If you could be a God...

Anyone who regrets that they were born, or wishes that they could be assisted to die is paying for your values.

If you're saying that an aborted foetus is a 'victim', then you're in with the rabid evangelical Christians who oppose the right to abortion. The foetus is no more victimised by mandatory abortion than by elective abortion. In either case, it is not a morally relevant entity with any interests invested in their continued existence. All I want to do is to take away the right to play God. And I'm not in favour of killing anyone who doesn't want to be killed, unless it's determined that omnicide is the only way to nip in the bud the perpetual cycle of imposition. Don't forget that a mass extinction is the eventual consequence of your views as well, but just imposed on a population that is temporally vastly removed from our own. So either natalism or antinatalism will result in the extinction of all life, but with antinatalism there would likely be less suffering involved.

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.

I would never have advocated for keeping Terri Schaivo alive, or denying people the right to state assisted suicide for any reason that they saw fit. If you agree that there are fates worse than death, but yet wish to deny death to those suffering chronically with severe mental illness issues, then it is a failure of empathy that (in part, at least) informs your views on the issue of assisted suicide. Very much like the arch conservatives who want to abolish any kind of welfare safety net because they can't imagine how it could be so hard to get a job which pays enough on which to survive.

And whichever one of us gets our wishes, vast populations are going to die off en masse. If you get your wishes, vastly more people and animals will die off in total (most of them due to normal causes, and then the final generations will die off in an extinction), and they will likely die off in more pain and it will be more dragged out. So if you find the idea of death and mass extinction abhorrent, then it would make more sense to induce it as soon as possible in order to minimise the suffering that will be caused. In the context of an eternal universe, it makes near to no difference anyway, because the universe will continue for an infinitely long time after life becomes extinct in any case.

No, from the perspective of anyone who realises that risk and harm are REAL, they aren't distributed based on fairness or desert and could happen to anyone.

If you were to write a book titled 'How to have a blast with the gift of life: the philosophy of an internet insult troll' by cupcakes (ghostwritten by goz, so that it can at least minimally comprehensible to an average reader), and had to come up with a list of things that would ensure a good life, if you had any shred of honesty, it would probably look like this:

Don't be born with a disability.
Be born into at least a middle class family in a developed nation. Try to be born into a rich, well connected family if you can.
Don't be born to abusive or neglectful parents
Don't become chronically ill
Don't become mentally ill
Don't have an IQ below 90, because otherwise you'll struggle to find work and be exploited terribly if you do.
Don't get molested by the local priest as a child
Don't get smashed up in a road accident by a drunken driver
Don't have a major economic recession happen in your adulthood
Don't have global warming cause climatic catastrophes that could be deleterious to your livelihood
Don't go blind


and the list could go on and on forever

So you're claiming that an aborted foetus is a victim and has been deprived of life if the mother didn't want the abortion, but not if she wanted the abortion? Please explain how that could possibly make any sense. 

As far as I'm aware, the foetus is not self aware and thus has no desires or interests invested in its own future. If aborted, it won't even know what's happened, let alone whether it was as a result of the mother's choice or someone else's. So I really fail to see how the foetus is 'deprived' in one scenario, but has not been deprived, or wronged in the other. How does the foetus know whether it's being aborted because the mother didn't want it, or because other people didn't want its welfare being risked without consent? When I asked you to explain why abortion was a hard compromise, you alluded to the benefits that already born individuals would derive from the foetus being born, not anything that relates to the foetus' own invested interests or desires in being born and entering the lottery.

Perhaps you're so appalled by antinatalism, but yet so stymied in being able to formulate a cogent argument against it that you're talking yourself round to a fundamentalist pro-life belief. Are these your peeps now?






Of course there has to be a mass extinction, because nothing is eternal. Perhaps not even the universe itself. Continuing to create more life only delays the inevitable, and for every generation that is created, there's billions or trillions of sentient organisms which are going to die (or worst, be forced to continue living until the heat death of the universe, because human views of death are too primitive to let people die when there's any possibility of preventing it, even against the will and pleading of the owner of the life).

Why did you respond to my comments about Youtube philosophers by bringing up Philip Nitschke, then? Right to die means the right to die. Having a right to do something implies that it doesn't need to be done covertly and that you can't be forcibly prevented from doing it unless you're directly endangering other people with your actions. If we used your definition of what constitutes a 'right' then a 200lb man has the right to mug a 90lb old lady in a dark alley at night, when there's no security cameras.



This is either a case of misdirection or reading comprehension issues. Having a 'right' to do something has no relation to whether the action is harmful or not. Smoking and alcohol consumption are both harmful actions (and can harm others as well as the person consuming), but people have a right to do those things if they are over a certain age. As long as smokers do not smoke in certain locations such as bars and restaurants, police cannot use force to prevent them from doing so. Smokers don't need to procure their cigarettes through shady black market sources based in Mexico and hope that the package doesn't get intercepted en route, or that the police somehow find out that they have obtained cigarettes and break down the door of their home in a raid at 4am to confiscate the contraban. There's no involuntary 72 hour hold period in a hospital for being caught smoking, or being suspected of planning to attempt to light a cigarette. There's no Facebook algorithm which alerts your other Facebook contacts that you are 'at risk' of lighting a cigarette. There are lots of things that people have a right to do that can harm themselves and others, and what all these things have in common is that the police cannot forcibly prevent you from doing these things unless you're doing them in such a way that poses a danger to other people or infringes the rights of other people. I'm not referencing anything other than a legal right, because there's no other type of right that exists. Rights cannot be observed in nature, they are a legal construct.




A foetus cannot give consent one way or another, so aborting them cannot be 'against' their consent. It's done without their consent, but there's no adverse consequences to doing it and the foetus doesn't have any desire one way or the other, so it's not done against what they desire.

The point that you're missing is that the only times when it's acceptable to consent on someone else's behalf is when there are problems with both options and the person already exists and has a pre-existing stake in the decision. In constrast, to decide against conceiving a child, there is no identifiable child for whom you need to make a decision (therefore nobody to deal with the consequences of not be, but should you decide to have a child, there will be a future person who will deal with the consequences of that decision.

And you're just dismissing the idea that there can be any risks at all in life, even when the parents have made the best plans they can (only bad and careless parents give birth to children with disabilities, or those who go on to develop a chronic illness, or develop mental health issues). But that's what you need to do in order to try and make a case against antinatalism, so that argues as well for antinatalism as any argument in favour of antinatalism.