Post by cupcakes on Sept 20, 2017 12:26:18 GMT
tpfkar
Sept 19, 2017 3:14:42 GMT @miccee said:
And again, "unnecessary" is not the measure.
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.
Unlike empty spaces where something does not exist, extant competent people at any time can make their own calls. And once extant the balance of good vs. the bad can be comprehensively considered.
And of course actuals can decide for themselves, although the incompetent (to whatever task, of various types including immaturity) have their consent proxied in varying degrees according to their abilities by guardians of one type or another.
But looking to the future, inductively it is easy to support that a live person at any time will far likely be quite grateful for their shot than not.
A fetus is decidedly not nonexistent, and alcohol and drugs during gestation have actual effects on these actual beings. As noted, they and children up to I don't know what age are considered incapable of consent, and older than that still of informed competent consent. Should they all be terminated now?
I have virtually nothing to say over what a woman can do with her body. Even the law doesn't, at least prior to whatever standard cutoff there is for legal termination.
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.
All those things you list are not really "risks", just life, albeit with your very impassioned if perverse slant. And we're improving them all the time. Nor must upping my wellbeing drop nor lowering it raise another's. Very animated analogy though.
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.
Anyhow, sensible compassionate sustainable living and human specicide are very different solutions, to phrase things very diplomatically.
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.
Wait, no, the other 18 would have precisely zero effect on the party serf unless the the host decided to be a psychopath. Another one of your grounded analogies. And by "wretched", do you mean as your self-stated ennui? Otherwise your numbers are hugely pessimistic. And we're improving them all the time.
Wait, is this slave non-existent and never-to-exist?
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.
And once that resource exists, the child is already extant.
And again, "unnecessary" is not the measure.
If the antinatilist dream was fully realized, what do you suppose would prevent life's inevitable reappearance or sub/less-sentient species becoming sentient?
Morally I would be fine with post-birth abortions, but I realise that this would probably be too radical to ever be implemented.