If you could be a God...

OK, so they're giving birth to the child in order to save some disembodied soul from the torture of non-existence.  Of course the parents are liable some of the cost for bringing into the world something that they want.

There would be no conscious mind to appreciate the lack of suffering, but the suffering would have been prevented from being distributed to those who didn't consent. Yes, the point of antinatalism is so that the Earth reaches a stage where there is no concept of suffering because there are no sufferers.

I don't see what difficult you're having with the ethical principle of not taking completely unnecessary risks on behalf of those who can't consent and, if the gamble doesn't turn out well (from the perspective of the person who has been born), they're going to suffer some really rather horrifying consequences over the course of an entire lifetime. So the decision to birth that individual would be the source of all possible harm (and pleasure, yes, but there aren't any non-existent people being deprived of pleasure anyway, so there's no ethical basis to impose the cost of bringing those people into existence).

And you don't see any merit to my argument because you've been fortunate enough that you're not one of the people who has to pay the highest price of continuing to procreate. If you'd been born with some horrible disability such as Harlequin Icthyosis, then you might resent the fact that you were going to have to face a lifetime of unremitting pain and never being able to do anything because you have to slather yourself (or worse, have someone else slather you) in emolients every couple of hours and because your skin tears painfully if you so much as brush up against a wall. What's the 'rational' number of people and animals that need to be tortured in order to gain a pleasure (arguably only the relief of the deprivations that were created by your existence) that was never needed or missed?

Does climate change count as an objective fact in your book? We don't know how that's going to pan out, but the predictions are rather grim.

There's no 'intrinsic value'. Suffering is a source of tremendous subjective value to whatever you bring into existence. So it's not really about value, it's about cost, and specifically the cost that you're prepared to impose on someone who didn't need what you were offering and didn't get to sign a contract to agree that the purported benefits of existence are worth the cost of the liabilities. If your only motive is self-interest, then there's nothing that I can do to rationally dissuade you from having children, because selfishness isn't inherently irrational. But if you argue that you're doing the children a favour by having them, then you have not a leg to stand on.

That's a feeble attempt at an insult to deflect from the fact that you can't come up with any rational justification or purpose for imposing the suffering on others that you'd likely be unhappy to have to accept for yourself. Just 'ethical values cannot be observed by a telescope, therefore we should torture sentient creatures'.

Because I've addressed the actual substance of your stance on antinatalism, rather than just an ad hominem insult. Seriously, all you have done is made a negative argument concerning values, rather than a positive argument in favour of perpetuating a cycle of harm.

My statement wasn't intended as an insult, and whether or not I have had varied and rich interactions outside of the Internet is irrelevant to the simple fact that I have observed that suffering exists and is a very serious problem for some. It's not normally human nature to talk extensively about one's suffering even with close friends, let alone some foreign tourist.

My statement merely pointed out that it's doubtful that some random sweatshop worker is going to regale a random paleface about the time that they had diahrrea during their 16 hour shift and soiled themselves because they're not allowed toilet break, so had to spend the rest of their shift toiling away in a puddle of their own excrement. And have you gotten to meet the African children who are slowly and painfully being turned blind due to contracting a disease which causes their eyelashes to curl inwards, scratching their retinas with every blink? I don't think that anyone can claim to know the full extent of suffering, and the thing is that you can only ever really underestimate the amount of suffering that exists, because even I often learn of diseases about which I was previously ignorant.

It doesn't have anything to do with the topic. I'm not offended in any case, but I do note that you still haven't addressed the rest of my points.

Usually someone not intending to be insulting would not post a comment that could easily be construed as an insult without bothering to address any of the other points in the post.

You'll have to pay for access and I'm not allowed to post the study for copyright reasons.