I just reread the essay, and I have the same reaction now as I remember having when I first read it - that of incredulity towards his reference to mor...
I used moral language just fine all my life before I ever encountered metaethics, and now suddenly I must pick a position between the existence of som...
I'm somewhat of an amateur fossil hunter. It would seem odd to me, that when I find fossils I am not holding the remnants of the bodies of animals tha...
But the issue is that if we do not sense the external world directly, but instead our senses are representational, our bodies themselves are also part...
I agree entirely. Frankly I think your posts are the most valuable and insightful on this forum. I have nothing further to add but to agree. It gives ...
Personally, I work a job which requires long hours - I work in logistics and warehousing (I drive trucks, forklifts, deal with freight companies, move...
The trouble is that under the view that, "all perception is generated hallucination", other people, your own body, and the wider world around you is i...
See also: But then every night I dream and the external world is, in fact, the work of my nervous system (if I take as true that brains are the source...
Haha, catchy! I mean, tell that to people literally starving to death. Sure, there is a physiological, hormonal basis to the felt sensation of hunger,...
I think we pre-theoretically inhabit a shared world of coloured objects. To the left of me is a red box of crackers. The red is not "my red", nor it i...
But doesn't this "more likely" lead to a repugnant conclusion whereby if we believe 51% of people find their lives worthwhile whereas 49% don't, procr...
So what you're saying is that we ought procreate so that the future people can be used as a means to reduce/prevent the suffering of the already livin...
Compare two people - one of whom is starving, while the other is simply not experiencing taste pleasure. There is a moral urgency to prevent the starv...
Nothing exists to suffer the deprivation, or to miss out on the good in life. Children are not out there somewhere in the aether, suffering from lack ...
I agree, there are enjoyable things in life. But most isn't all, and all is what I would require as a standard before I'd even consider inflicting hum...
What? I know from my own experience of human embodiment that there are significant burdens involved. For example, the ever-present need for warmth, pr...
Yeah, also JADCO was/is basically corrupt, and Jamaican athletes could dope with impunity while officials looked the other way. "The commission has be...
I think hidden in these sorts of questions is the assumption that if life isn't miserable enough to lethally harm yourself, then it's worth procreatin...
Exactly. Pessimism is always characterized in this way as a sort of moral failing - a personal weakness on the part of the one espousing it. The pessi...
I think you give humanity too much credit. If somebody was already planning on bringing children into a world and life that involves work, suffering, ...
But what more can really be said other than, "you're shit out of luck"? The premises of life are already present, you're already caught up 'playing th...
On my view, there is no higher state of 'happiness' anyway, than the way in which the antinatalist conceives of the unborn. To be unbound from all cau...
Yes, exactly. Life appears absurd and bizarre only when one takes a derealized/depersonalized stance towards it - when you intellectually look at exis...
If we conceive of the absence of our existence (and likewise, the unborn/unmanifested) as the ultimate peaceful 'state', anything manifested appears "...
Are children brought into being from this paradise? Do we return to this paradise at death? It seems incoherent to me that our lives and ourselves jus...
No, not necessarily. What I'm getting at is that a lot of antinatalist argument rests on an assumed view of self which is essentially, "I did not exis...
Exactly. Without dukkha, there exists no impetus to act. Yet we humans are perpetually caught up in action - striving towards, maintaining, dealing wi...
What, exactly, is the difference between the way in which an atheist materialist views brain death, and parinibbana? Functionally, they are identical,...
It is as if having children is taken to be the default position - against which the antinatalist must present his case and challenge. But it should be...
I think a lot (all?) of these antinatalists threads are missing the voice and opinions of women - those that actually become pregnant, and then breast...
Antinatalism can be seen as a method to resolve the issue of dukkha. That is, as humans we are caught up in a constant striving, driven by discontente...
Exactly. I question why secular Buddhism even exists, when under a 'one life and done' model, the path leading to the cessation of Dukkha is mere bodi...
Suppose I am hit by a drunk driver and am greatly harmed, physically and emotionally. If I were looking for someone to blame, it would be the intoxica...
One thing about these arguments is that pro-natalism is taken as the default position, which the antinatalist must argue and combat against. But surel...
Perhaps when the antinatalist makes his arguments, "suffering" is simply too strong of a word, with too narrow of a scope for the argument to be taken...
My opinion is that the quality of, and conditions of human existence are nowhere near good enough to justify satisfying the want for a child (by procr...
So the antinatalist is psychologically projecting his own misery onto the unborn. But the antinatalist was himself once that very unborn child. The pr...
Suicide destroys that which could be better or worse off by the act. You are already living, and therefore any improvement to your welfare, or the con...
Yeah, you also find the same hollowness and conformity in this sort of drivel: :vomit: But perhaps here you are giving only two choices. Either there ...
On my reading of the suttas, I fail to see how there is any functional difference between Buddhist parinibbana and the atheist materialist conception ...
I mean, even the "solution" is itself pesimissitc. The highest aim of our lives is to essentially dissolve the conditions for future experience. Samsa...
I was somewhat playing devils advocate. In my life I have noticed that most people are just simply 'caught up' in their day to day lives, rarely refle...
Exactly. One does not just spontaneously burst into existence out of absolute nothingness. There are prior causes and conditions within an already exi...
To actually answer this question, If I grant that human lives are made worthwhile only by the presence of pleasurable experiences balanced against the...
If we grant their being truly positive hedonic experiences within lives, and the worth of ones life is based entirely off a cold hedonic calculus of t...
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