"Why I don't regret my abortion"

When there's nothing that you can do to undermine the argument, you attempt to undermine the person making the argument; much as graham has done. I support antinatalism because it is logical, and there is no reason why someone who is perfectly contented with their life cannot be an antinatalist. I'm not going to pretend that unhappy people aren't more likely to gravitate to antinatalism, but that is because if your life has gone wrong you're more likely to think that there's something wrong with life in general. Much like people who toil for 16 hours a day in sweatshops are going to need God in order to validate their lives, because if they took things at face value, it would all look very grim and pointless.

You haven't pointed out any flaws in my logic. It's clear that you disagree with my opinions, but that does not mean that you've exposed them as being invalid.



Haha! Now you're misconstruing what I've posted and then doing a cut and run to make it look as if you've won the argument. If you reread what I've posted, I did not say "fairest society" I said "fairest state of affairs". Because there is no such thing as a perfectly fair society, due to the flaws in our nature and the limitation of resources. What a cowardly and pathetic strategy to misquote me and then run away from the argument. That is not a case of "point[ing] out gaping flaws in [my] premises and logic", that's a case of being a disingenuous coward.



The fact that you disagree with my logic is not evidence that my logic is flimsy. You are not an objective arbiter of what is logical, especially as you've earlier stated that it's not morally concerning for parents to knowingly pass on terrible disabilities to their children. And please don't think that it has gone unnoticed that you have ignored that part of my post, although you're too much of a coward to admit to ignoring what you cannot rebut, which is why you're doing a cut and run.



I haven't ignored that part, so once again you are wilfully misrepresenting my argument. I've acknowledge that it is important to find a balance between harm minimisation and benefit maximisation for those who are already alive. However, the part which you are disingenuously ignoring is the fact that if we stopped reproducing altogether, then eventually there would be no need to find that balance, because there would be no need for the benefits. But by continuing to reproduce, certainly you guarantee that there will be benefits for some, but you also guarantee that the burden of harm (I.e. the cost of the unnecessary benefits) will be unequally spread out.



If God exists, then I would certainly have reason to question why he is a good authority on anything. But in any case, theists can still attempt to point to God as the ultimate arbiter of what is objectively good or right. Harder for an atheist.



I mean not subjectively. For example, foreign sweatshops are a good thing for westerners who can ignore how their clothes are made, but not so good for those who are exploited in the sweatshop. 



You mean there's nothing left to ignore, misquote or misrepresent, so now you are moving on to the ad hominem attack, which is the last bastion of the cut-and-run coward. I've never tried to deny that I'm not personally happy with my life; but you cannot undermine my points with personal attacks or "only miserable people would have a different opinion from mine, and since they're miserable they must be biased and must therefore be wrong".

Until risk-free and pain-free suicide becomes available for all, then nothing can be concluded with regards to the low suicide rate. And of course, I could be absolutely loving every minute of my life and still be a fervent antinatalist; because antinatalism is about whether or not to bring new people into the world (with awareness of the unequal distribution of risk and reward). A happy person doesn't necessarily have to be one who is indifferent to, or in denial of the hardships of other sentient life forms. Although it probably does help, to be sure.

Continuing to live is the default state of affairs for all humans. To cease from continuing to live requires that we overcome our instincts (including any kind of involuntary physical action that might result in preservation of life), overcome the pain barrier, and also requires planning ability. Worth a note that there exist many people who are too depressed to kill themselves, because they don't have the emotional energy to dedicate to the planning of the act and lack the motivation to overcome the survival instinct, etc. There are also a great many people who have been suicidal for many years before completing suicide; so you mean to suggest that they really really loved life up until the very last moment? If what you were claiming had any truth to it, there would be no such thing as a persistently suicidal person, because as you've just said, the moment that they started to compare life's credits to its debits, they'd be gone before they could change their mind back again.

And thank you for quoting me directly for your signature. Shame that graham had to quote correctly then go on to misquote that in his own text and 'answer' my point based on the misquote instead of the correct one. Hopefully if graham is still viewing this thread after doing his cheeky wee 'cut-'n'-run', your signature will help him to have repeated exposure to what I actually posted rather than the strawman out of which he wanted to beat the stuffing.

The lack of determination and courage is not an indication of placing a high value of life; because nobody who highly valued life at all times would find themselves in the position of seriously contemplating suicide.



Then almost nobody is mentally competent; whether suicidal or otherwise. Virtually everyone has a profound aversion to inflicting grievous physical harm upon oneself. This instinctual aversion does not reliably subside when the physical harm is a means to a desired end.





Which only goes to suggest that those who are mentally incompetent by your standards should continue to suffer, and if there is no therapeutic interventions which can help them, then they should be condemned to suffer indefinitely. Don't believe that it has gone unnoticed that you have consistently dodged the question about what to do concerning those who have severe mental illnesses which have failed to be ameliorated by many different and diverse courses of treatment.



And if the mental illness does not respond to any treatments; then it's the mentally ill who should be condemned to a lifetime sentence of something that most sane people wouldn't wish on their worst enemies...right? If it were possible to simulate some of these severe mental illness in criminals, then it would simply not be allowable to do it to even those who have committed the most heinous atrocities, because it would be considered humane. And yet people like yourself have no moral qualms about allowing vast numbers of innocent people to have to endure those torturous conditions without any prospect of a solution that will actually work.



It's normal (especially on this forum) to be annoyed about the fact that someone has misquoted/misrepresented your opinion in order to match the pre-prepared response that they had in mind, then cutting and running before you have the chance to correct the misquote and ask them again to address the actual quote. Much like you can't resist the opportunity to 'dump your resentments' on Vegas Devil whenever he posts on a thread, even though he can't read your posts.

Even if so, it does not hold that the flipside of that decision is the notion that life is worth living.



Demonstrably not true. The most common predictor of a future suicide is previous failed attempts. Previous failed attempts are often cases where they couldn't quite cut through their wrist deeply enough, or cases where they started out with a firm commitment to hang themselves, but once commenced; balked at the pain of the noose around their neck or all the blood rushing to their head, etc. And looking over a 200 foot cliff with a view to jumping off never seems like a 'trivial' decision to anyone who has normal instincts. If the vast, vast majority of humans did not have those powerful overriding instincts, then our species would never have had a chance of making it to the point of advancement at which we now find ourselves. Our overwhelming aversion to harm (even harm which is the means to a desired end) is a built in safety device which has evolved to ensure that our genes are transmitted.



Then you've probably never intimately known someone who has a treatment-resistant form of mental illness (and those people are much better off without having friends or family as callous and intransigent as yourself).



As above; and mentally ill people do not need to be treated as infants. There are a great many people who have struggled with mental illnesses throughout their life, but have yet gone on to make valuable contributions to human society. What you are doing here is entrenching the stigma that is attached to mental illness. Having some form of mental illness does not mean that your rights to be treated as an adult should be void. A very Orwellian view you have with regards to mental illness; treating them as a monolithic group as you do.

And my view is based on respect and compassion for the mentally ill, and anyone who is disadvantaged by the unequal distribution of benefit and harm which is a consequence both of our flawed natures and the limitations of resources.



I only referenced it because you had quoted the pertinent post of mine, and that happened to be the very quote that was straw-manned by graham. Don't quote me in your signature if you would prefer that I did not comment on it. And I meant 'won't read', or perhaps 'will pretend not to have read'. That's splitting hairs. And I responded specifically to your post content, which was the quote that you pulled from the relevant interaction with graham.

Lack of ability to follow through on the decision is not evidence of wavering on the decision. And even where there is a wavering of decision, there can be many reasons for this lack of resolve, which include the suffering that would be caused to other people by one's suicide, and importantly, the potential consequences of failure in the suicide attempt (given that not even a bullet to the brain is an absolutely 100% guaranteed method of death).



It indicates that the individual in question did not value their life highly and were unlikely to have been continuing their lives in order to continue deriving value from their existence. And instincts have absolutely nothing to do with reasoning. Our instincts are the way they are because we have evolved that way. Nature isn't rational; it simply is. An overwhelming fear of death is an evolutionary mechanism which ensures that our genes can be transmitted to a new generation. The humans who lacked an irrational aversion to death would have been less likely to have passed on their genes and therefore those lineages would have been less successful. As a consequence, those who can commit suicide easily are a vanishingly small minority of the population who are exist at present; they are an aberration. The vast majority of life-hating people cannot arrive at suicide as a "trivially easy" act to accomplish.



No, it's evidence that nothing comes with a 100% guarantee and we do not have 100% control over anything at any time.



Except now you're misrepresenting my vision. I've already explained that in my proposal, there would be mandatory attempts at treatment before assistance in dying would be given. My personal proposal allows plenty of scope for people to get better, but at some stage ultimately hands over the reins to the individual themselves. Conversely, all you can do is to pretend that there have never existed any cases which haven't responded well to the treatments that are currently available. I am offering a proposal which would offer ample opportunity for clinical treatment as well as ultimately giving the option of death. All you can offer is denial, and you can afford to stick your head in the sand with respect to treatment-resistant forms of mental illness only because it hasn't happened to you, or to anyone close to you (if you're even capable of caring profoundly about another person's wellbeing).



It is treating them like infants, because your entire rationale for denying the right to assistance is 'they don't know their own minds, so must defer to those who know what's best for them'. But based on your own outlook, you are deciding that life, at any cost whatsoever, is what is best in all cases. This is a profoundly myopic and ignorant outlook. And you're ignoring the fact that the model that I proposed would be one wherein the right to assisted suicide would be arrived at through a process of attempting to clinically treat the condition. And there most certainly is a stigma inherent in 'these people don't know what's good for them, so they need people like me to make judgements on their behalf'.