antinatalism and pessimism

I think that "suffering" is never well-defined in these discussions.

If we define it so that it's very broad, so that "The world is full of suffering" would be plausible, then we're going to define it where it's rather implausible to attempt to depict suffering as something necessarily negative, or at least as something that is a sufficiently negative that it outweighs non-suffering.

If we define it so that most people would feel that it's necessarily, significantly negative, then "The world is full of suffering" is not going to be plausible.

Or in other words, forget about the word "suffering" for a moment. Most people do not feel that most of their experience as living creatures in the world is negative on balance. Surely some people feel that way (and my suspicion is that those people tend to be the ones who are antinatalists when they think about this issue), but most people do not.

A more important issue that I mentioned in the earlier post, though, is this. A lot of antinatalist views hinge on the notion that suffering (ignoring that it's ill-defined) is inherently negative. The problem with that is that nothing is inherently negative, or positive, or bad, or good, or anything like that.

Value statements, or valuations in general (just in case we want to get persnickety with the word "statement") do not exist outside of individuals valuing things however they do.

So there need to be living creatures, with minds, for there to be any sort of value whatsoever. And different individuals value different things, and/or different individuals value the same things differently. The upshot of that is that what may be suffering with an overall negative balance to you may not at all be suffering with an overall negative balance to a different person, even though objectively, what the two people are experiencing is just the same (well, or as much "the same" that it can be, given nominalism).