antinatalism and pessimism

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.



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.



Then what is?

Sorry if this is slightly long.

i) & iii)
I'm referring to the problem of an earlier function dictating its current function. eg: A church that has become a gothic nightclub no longer serves the role of being a church.
There would have to be a reason to take "I need suffering because it helps me survive long enough to reproduce" over "I need suffering because it makes life more interesting." In existentialist terms, I don't think there is meaning beyond what people give it. For it to be bad it must be thought of as bad, and we know this changes from person to person. Sadists believe it to be a good thing. Sounding slightly Wittgenstein-esque, concepts mean things to different people. They are interpretational.
I do not believe that most people take the absence of all suffering being bad as a priori. Some may contrast their views with it, sure, but think of all the people who watch sport. Would they believe the games would be better without suffering? What people interpret as bad varies at different times. Being the living beings we are, it is usually some event combined with a level of misery, never really the same ontological state of affairs, and never suffering in itself hanging as a platonic ideal. To isolate it as such, with it existing in each and every situation seems too artificial.

ii) "And my point is that individuals ought not to be forced to contribute to a shared goal with which they do not agree, or be collateral damage that is caused in the process of pursuing that goal."

Regarding goals, I believe there are reasonable demands and unreasonable demands. I think being forced to stay alive is an unreasonable one, however I do not think simply being born is an unreasonable one. Yes, the smaller (and it must be small or everyone would have given up already) collateral damage is worth the risk for most people because the joy of having children outweighs the negatives for them.
Even if antinatalist philosophy is employed, there may still be natural evil occurring somewhere in the universe. One of Nietzsche's (the anti-pessimist) big concepts was his eternal recurrence. If you're a strict naturalist and believe the first law of thermodynamics holds then infinity may be in play and life may just be a reoccurring event by chance alone. (That is how life on earth is believed to have started). No matter how many people or animals are sterilized, there will eventually be new "life" or floating minds in some form or another. You have to become an anime villain with omnipotence/omniscience to make it work.
If we are to take that to its logical end, it is likely better to be born in a controlled environment than being born into chaos. Schopenhauer (the big pessimist) believed that the will (beings, minds) simply manifests again at another vent which was why he did not encourage suicide but asceticism. If we go full scientism then antinatalism vanishes from the meme pool because it does not encourage survival. It is only within collapsing civilisations it will take hold and then other people (or other animals) who are not persuaded or lack the mental equipment to be persuaded will take advantage of that.

Once again, I'm not concerned about the wellbeing of the non-existent, but those who will exist and will wish that they did not. And those who will exist in the future (as well as those who exist in the present) are part of an unnecessary gamble that is being made by someone else on their behalf. The future person's wellbeing becomes a salient consideration upon conception; and to continue with the pregnancy is to act without the consent of the foetus. It's ridiculous to say that it's OK to just recklessly keep having children even if you don't know whether you'll be able to provide for them, or even if it is very likely that they will be born with a congenital disability that will cause them a lifetime of suffering. It's not OK just because a non-existent person cannot consent. The wellbeing of future sentient beings is worthy of concern and consideration. That's why there is concern over climate change from people who are likely going to be dead by the time that the worst effects become evident.

And the fact that children of a certain age can be suffering terribly but not consent to be killed, or have the wherewithal is another area of moral concern, for you will be condeming a certain number of young children to a period of suffering. And those with the worst disabilities are being born into a long life sentence that would be considered cruel and inhumane if it was inflicted upon a sadistic torture-murderer.



I don't think that it is a relatively small risk, considering the state of the world at the moment, and the fact that even a large segment of well-off people are evidently very unhappy with their lives and this is reflected in the kinds of behaviours that you would not see from happy, well adjusted people (alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, domestic abuse, child molestation etc).




If you bring a child into the world in a wealthy nation, then children and adults in other parts of the world will be exploited so that your child can be provided for. And of course the same thing can be said of farm animals who will be kept in poor conditions and killed for their meat.



I don't want a lot of hyper religious people having the power to impose laws on me; especially when there are people who claim to be non-religious who want to impose arbitrary moral limitations on what services I'm allowed to obtain from the state or free market regarding something that affects me alone. In theory, I support open borders, because nobody should own land by dint of having been born on it...but if people are going to gain a foothold and then seek to aggressively impose religion, then that's a different matter. And I never really defended Trump; merely pointed out the undeniable fact that he wasn't as bad as Ted Cruz, and his presidency was in effect unlikely to be much different from a Hillary Clinton one (which is coming to pass).



Globally, the majority of people are living in poor conditions, and it is a small minority who are doing the exploiting. Most of the world;s population isn't part of the middle class of a wealthy, developed nation. So the numbers provided were very optimistic. Sweatshop workers in places such as Bangladesh work for very low wages and in terrible conditions because they have to support themselves and consumers do not collectively demand better conditions (and show willingness to pay a premium so that their clothes and electronic devices can be manufactured in humane conditions).



And just because someone does not already exist, does not mean that there isn't good reason to be concerned with the conditions in which as yet non existent beings will exist. Society already frowns upon parents who have far more children than they can ever afford; so that indicates that the wellbeing of a future person is taken seriously.



But why is an unneccessary 'good' (in that absolutely nobody would miss the absence of it if there were no sentient beings) justified by the toll of suffering that will be exacted from the unfortunate?

There's no guarantee of preventing the future appearance of life (I see how you've stolen Falconia's point); but that is beyond the control of anyone currently existing. It should be considered a moral imperative to stamp out suffering as far as we are able to; then hopefully any future civilisations that rise out of our ashes will find the same epiphany.

I can handle insults perfectly well. What I was complaining about in the main was the fact that I was not given the opportunity to correct the distortion made by graham, much less defend myself against the insults.



There's nothing which has convinced me that bestowing a good that is not needed is worth inflicting a harm which could have been avoided. And my previous 'rabid natalist' stance was really just channeling what society already tells us about having children and is the logical conclusion of that idea.



I never complain about your insults, and I have taken them up to this point. I mentioned it in this one instance because the poster in question did a cut and run so that I couldn't defend myself against a)the strawman argument; b) the 'you only think this because you're depressed' dismissal of my argument.

I did not point out a "typo" in your post. I remember the instance well. I was having difficulty deciphering your bizarre way that you were wording your posts, which I have since come to learn is just representative of your signature garbled word-salad style of posting.

Valuing one's own life is not religions; but imposing restrictions on the autonomy of what other people can do with their own lives and bodies on the premise that 'life is sacred' is religious.

And the Muslim thing was about the fact that whenever Islam was criticised, you would always have to draw up an equivalency to Christianity.

Safe spaces did not originate from the 'alt-right', it originated (or at least became popularised) on university campuses. Likewise, 'trigger warnings' originated on university campuses so that sensitive students would be forewarned about potentially "triggering" material. And it's not only the 'alt-right' who mock constructs that were invented to protect students from challenging ideas.






It's not 'zero sum', in that I'm not saying that there's a fixed amount of suffering in the world and when one baby has good fortune, another will have to compensate for that with bad fortune. The point that I'm making is that it's not possible to keep rolling the dice and expect only positive outcomes. Therefore, with each birth we do not know whether the child is going to have a good life, a mediocre life, or is going to suffer terribly. If we allow the dice to be rolled on the misguided basis that the results are 'usually' good, then that means that we're still going to pay the price of the suffering of the unfortunates as collateral damage in the enterprise.

How is having to endure a condition where one's skin peels off at the slightest contact, or 80 years confined to a wheelchair and suffering depression for the entire duration a case of 'winning the lottery'?

As explained a million times, I have no delusion that I'm going to alter an inevitable outcome; merely playing my inevitable role in that inevitable outcome, because a conscious entity cannot choose not to choose, nor be resigned to an unknown fate.



If it wasn't a medical diagnosis and didn't invalidate the argument, then that makes it just an insult. Much the same as insulting someone based on the race, sexuality or disability. Which means that your behaviour is no different from that for which you have relentlessly criticised others. Also, you have mocked the appearance of posters here, so again, you do insult people without provocation.



It's only good for the people who have had good fortuned, and has to be paid for at the expense of those who, through no fault of their own, had poor fortune coming into it.

The foetus becomes a future person who may be experiencing suffering which was imposed upon them before they had the power of consent. The fact that someone doesn't exist yet is not rational justification for ignoring the welfare of the future individual and how they might feel about the decision that was made unilaterally on their behalf. And the parents can do everything right with regards to taking care of their child's material needs, and do everything within their power to ensure that their emotional needs are taken care of...and yet their child still has a wretched life that is an imposition on them. And even allowing for the preposterous presumption that suicide is easy once you get to a certain point, you've still burdened them with tremendous inconvenience before they get to the stage of determining that suicide is the solution, and the pain and suffering of wrestling with that decision, then the pain, fear and anguish of actually going through with it.



But 'allow[ing]' them to live is just to create a problem that needn't exist. How many tears have been shed and hands wrung about the barrenness of Mars, or even the barrenness of our own planet before sentient life existed? And many of those who have life will never find it to be any kind of advantage; some of those will never have the ability to escape from it (e.g. your wholehearted support of denying the severely disabled the right to die except through starvation).



I'm not talking about the risk for each individual. If the risk is merely 1 in 100 who feel burdened by existence, then that still represents 1 human being out of a sample of 100 who is being imposed upon for the supposed benefit of the other 99 (not drawing a direct causal link between the joy of the 99 and the pain of the 1; simply stating that the 1 is the price of continuing to roll the dice). It's not your place to determine whether someone else's suffering is 'worth' the joy that you've experienced; if you consider that to be your prerogative then that would make you an extremely callous individual.



I do believe in fighting to improve conditions; but it would be altogether better not to create the mess in the first place, and then find a way of imperfectly cleaning up some of the mess.



Yes, that is why I stated 'in theory', I am in favour of open borders. So that would be in the event that those hordes would entirely consist of individuals who did not seek to unduly infringe upon my liberty. At the moment, the vast majority of humans on the planet do have some kind of agenda that they want to aggressively impose upon others (even those who deem themselves to be liberal and irreligious), so it's rather a case of introducing even more strains of viruses into an already feculent cess pool. But in the very unlikely event that this sort of thing ever got sorted out, then I don't agree with the notion that the privileged minority should horde their resources just by dint of having being born in the right place. If the Syrian refugees were all antinatalists who were uncompromisingly in favour of the right to die, then I would say that we should let in as many as wish to come here. And if that would mean that the people already here found it difficult to get by, then that would be hard lines, because we never earned this privilege in the first place.



The issue is that without any mandate except that unilaterally decreed by yourself and your mating partner, you are bringing a new life into the world that may possibly consider the life bestowed upon them to be an onerous imposition rather than a wondrous gift. That's where 'necessary' comes in; there is no justification from necessity of bringing new life into the planet, such as usually would be expected (at a bare minimum) if we were to gamble with someone else's suffering without first having obtained consent.

And if you didn't bring them into existence, then they would not express a preference for life (and there will be nobody with a preference of death to feel aggrieved at the imposition against them); so your justification goes nowhere.



Extinction is the only way that suffering can be eliminated; as suffering is woven into the very fabric of reality. We need suffering to let us know when to eat, when we need shelter from the cold, when we would benefit from communing with others, etc. Even if it is feasible to suppose that we can attain a utopia or near utopia in the future, then the road to that is paved with the collateral damage of suffering individuals.

And if another supreme life form ends up colonising the universe in the future, that is most likely going to occur after humans will have gone extinct anyway. So the idea that we should stick around so that these future life forms might benefit from having us here to show them the ropes is a specious one.



It's just that Falconia's ideas have never heretofore formed part of the basis of your argument. But if you want to pick up on some of the rational things that Falconia has mentioned, then I'd urge you to have a little re-read of her position on the right to die. Here's a quote to save you from going through the thread:



So I suppose you'll now be wishing to call Falconia a psychopath?



I think I know which dead-end street this is going down; but to humour you, I do drive and occasionally also use public transport.

Absolutely, so they need to get consent before they can decide.   The fact of yesterdays tomorrows being what today's yesterdays determine are imposed by they nonexistent future possibly not but oh my god everybody must die is more rational than your vapor can't give consent so too bad.  But in fact, the evidence that the vast majority of people would resolutely prefer to be given this chance to enjoy this blast of an existence upends and overruns your morbid pessimism.  It's not an imposition, it's a great gift of an opportunity that they can decide what to do with once they reach a state that includes the ability of consent.  If they are wrestling with it then they in fact have desires for it.

In any case, according to your beliefs they are simply organic robots with no actual choice following a player piano tape, so not only are their existences unstoppable and unalterable from what was set at the outset, they aren't really sentient at all, just "convincingly" (to what?) simulating it.

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On that note, you've also called me "deranged", which is the mental illness equivalent of "n*****"

I'm familiar with their arguments. That's included in what I'm referring to re finding it ridiculous.

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).