If you could be a God...

If you could be a God... Apr 4, 2018 1:28:06 GMT

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Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2018 1:28:06 GMT

Apr 4, 2018 1:13:52 GMT Eva Yojimbo said:

Apr 3, 2018 14:26:36 GMT @miccee said:

I'm certainly not saying that one can 'prove' that values are correct. They are subjective, of course. But harm is ALWAYS a bad thing, and if you can avoid harm without incurring some kind of cost (even if that cost is merely a deprivation), then most rational people would always choose (for themselves) to avoid the harm and not take the unnecessary risk for a purely conjectural 'reward' that would never have been missed in its absence.

Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that one needs to be religious in order to value life. But denying people the right to bodily autonomy (as in abortion, right to die, sexuality) usually has a basis in religion. What I'm actually arguing is that saying that the social value of life reins supreme over any other ethical considerations (consent, bodily autonomy, intellectual freedom) is akin to a religious creed. And yes, you can value life over consent to the extent that you'll metaphorically run up a credit card debt and then force someone else to spend a lifetime trying to pay off that debt (which can never be paid off, because you can never eliminate needs and desires), but to do so would make you extremely selfish.

It's irrational to suggest that you can consent on anyone else's behalf, because that isn't how consent works. Sometimes it is necessary to make a contingency based decision on behalf of someone who is comatose or is unconscious, but in that situation, you're trying to figure out what would be the less risky option and what option would be consistent with that person's values. But there's no imaginable contingency under which you would need to bring someone into existence, when you know that there is no risk or harm in the decision of refraining from bringing them into existence, and you have absolutely no idea what the person's values will be if born.

I would argue that it's impossible to rationalise the idea that we're doing someone else a favour by bringing them into existence and waiving the requirement of consent, even when the person would never know if you had refrained from taking the risk.

Harm is only always a bad thing if you're defining harm as whatever someone subjectively finds to be a bad thing, in which case it's basically just true by a defininitional tautology, and people risk harm constantly for purely conjectural rewards... sometimes not GOOD conjectural rewards (that's the only way to explain many of the videos that end up on a show like Ridiculousness).

Thing is, I'd argue that most of religion has its roots in evolutionary psychology. One reason stuff like abortion and suicide are frowned on is because larger societies are stronger than smaller ones (smaller ones are constantly threatened with annihilation), and every individual is more important to the survival and continuation of the group. Individuals might value something like consent, but evolutionarily speaking that's less important to survival and reproduction than, well, survival and reproduction. So the reason many value life more than consent likely has deeper roots than just religion.

I don't really want to get into the rest, except to say that, again, it's not innately irrational to say that we're not going to transfer our consent values onto those not living and that the decision rests with the (potential) parents. All I'm saying is that you can easily arrive at anti-natalism or, errr, natalism rationally depending on what values you start with.

Harm is, by definition, anything that generates an averse reaction (so 'harm is bad' is indeed a tautology, because whatever is bad is harmful and whatever is harmful is bad). I agree that it can be rational for people to risk harm in the hopes of gaining a greater reward. But a non-existent person doesn't have any need or desire of any reward, and when you bring that person into existence then primarily, you create needs. You create a need machine which can only be satiated for brief periods, because you need to need in order to be able to survive; or for the desirable sensations to be desirable, you need to be warding off a deprivation.

I agree with you about religion having roots in evolutionary psychology; but the thing about that is that evolution doesn't care about what's rational or fair. All evolution does is create the most successful gladiators, and it's likely that religion and certainly the intense aversion to death were successful traits in evolution. And you raise an interesting point; cupcakes' views on the right to die may come from deeper roots from just religion, but still atavistic and primordial. Not something that should still be informing jurisprudence in technologically and philosophically advanced civilisations.

It's irrational to presume that something that doesn't exist can be consented for, when there's no peril or state of actual or potential dissatisfaction from which it needs to be rescued. It's unethical and cruel to presuppose that we ought to have the right to make that call (play god, in effect) with the wellbeing of someone who may have to suffer through something that we would not have wished to consent to have to endure for ourselves had we had the chance (disability, illness, poverty, homelessness, etc). Also at the time of making this decision, parents haven't even lived a full life, so they don't know what the dying process is like before imposing that on someone else.