we imagine scenarios that we've never encountered before. Intuitions are just the culturally mediated models of mental processes, which came about (and were learnt) in an environment in which we did not have to consider compelling lifeguards to teach forever, or having certain knowledge of the contribution of one's offspring. It's unsurprising, to me, we don't have any intuitions which cope with such circumstances, having never encountered them.
Repeating it doesn't make it less absurd. Suffering is a very complex state of a human mind. It's only relevant with the alternatives in play. If there's no-one to benefit from the absence of suffering, then there's no point in bringing it about. You're reifying 'suffering' from a complex psychological state to some transcendental target which ought be met no matter what. Why ought it be met?
I really can't see how any of that actually meets the charge of neo-liberalism. It seems completely unrelated. Hyper-individualistic notions like "why should I suffer any inconvenience for the sake of others" are toxic. Your philosophy boils down to the principle that we cannot expect anything, even the slightest inconvenience, from any individual, for the benefit of their community. I've simply no time for that kind of bullshit.
Yes, morally I think that's a necessary boundary. I don't think any external authority could possibly take on such a role though (if that's where you were headed), it's just a moral question. If you don't feel confident that you're going to provide the best environment you can for a child, then you didn't ought to be having one. That's not to be taken in terms of material comforts or circumstances though. As I said, some social projects take more than one generation to complete so it follows that some children will be born into difficult circumstances to complete the project of ameliorating those circumstances for the benefit of generations ahead of theirs. But I think if parents have no reason to believe their children will help in anyway, then creating a life which you know will experience those circumstances seems to have reckless (if not outright cruel) intent.
This is why I keep circling back to neo-liberalism. I think, despite all the tangled dead-ends @schopenhauer1's torturing of english grammar takes us down, we're actually on a very similar page. We can imagine what life would be like for our children and it would be cruel intent if we imagine it to be needlessly bad but went ahead and set things in motion to bring about that future anyway.
The point is that it is not unreasonable to imagine (in that future) that the child will have to tolerate some suffering for the benefit of their community. That's part of being human.
I don't care what you want to call it. It is ensuring that at a future state, something does not suffer. I'm not buying the word-games that you think are making a point and that I'm supposedly failing to understand. As long as the potential for more people exist, there is the prevention of more people existing. That isn't hard. The prevention of that potential from being actual is not hard to understand either. You make a false dilemma by saying that there is no "one" to benefit. You can call it "not moral" or anything else. All that matters here is no future person that could suffer would suffer. Most people who value that, would call that moral.
Communities are only there to sustain individuals. Thus the community is necessary because individuals in the community benefit. Generational benefits, are hollow because "generations" don't benefit from those benefits but future individuals would, which is an important distinction. All of this I'm sure you agree with, but it is its implications.. If we admit it is not for any third-party ideal but for people, then we might agree that ethics is at the locus of the individual. Why? They are the bearers of experience. We are the species that have to justify why we do anything. Existentialism is all about the fact that there is no given justification. Each individual has to decide to take on this or that notion for why they need to keep doing X task. Do it for family, country, survival, not being hassled, feeling of no other choice, or anything else, it is up to the individual to justify why they must keep going. Often the tasks are de facto built so there are no choices but certain ones that aren't sub-optimal for the given set of circumstances.
"Is morally irrelevant if nobody actually benefits"? What does that mean?
*sigh*
Now where did that come from ...
It can't be "demonstrated" to be false if people find the state of suffering as no good. Those people are the ones making the decisions.........
He @Benkei thinks that if the no person is born, that "no person born" does not benefit from being prevented from existing. The problems are that he thinks there are no other ways to rephrase that which makes sense. He narrowly defines it thus so it becomes an absurdity like, "Preventing suffering matters only if someone is born to prevent their suffering".. thus he thinks this makes antinatalism never be moral cause no one benefits.
There are not just a few people who believe that they suffer more than enough for "the community" because they put up with some particular person being alive and that they are doing this person a favor by not killing them. They also score as "normal" on a psych evaluation test. I've known such people.
"Toxic"? Yeah, right.
Do you believe that you are "suffering an inconvenience for the sake of others" when you read posts here that you disagree with?
I'd love for you to be in my shoes, to have a neighbor like I do. I really do. I want to see how you'd handle that.
Killing causes more suffering and is extreme violation against person who will be killed. It is extreme violation against person´s sovereignty and autonomy.
Quoting Benkei
If not being born could never be better than a life, we can get some interesting conclusions.
If we forget for the sake of argument the sovereignty and autonomy of a person for a moment, we can also think a scenario, what I call absurd.
If not a moral obligation, then supererogatory act, is to breed more babies to existence to miserable circumstances, war zones etc., and when they are born and suffering, perhaps we could save them from such environment. And those who are in permanent agony and there´s no salvation for them, we could make euthanasia for them (of course we could respect their autonomy, and do so only if we can get consent from them), and we are now decreased lots of suffering!
And after all, we don´t have to decrease the suffering not much at all, because like said non-existence could never been better than most miserable life.
I would agree even back when I was one.
I would want to be a bit more specific here. Not sure what you mean by “antinatalism is pointless”. If you mean by it that “Antinatalism is not good” then, agreed. It isn’t. That’s not what the antinatalists argue.
The antinatalist argues that having children is bad. He doesn’t try to establish that not having children is good (who would it be good for)
Quoting schopenhauer1
I would agree. No one in fact benefits from not having children. And since I think the asymmetry is BS, I would also have it that “not having children” is not a good act (who would it be good for). I thought this even when I was AN.
I’m confused what this has to do with the argument though. Antinatalists try to argue that having kids is wrong. What does saying “Not having kids is not good for anyone” do here? It’s true but... irrelevant.
Agreed.
Benkei might say if no person is there to not suffer, antinatalism is wrong on the account as there is no recipient to not suffer.
Still not seeing what any of this has to do with the issue. What's at stake is whether (to rephrase it in your terms) it is reasonable to have an expectation of the individual that they will care about the well-being of other individuals sufficiently to want to suffer minor inconvenience for their benefit.
Your neo-liberal philosophy is that no, that's not a reasonable expectation, some people may not care about the well-being of others enough to want to suffer some minor inconvenience for their benefit and it's not for us to interfere with that. I don't agree that we cannot have expectations of others which inform our actions toward them.
No, not particularly. Why do you ask?
Quoting baker
What an odd thing to want.
I want to see what you consider "suffering an inconvenience for the sake of others".
Not at all. I want to put your humanist notions to the test, seeing how you'd deal with someone who doesn't care whether you live or die and who has no qualms about endangering your property and your person. And the authorities side with them!
Anything from opening a door for the person behind you to throwing yourself on a grenade to save your comrades.
Quoting baker
In the past it's generally come down to physical violence. I don't know now I'm older. Thankfully it's not something I have to endure. Perhaps buy a gun?
So much for "suffering an inconvenience for the sake of others".
Well, there's the cost of the gun...
But who is who in this willingness to suffer minor inconvenience for the benefit of others?
And in what way?
Are you saying that the antinatalist should be willing to suffer minor inconvenience for the benefit of others (including those yet to be born)?
In what way?
No, I'm saying that having the avoidance of all suffering as a moral maxim is incoherent because moral maxims by their very nature, require at least some small degree of suffering to carry them out.
Agreed, said maxim requires a further qualification.
No, not quite.
This is why I think dignity is violated after a certain threshold is met. This also has to be balanced with unnecessary suffering. So birth is a case where dignity would be violated and unnecessary suffering would be violated. However, when someone is born, things like taxes, making people go to school, etc. can be a consideration because as to survive, we live in a society and is necessary for the maintenance of that survival. If it isn't an industrialized form, it will simply take other forms, as in some way people will have to get together to get stuff done for survival's sake. So dignity not violated/unnecessary suffering in the case of the procreational decision looks like antinatalism. All harm and all dignity violation could have been prevented. Once born, it becomes ameliorating greater with lesser harms and thus looks more like balancing of smaller infractions with unnecessary future suffering, etc. The point of violation becomes different when an actual person has needs and wants and interests and ability to feel pain, etc. versus preventing a hypothetical person from dealing with any of it.
Dignity being violated is if in some sense a negative that will befall someone is being completely overlooked in an egregious manner (like unnecessary suffering, being put in the challenge game in the first place that is nearly inescapable). In the case of birth this is always the case the way I see it. However, once born, de facto choices are in play. We must work to survive, and work is learned through socialization, sharing experiences- essentially using language-based ways to convey meaning. This entails a social structure that keeps this going, etc.
And so I guess the straightforward case of procreation is like the lifeguard being condemned to lifeguarding school to me whereas..
The small violations that we balance with unnecessary suffering we must do once born is likened to lightly tapping on the lifeguard to wake him up to save the child...That is to say, it doesn't meet the threshold of egregiously overlooking the lifeguard, and certainly it is fulfilling the need not to overlook the drowning child.
Well yeah, that then is exactly what I'm talking about. You put all stuff that your have to do for others in terms of your own benefit. "I have to pay my taxes becasue it contributes to the general governance from which I benefit". I don't think anyone suggests neo-liberals are fanatically opposed to helping others even when it directly benefits them to do so.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It's not being overlooked at all. I know that if I have another child they will suffer many of life's challenges, I'm not overlooking it at all. I expect a person to tolerate such harms for the greater good. I expect it of my children and I expect it of any imaginary future child when I'm contemplating what their existence would be like when considering bringing it about.
It's a reasonable expectation because normal human beings do indeed tolerate minor harms to benefit others, it's part of being human - or at least it was until you and your neo-liberal buddies tried to drive it out of everyone so as to make them compliant little consumers.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This makes no sense at all. The harms are the same in both cases. The harms brought about from procreation are exactly and only the "small violations that we balance with unnecessary suffering we must do once born".
I don't have a problem looking at it in either way. But let's not kid ourselves, the reason for the survival is so that individuals in the society (like you and I and him and her) can benefit. Health care for all is health care for everyone in the community. Helping the poor is such that anyone who befalls the state of being poor can be helped which could be any X person. I am not saying we have to look at it in completely self-centered ways but simply recognizing it is at the level of individuals whereby benefits are being had. So I do not accept that interpretation or spin on it.
What I was trying to say with "every human needs a justification" is that humans are not just if/then creatures. The motivations are obviously complex and multicausational. We are a linguistic-based animal in a large degree. Thus linguistic-based concepts often (at least appear to ourselves) as our motivators for why we do any act. So the reason I do X is because.. (fill in the blank). However, these justifications/motivations are never just automatic. They are things we convince ourselves either out of habit, perceived losses from expectations, rationalizing, or simply expediency (can't think of a better way). So humans have to constantly buffer why they do anything. There is no automatic reason why we need to do anything at all. Thus we are an existential creature because there is never a set automatic response (outside of some basic stimuli perhaps). For the community, for this or that reason, are justifications we tell ourselves, sure. But it is never as easy as, "Society broadcasts X message (perhaps what Isaac thinks people should do), and people accept it". Rather, each and every decision is an existential decision to follow a course of action. Each person has to allow that X view to motivate them. It just doesn't motivate them. We can evaluate at any time, "I don't like this" and no longer go along with the program. The idea that these people need to be "recalibrated" like some member of the borg, is a bit dehumanizing at the least. It is at the most "bad faith" in not recognizing the fact that again, people choose justifications for why the do any task at all.
But all harm can be prevented in one case and not the other. That is why it is "unnecessary" at the point of procreation. Unless you want to die, all other harms are ameliorations, often by necessity of the facts of survival through balance of lesser harms with greater harms. This whole thing did not need to take place though in the first place.
I think only some people are like that; in fact, possibly the minority. A case can be made that a psychologically normal person does usually not reflect upon their choices at all, and this is actually preferred both by psychologists and people at large.
In fact, someone who reflects on their choices like you suggest, someone who wonders about their motivations that way is likely to score highly on the neuroticism scale (at least that), and render themselves somewhere in "mentally unwell" territory.
What you describe as "humans have to constantly buffer why they do anything", normal people would classify as "doubting oneself, second-guessing oneself", and thus as "lack of self-confidence", "lack of belief in oneself". A more charitable normal person would tell you that you "think too much".
Quoting schopenhauer1
No, I think that typically, they don't "choose" their justifications. They just have them, end of story.
Even if that is the "majority", we have the ability to access whether we still want to do something or not, and evaluate it negatively or positively. There are many times when what one is currently doing does not align with what one would rather be doing, and then there are a whole set of justifications why one wouldn't do otherwise. It's just that these justifications are more in the background.. You don't just quit your day job because that brings X, Y, and Z.. etc. Of course the limits of this thinking butts up against the reality of our mortal conditions.. We need survival, survival requires the necessity of social and historical contingency.. we must work through this to survive...etc.. But then what if we don't want these initial conditions? Well, too bad.
What you seem to describe is primary consciousness without any ability to self-reflect, evaluate, and judge in complex linguistic terms that we do. Or it could be explaining a highly habituated person like in a military setting. Follow orders, don't overthink, etc. No, we don't always just "do".. we often give ourselves reasons, motivations, stories, narratives, principles to work by, etc.
Of course, a lot of it IS neurotic in the sense that a general anxiety and angst often motivates us to want to alleviate that anxiety as well. "I don't want to think of X so I do Y" (eat food, go for a run, read a book, etc).
I think this is a good analysis. what's happening in antinatalism is the consequence of seeking some foundational principle behind a set of moral intuition which in all likelihood has no such principle. That it leads to odd, even repugnant conclusions shouldn't surprise us, and certainly shouldn't guide our actions. There'll be no end to@schopenhauer1's ability to provide post hoc rationalisations because data underdetermines theory. The relevant point is the one you've made here - theory also predates data. It is all seen already interpreted.
Odd yes. Rupugnant, no.
If you, as an AN, care so much about future, potential people that you want for them not to suffer even one iota of harm, then how come you don't extend the same care to people who are already alive?
Your AN arguments are presumably based on empathy and compassion for people who don't even exist yet, but you don't muster the same empathy and compassion for existing people*. That's strange.
*Which you'd need in order to get through to them.
Surely both can be employed no? Prevent it fullstop (what most people aren't doing) and also help the people already here. Unfortunately, for the already born the inherent conflict with working towards helping others and simply just "working with others" will be part of the "helping others" but that is the nature of man.. To essentially deal with the asshole qualities of other people and hopefully disregard, overcome, or change them to some extent. And everyone thinks it's the other.. and perhaps it is..
First things first, I don't claim to know all that much about suffering but from my own experiences of how bad life can treat you I've discovered, to my great disappointment, that when one is miserable, it's impossible to think let alone think well (rationally). The mind/brain is overwhelmed by the urgent call for relief (from suffering) that it can think of nothing else. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates what I'm driving at quite well. In the face of this viral event which I liken to suffering, all governments of the world seem to be hyperfocused on how to alleviate/eliminate the devastation the pandemic is causing.
To get to the point, antinatalism is a rational standpoint - arrived at via research, study, discussion, and argumentation. What I want bring to your attention is that antinatalism, because it requires extensive rational analysis, implies that the brains/minds that hit upon the idea were, note, not suffering; had they been suffering they wouldn't have been able to think at all. I guess my point is, in a nutshell, that antinatalism exists as a well-reasoned philosophical position means that antinatalism can't be right.
Not sure if any of this is correct. Can you not suffer and think of an argument? Even if that was true, can you not have some moments of clarity and some moments of suffering? Isn't thinking rationally and leading to AN, an indication that it is the rational answer?
No, unfortunately not. Ever heard of a woman in labor coming up with a bright idea? Plus, what's the idea of taking leave from work when one falls ill?
My life was good when I was a child. When I was older I have suffered. But at world scale, not so much at all. There are millions and millions of people, who had and will suffer far more than I have, unfortunately.
The first person´s point of view to pain (I use the word "pain" in special meaning covering all suffering) is important. Many people doesn´t have a slightest idea what suffering can be, good for them.
When I´ve been in pain (I say in PAIN), I think this is terrible, this should not be. And sometimes it could be hectic, violent, you just react. Afterwards I have thought a lot.
Pain, suffering, the accidental part of life (you can´t escape it).
So, I don´t think your point of view is valid.
:rofl:
Would you like a similar fate to William Wallace (c. 1207 - 1305)? Hanged, drawn, and quartered?
[quote=Wikipedia]The convicted traitor was fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn by horse to the place of execution, where he was then hanged (almost to the point of death), emasculated, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered (chopped into four pieces). His remains would then often be displayed in prominent places across the country, such as London Bridge, to serve as a warning of the fate of traitors.[/quote]
Perhaps that might not be to your taste, you might prefer something else, Crucifixion?
What? How does that follow? And how does it not apply to every position ever?
It applies to every position of course. :chin:
Even that one.
In other words, you're speaking nonsense. Your thoughts are self contradictory. Should be a pointer that “if they were suffering they couldn’t have thought of this position therefore this position is not right” is not right to begin with.
What's self-contradictory about it? That there are philosophies, all and sundry, implies that the suffering extant in the world ain't so terrible that people can't think. This gibes quite well with the fact that much of the thinking going on in the world takes place in so-called first-world countries where suffering, at least those in the form of diseases, seems to be ebbing away. Contrast this to other less fortunate regions of the world. A grain of sodium chloride might come in handy nevertheless.
That antinatalism exists implies that people aren't suffering to the extent that they can't apply their brains which they have to to think of antinatalism. Ergo, antinatalism is a catch-22 situation - the antinatalist claims all is not well but to do that all has to be well.
I see what you mean now. There are multiple ways to resolve this though.
1- First off, the AN doesn't claim that all is not well necessarily. But that there is a chance that all won't be well. So based on that, don't take the chance.
2- The AN can simply claim that all will not be well for their child while all is well for them
Among others. But most importantly: No AN on this site has tried to reach AN through the angle that life is terrible and unbearable. Because that's not true on average. Most arguments are about risk management and how the risk of all not being well need not be taken.
I simply don´t understand your point. Wallace´s fate and - also crucifixion - is horrible. I don´t wish such a fate for anyone.
If just looking and thinking about suffering of others, one could come to conclusion that antinatalism view is the right one, I think antinatalistic point of view have to be right.
The future is unpredictable, like the weather I suppose - bright and sunny one moment, overcast and pouring the next. Nevertheless, there's a noticeable trend, even if only in certain patches of the global community, in the human condition in that the overall situation vis-à-vis happiness has shown some definite improvement. All we need to do now is to maintain the momentum so to speak and the future will probably be a better place than now/the past. That's looking at the bright side though, full of optimism and hope.
Here's another version of my argument which takes into account the fact the existence of abject misery - poverty, chronic illnesses, death, and the rest of the stuff about life that make it an unbearabale ordeal/agony.
As I said, antinatalists, given that they've developed a philosophy (antinatalism), have to counted among the fortunate - even if antinatalists experience suffering they still have an overall comfortable existence as evidenced by how they were able to "think in peace" and work on their belief.
Antinatalists, when they speak of how, to borrow a line from Buddhism, "life is suffering" are not talking about themselves for, as I said, they aren't suffering. What they're actually doing is drawing our attention to the section of the human population who live in appalling conditions, those whose lives are a constant struggle, those who don't know what fun means, and so on. Let's call such people les misérables
Here's the million dollar question aimed at antintalists: can't the les misérables work their way up the social ladder and themselves become antinatalists? Surely they can, les misérables are humans, endowed with the same capabilities, as antinatalists. If so, the antinatlist position is untenable; after all les misérables can achieve the same level of happiness that allows antinatalists to cogitate about them.
Cool. But is having children now risk free? No. If not what justifies the risk?
The antinatalist would tell you: Nothing. What would you say?
Quoting TheMadFool
Not as surely as you might think.
Quoting TheMadFool
Why does that make the position untenable?
It would only be untenable if you can demonstrate that les Misérables will achieve the same level of happiness. Demonstrably, that's not the case. That they can is not sufficient.
I don´t believe at all, that all antinatalists don´t have suffered.
And let´s suppose, that even if you are right on this, "life is suffering" is not the only argument antinatalists have.
Quite shocking news I must say. It was a zen moment for me. We've been so preoccupied with suffering - that's how powerful it is - that we couldn't see past it. I wonder what other reasons are there for pushing the antinatalist agenda? Can we, for instance, convince a denizen of paradise (supposedly bliss taken to perfection) to not want to live or, at the very least, refuse to have children?
There at least couple of arguments, which relate on suffering: The first one argues that "life is suffering" is not true in general, but life contains too much of it.
And the other one. This is more complex.
It´s about rights and obligations. I will say we don´t have obligation for anyone to have a child, and same time we have no right to have a child.
In murder the murderer extremely violates the rights of victim of murder very bad, her/his autonomy and sovereignty. Even so, when the murder is painless and does not contain any negative emotions of the victim.
I think these things - autonomy and sovereignty - are violated also when persons are going to have a child. I have to also admit, that in this case the violation is more questionable.
And I´m not saying that murdering people and having a child are ethically at same level. Not at all. But both of those acts have some similar features.
Hey Antinatalist,
I've read Schopenhauer's "Studies in Pessimism" and "the Conspiracy Against the Human Race" by Thomas Ligotti. Beautiful and intelligent works of literature that reveal the complex puppetry of our existence and the constant carrot on a stick which seems to deceive us... however, i think this kind of evaluation of reproduction as a moral act is a bit absurd.
For one, the idea that a child is begotten or created (such that it emerges out of nothing into being) is an old myth. Children are, relative to one reproductive partner, an expression of the other partner. If a man has a child with a woman, we may say he "sculpted" the child from her (as out of a preexisting template)... the woman who bears the child, from her perspective, has also "sculpted" the child from the father in the same way. Neither one has "created" the child. And even if we tried to say the man and the woman together created the child, we find that, even from this perspective, they "sculpted" the child from matter itself which they must have consumed and then used in the act of fertilization and embryonic development. ..."creation" or "conception" is not something that can be physically defined in nature... there are only stages of process, of which we cannot ascribe beginning or end except by arbitrary, subjective description. As odd as it may seem, the desire that manifests in a child (or in any thing) is inseparable from the same active forces responsible for it's manifestation... desire (the mechanism) may affect some organism to do something, to feel pain in some instance or to desire some stimuli that another organism might have an opposite reaction to, but the "desire" in itself is inseparable and identical as a force between them... it is just an objective fact of physical reality...
Pain and desire is not bad in itself by any evaluation…
Also, pain is discovered to be the same force as pleasure, just as in a magnetic pole, repulsion is the same force to the pole as attraction... the negative is the same force as the positive... You cannot eliminate one without elimination of the other. You cannot have one in the absense of the other.
Now then, if it is maintained that pain (as it is always conjoined to the experience of pleasure) is not bad in itself, why do we still care about reducing it?
Here is a semantic distinction which is very important… we should always seek to reduce pain and pleasure to such a degree that both experiences are sustainable together. We cannot say we wish to end pain or pleasure in ourselves or others, because that is like saying we would like to destroy reactivity. It is impossible for us to conceive in the first place… we also can't say we would prefer not to create pain or pleasure, because it is just as impossible to create the dynamic between pain and pleasure as it is to destroy it… it seems that we can only increase or decrease the experience of pain or pleasure to its opposite… we should like to avoid pain, so it's natural that we should reduce it as it is comfortable for us to do so, but we don't want to eliminate it entirely, as that would imply that we also wish to eliminate pleasure, or that we wish to eliminate wishing, which is absurd… we can't want what we can't in the first place conceive.
There is an instinctual responsibility of parents to their children (empathy and a nurturing capacity is usually a part of our psychology)… There is a social responsibility of parents for their children which we require for the sake of society's sustainability (such that we demand, regardless of a parents desire to look after children, that they must do so). Likewise we insist that embryos with terrible deformities should be aborted because they cannot sustain their own existence and would be a burden on society. But, there is no objective, universal responsibility of parents for offspring any more than there is any objective right or wrong, or any more than it could be possible for a parent(s) to create the child in the first place… the parent(s) did not conceive the child like a God creating a human with some intention for the human in itself… the child occurs as a byproduct of sex and the parents have been "programmed" to care for it and raise it so that sex can keep happening…
If humans had hundreds of kids at a time, they would be less likely to be nurturing at all… like crabs that have hundreds of babies and snack on some of them, because it doesn't affect natural selection at all for the crab… It is a natural selection of behavior just as much as of the organization which behaves…
As much as we may think otherwise, we really don't care what the consequences of our desires are in the manipulation of physical reality so long as that ability to experience desire is not prohibited by that manipulation (so long as we don't expect a stomach ache from the expression of our desire in eating one more cupcake, for example).
The only way one could imagine "too much" pain (suffering) is as it would prevent pleasure entirely... but, as pain and pleasure can only exist in conjunction with each other, pain (stress) can never so far outweigh pleasure (relief) as to render it impossible for the thing that experiences them.
At most pain (or pleasure) could so outweigh its opposite as to change the organization quite drastically, even from living to non living...even in some instances resulting in the conscious decision of a thinking organism to self destruct and force a drastic organizational change from living to non living... but never "too much" except by some arbitrary evaluation of what constitutes "too much".
Hey for you, also
In the other thread I said (this is old - but still valid - fragment of my philosophical essay from 2004.
I didn´t knew the word "antinatalism" then). The woman and the man, who are trying to have a child are both in responsibility, that is not evadable.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/525133
Quoting Marigold23
This is often the case, at least.
Quoting Marigold23
I totally disagree.
Footnotes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_and_Fog_(1956_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Browning#Ordinary_Men
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/321263.Humanity
And, people living in horrible environments, like prisoner in Dachau in 1943, most of them wanted to live. I don´t disagree. But I think, for most of them (at least), it would been better that they had never been born. Say people like Benkei whatever they say on "betterness".
I'd like to rephrase what I said here
Anyone may say some amount of pain is "Too much pain" if by that they mean it has passed a boundary of pain which they would be comfortable with... In fact, no pain is generally comfortable so a person may say all pain is, by subjective definition, "too much pain", if they're just referring to their feelings regarding it.
Therefore, I assume by "too much pain" we must be referring to a point at which pain or discontent for an organism passes an objective limit where it fundamentally destroys the functional capacity of the organism to experience it... Death, in other words... if an organism is not destroyed by pain or discontent, then it is not "too much pain".(except by a subjective evaluation).
Pain after all is meant to be functional, and one may see how it can fail in this function and be described as "too much" or even "too little"...same with pleasure, if we are referring to some function which they carry out. That function seems most likely to be life preservation and reproduction of the organism, like most biological functions.
And of course, If pain results in death directly, then it may prevent pleasure from being experienced as well as pain... but, as an organism survives, it must be able to experience both pain and relief from pain... they go together in living things...
I actually agreed with antinatalism for some time, so I feel a bit like I'm talking with my past self. I find antinatalism to be an intelligent conclusion in a lot of respects... I like its devotion to the adamant regret of all pain and discontent in itself.
People want pain to be relieved and pleasure to increase... but I believe they cannot want "not to be" or for pain and pleasure to be eliminated. To say "I would prefer never to have been" is the same as saying "I would prefer not to be." To believe that it would be better "never to have been" is a prerequisite to antinatalism. There is a fallacy in that statement: For one, as I said, a person can only truly desire what s/he can conceive (what has been experienced)...while a person may imagine death (as an idea of non being and non feeling like unconscious sleep), and act upon that imagining, say, to commit suicide, they cannot truly conceive of non existence, and so we must conclude they acted not with any negative association to their actual existence, but to some object or stimulation in their existence...to this extent, I must conclude that all suicide is, to some extent, unintended or accidental with regard to the relationship between the intention of the suicidal in reducing pain/discontent and the actual outcome of suicide which is pain and pleasure both being eliminated (rather than reduced) in the death of that person's ability to associate (or to think and feel)... A person cannot truly desire a state which is beyond conception. This is not to say that a suicidal person cannot understand the truth of this... in the same way that an alcoholic doesn't act logically due to the stress upon the mind in a chemical imbalance from addiction, there are all sorts of mental stimulation which hinder logical action... extreme pain and discontent are among them. There is no requirement that people must act logically, but there is a requirement that we cannot act based on inconceivable concepts... and an illogical act (like suicide) could however be a reasonable or understandable act if the discontent is more than a person can bear... but they cannot possibly associate negatively to their existence itself...we do not experience existence itself...we experience noticeable or "experience-able" things... a thing (or state) couldn't possibly experience itself because experience requires detachment from stimuli prior to any noticeable contact with it. We cannot, as we exist, be detached from existence in itself in order to experience it, and so positive or negative association with it is absurd, just as it is absurd to associate positively or negatively with non existence...
For another thing, a desire is expressive of a current state and past states leading up to it... to regret being itself would necessitate regret of that regret... (an association to your association). In other words, if you could truly conceive of your existence or non existence in the first place, (which you can't) and you were to associate negatively to your existence, you would also be associating negatively with that negative association. This is an absurdity, because we don't regret the fact of our regret...
try it... do you regret your regret?... if that were so, then wouldn’t you stop regretting?
And if you don’t regret your regret, then you can’t possibly regret your existence which is a prerequisite to your decision to regret.
As far as the responsibility of parents for their children, I would also generally agree with you that parents are (most of time) intentionally, causally responsible, in tandem to nature itself.
Any moral responsibility though is not universal but relative and subjective, though I would also agree subjectively that there is a moral responsibility of the parents in caring for their children.
Pain could be good for to reach the higher ends or to prevent more suffering. But who needs those, if there is not life in the first place.
In biologically the purpose of life of an organism is just transfer its genes forward. That is how evolution works, but that doesn´t make it good.
I certainly argue, that people in the World War 2, suffered too much. They felt too much pain.
Like I said, I understand the view that at least some of the pain is necessary for so called higher ends and to prevent more suffering. But in general, pain is too much when comparing the pain to its option, no life at all.
Quoting Marigold23
That is just psychological guessing. And even if you are right, what I certainly don´t believe,
if antinatalism is a fallacy, it is only that at psychologically level - and I don´t believe in even that. Suicide could be best option for someone, and saying that I´m not advocating suicide for anyone.
Quoting Marigold23
I´ve always said, there is no parasites if there is no organism.
There is no paradox in your example. Of course there have to be somebody who exist, that this somebody could curse its existence. And if there is nobody who exists, there is no need for curse or suicide.
Quoting Marigold23
Ok.
I´d read this couple of minutes ago. I have been thinking similarly about twenty years. Of course this could be trivial, but I have then met many people who haven´t thought this trivial thing.
Maybe I’m getting you wrong, but your argument basically boils down to the claim that if we keep procreating somewhere down the line we’ll reach a point where the utility created for the already existing by harming someone into existence will eventually outweigh all the harm it took to reach that point.
Is the principle at play here something like: it is okay to harm indefinite numbers of people if there’s a chance somewhere down the line that one of them will end up reducing a greater amount of harm? Doesn’t lead to some disturbing conclusions? Like suppose I could stab one person every minute knowing there was some chance that in doing so I could create some groundbreaking medicine.
Even if it might be enough to outweigh all the harm I’m doing in a raw kind of calculus sense it still seems weird. Like all the dead stabbed bodies won’t really care that their deaths helped some future generation live longer. Since they’ll be dead and all. Yes there’s a chance that the 10 millionth child to be born from now could cure cancer. But there’s also a chance that the 10 millionth kid born from now will grow up to perform genocide. Doesn’t depending on the potential for future goods while ignoring the potential for future bads seem blatantly unsubstantiated?
In your system, can we then justify stabbing people every minute so long as it comes with a similar chance of creating a net positive utility later?
Also, presuming that the burdens of life are a fine thing to burden a new person with is paternalistically selfish and callous to do on behalf of another. You, the parent want to see an outcome so you drop existence on another persons front door and say your forced move is then deemed as good. You think your priority of being X or wanting to see X means others must be forced to bear whatever consequences and then that you should be thanked for it. Just selfish, manipulative thinking. You’re neither doing gods work, nor are you doing society, your future child, existence, the universe, or anything else a favor by procreating, only yourself.
Individual lives also shouldn’t be experiments in probabilistic outcomes. This isn’t a statistics game, but real people. Oops, they had a bad life, just a glitch, is again, callous and selfish. This is not to say I buy into the notion that there are necessarily “bad lives” vs “good lives” each being easily determined by some dumbass hedonic calculus or exit survey :lol:. Everyone is harmed by existence. Everyone will experience burdens and the struggles of living, and is indeed burdened with the challenge of overcoming x, y, z in the first place. This itself is enough.
Ignoring all joy, all the harm that could befall existing people due to a total lack of reproduction, and indirectly devaluing meaningful lives by essentially telling them that their creation was a tragic mistake that should not have happened due to the existence of risks is inherently paternalistic and fulfills nothing other than a pessimistic desire to ignore all that is good. One's personal evaluation of "X" (which could be totally legitimate and understandable) doesn't give them the right to suggest that X is supposedly irredeemably bad for all, especially those who aren't here to express their opinions on it (this is as sensible as the claims about "forcing" or "imposing" life) or that a particular component of X is all that we should care about. I think that this is narrow-minded at best and downright dangerous at worst.
It's also increasingly becoming "clear" to me that antinatalism is false. I don't think that nonexistence has any value, so not creating people isn't inherently problematic for me (which is also the reason I do not actively advocate for natalism in a world that already has many issues to deal with). However, if it's ethical to not create a harm, it's also unethical to not create a good. In the case of existing people, this fact would be affected by various factors including the fact that those who exist do not seem to require excessive external interference for gaining happiness as long as they aren't harmed. However, it's quite evident that nonexistent beings are not in a preferable state of affairs. In view of this, if all else is equal, I do think that it would be problematic to not create a benefit if it's good to not create a harm. But since we don't live in such a world, I think it would be quite difficult for our intuitions to align with that logical conclusion. Actions that ultimately lead to more harm than good are not a desideratum.
"Oh, you have a good life in spite of suffering, and you also want to do everything you can do to help others? Well, that's irrelevant because the harms matter more so your procreation was not a gift but an immoral gamble" is not a particularly wise thing to say, in my view. Happiness is also more than mere probability or selective deontological games (defenestrate positive intentions regarding giving a good life but take into account allegedly selfish intentions pertaining to the birth of "mini-mes or more working hands) that care about a nonexistent "imposition" (whilst also attempting to impose an unjustified pessimistic view onto others) but not about an act of true beneficence which cannot be solicited and is one that leads to the genesis of the opportunity for indescribable value for billions of sentient beings in this mysterious universe of ours.
I do think that we need to stop worshipping parents blindly. There's nothing praiseworthy about creating people because you want more working hands. We definitely need to think about these issues in a more careful manner.
I hope people can think about these problems in a careful manner and reach a truly comprehensive conclusion. Having the will to do good and represent the interests of all can be a worthwhile and fulfilling endeavour. ;)
Not the case.
If you procreated someone into the mouth of a volcano to be burned alive.. that is objectively bad in just about every measure. If the case was, born into a volcano or not born into volcano, the moral choice is not to be born into the volcano.
If you did not procreate someone into some happy moment, that is not objectively bad. You deprived no "one". A state of affairs where one's action prevented happiness (and no one was around to see it), then it is not immoral. A state of affairs where one's action prevented pain (regardless of if someone was around to see it), it is moral.
@Albero you started this.. Your input please. Don't throw meat to the lions and sit back with glee whilst the lions fight over the meat. Participate, please.. I do usually agree with you, and like your posts, but I hate being the lone voice and debate the same anti-antinatalists over and over.. Why pick the fight with khaled again, anyways? Let sleeping dogs (threads) lie... Just like humans should do when it comes to not creating more humans.. Let sleeping (non-existence), the default, just be.
I've missed your thought experiments. Remember the Willy Wonka one? :grin:
I will say this tho:
I’ll pretend I’m a moral realist for a sec, and I’m gonna have to admit that it’s just not true that not creating goods is unethical. This is probably one of many issues with utilitarianism: “Oh you’re living your life, why aren’t you being a good effective altruist and donating to charity all the time?” It’s just not intuitive. It would mean that every time I’m not doing anything good I’m technically being immoral. How far does this extend? Even pro-natalist philosophers agree universally there is no obligation to create happy people; merely that it’s permissible.
The value of good might be counter-intuitive, but it's probably still less so than an absolutist opposition to all procreation for the sake of a lesser or nonexistent good.
Edit: Also, I am glad to know you're not an antinatalist or a Schopenhauerian pessimist (it would be important to remember that not all pessimists might support AN). :)
I cannot see how the lack of someone experiencing harm is good even though there aren't any souls in the void who are in preferable state of affairs that would be disturbed from their creation, yet the lack of all experiences of love, beauty, and creativity don't matter simply because one could not have asked for those goods themselves. I am afraid I won't be able to accept arbitrary double standards.
Sleep is not better than an enjoyable day spent with one's loved ones (especially if an unsolicited lack of waking up that leads to absolutely no gain is somehow desirable). ;) Valueless/neutral states of affairs cannot be preferred over good ones. This ineluctable fact cannot be changed, in my view. The "default" state might be the default as far as the elimination of the negatives is concerned, but it's the opposite of a default (for most people) when it comes to the preservation of the positives.
After having had to debate multiple antinatalists across YouTube and other websites (wherein some threads have lasted for more than a 100 comments), it's definitely starting to feel like a lonely battle (and a repetitive one). :p
For what it's worth, I also agree with much of what you say, particularly the need to not take procreation lighly in the times we live in. Thanks for being there and for sharing your sagacious thoughts.
Have a wonderful day!