antinatalism and pessimism

antinatalism and pessimism Sept 19, 2017 3:14:42 GMT

Quote

Post by Deleted on Sept 19, 2017 3:14:42 GMT

Sept 19, 2017 2:10:32 GMT cupcakes said:

^tpfkar

Sept 18, 2017 22:37:42 GMT @miccee said:

But non-existent people do not share that subjective opinion; and you cannot infer consent in all cases based on what the majority thinks. You don't know in which cases you're going to give birth to someone who will find life to be a "freakin' gift" and which cases you're going to give birth to someone who will suffer from severe paranoid schizophrenia and spend their entire life in a psychiatric ward. Or in which cases the child is going to start out with all the advantages, then be crippled in a car accident before their 20th birthday, causing them to spend 70 years confined to a wheelchair, soiling themselves and having other people change their nappy.

Our shared subjective sense of morality generally holds that you cannot gamble someone else's lifesavings without their consent on a risky investment, just because you plan to give them back more than you took if the investment works out. Therefore all I'm really doing is reframing life as being an inherently risky and unnecessary prospect.

Sorry, the nonexistent -wait for it- don't exist. Nor is "consent" even a coherent concept for the empty space where they don't reside. And of course there are no 100% guarantees, and of course they aren't expected. Some having problems is not a sane reason to, forgive me, throw the baby out with the bathwater. Your exaggerated emotional framings of virtually tiny relative risks remain utterly unconvincing of anything save your personal distorted outlook on life. But primo poop visualizations once again!

And they shouldn't be expected to pay the price of everyone else's joy. Especially if nobody would be deprived of that joy in a universe with no sentient life.

The non-existent and never-to-exist do not have any moral stake. But the people who will exist in the future may feel aggrieved at the gamble that was taken on their behalf; and therefore the lack of consent is a valid moral concern. I'm sure you wouldn't say that it was acceptable for a pregnant mother to abuse alcohol and drugs just because the foetus is not yet a full person.

The risks are certainly not tiny, nor virtually tiny. There's diseases, poverty, violence, disability, exploitation, natural disasters, economic crashes, drug dependency, etc. The list goes on and on and on. It's like being on a forced march through a field with hidden trapdoors beneath the grass. If you happen to be one of the ones who luckily avoids all the trapdoors, it can be a nice walk with attractive scenery; but there's no moral difference between the person who makes it to the end of the walk unharmed and the person who falls into a trapdoor and gets maimed within the first mile. Their consciousness is of equal quality and value to yours, and their wellbeing is just as important as yours.

And that's not even getting started on the army of sweatshop workers in Bangladesh who toil for 16 hours a day, 6 days a week for a dollar a day (and to go back to poop visualisations, often soiling themselves on the production line because they're not allowed toilet breaks) in order to make it possible for you to find cheap clothes. Or the children in Africa who toil all day in the mines just to survive.

It's also not even to get started on the climate chaos that is caused by our wasteful lifestyles in the developed world - creating the conditions for natural disasters, and then pulling up the drawbridge when the people who are affected (the people who have contributed the least to the problem) try to seek refuge. Which is something that I can virtually guarantee is going to start happening within the next 50 years.

Even if you could say that only 1 out of 20 had a truly wretched time of life; that would be akin to your holding a party every night for yourself and 18 of your closest friends, then kidnapping someone off the street to serve as a slave, and not only forcing them to do the catering for the party but also to pay for it themselves, then keeping them in a spartan cell in the basement.

Certainly stealing is bad, but starting tiny-risk stratospheric-dividend investments for them from your own resources, and nurturing them and their assets, and giving them the substrate on which to have a disproportionately fantastic time, with the ever present ability to check out if they ever want to, is an inherently net-positive lottery-lucky-to-get gift.

But a person's suffering is his or her own resource; and a precious one at that. And with the best will in the world, you cannot take all the suffering from your child and make it your own.

And again, "unnecessary" is not the measure.

Then what is?