Alright I just finished the Lukács paper.

So I might say that Lukacs criticism of existentialism comes from a couple of different levels. One is that existentialism does not reflect reality, and another is that existentialism does not present any new method but rather has roots in Kantian enlightenment era thinking -- and since epoch-making philosophies are characterized by a novelty in method, existentialism is not epoch-making but rather a fad which has become popular because of the social conditions of the time in which it was written. Existentialism appeals to the feelings and needs of certain intellectuals and so escapes criticism, according to Lukács.

On a secondary level, I think, Lukács also notes how this philosophy helps bourgeois and reactionary political actors by isolating the individual from their. social relationships. But I really think the core of his argument has more to do with the above -- he isn't just saying that existentialism does not agree with Marxism, and helps the enemy, but rather that it fails on its own from proper philosophical considerations: it fails as a third-way, but is just a rehashing of transcendental idealism for the times it was written in.

There was one point in the essay that made me think I'd like to hear more from Lukács where he said ,"A very specialized philosophical dissertation would be required to show the chains of thought, sometimes quite false, sometimes obviously sophistical, by which Sartre seeks to justify his theory of negative judgment." -- but, hey, then this wouldn't be so brief either :D.

It seems that he focuses mostly on Sartre at the end because he was the philosopher at the time most associated with popularity, one, and I suspect he focuses on Sartre too because he was a communist -- so that one couldn't say "well, even one of your own is an existentialist, so surely this is not a reactionary philosophy"


One take-away that I really liked from the essay was Lukács' observation that absolute responsibility is only a shade away from a total lack of responsibility -- and similarly so for freedom -- so that one could feel that one both is responsible yet act cynically. I thought there was some truth to that.



I'm not sure I totally agree with Lukács criticism, though. While I do think of phenomenology, at least, as a kind of "third way" between idealism and materialism, I don't think it's a way between as much as it passes over such questions as not worth asking -- at least, not with respect to phenomenology. I suppose it would depend on just how serious you took phenomenology when considering questions of ontology, but it seems to me that one could easily be a phenomenologist and a materalist without tension.

Sure, I'm good to start reading. Realistically I think I could post something this Saturday.

Yeah, sounds good. :D it's pretty much all I was thinking. I guess I just feel self-conscious about suggesting stuff.

I thought that https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1949/existentialism.htm might make a good companion piece -- since they are both sort of "outsider" criticisms (so it appears from the first couple of paragraphs at least) of certain ways of doing philosophy, but one from (what I take to be) a pragmatist view, and this one from a Marxist perspective. Plus it's short, and Lukacs is another writer I haven't really spent time with.

Not in the circumstance of no person existing at all (but has a potential to ). In cases of potentiality of possible people, there is an absolute way to prevent all harm, with no relative trade-offs that affect a person. — schopenhauer1

Preventing all harm to whom, though?

I'd say we've reached something of an impasse here. The case for the harm to the potential of possible persons is just not a case that means much of anything to me. But I'd just be rehashing what I said and what you are responding to here.

I see by absolute you mean something different than I had thought, though. You mean something along the lines of certain, or perfect.

This doesn't make sense. It again values life itself as something that must be had in the first place. Ethics is about right course of actions. — schopenhauer1

Does it not make sense, or is it something you disagree with?

I actually disagree that ethics is about a or the right course of actions. And perhaps that could be fruitful to explore, though it would take us pretty far astray from the OP -- so another thread, another time. I'll close with the opening paragraph from Susan Wolf's Moral Saints to hint at what else I might be thinking of, though -- and say that I think ethics is about living the good life, just to give it a slogan:

I DON'T know whether there are any moral saints. But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them. By moral saint I mean a person whose every action is as morally good as possible, a person, that is, who is as morally worthy as can be. Though I shall in a moment acknowledge the variety of types of person that might be thought to satisfy this description, it seems to me that none of these types serve as unequivocally compelling personal ideals. In other words, I believe that moral perfection, in the sense of moral saintliness, does not constitute a model of personal well-being toward which it would be particularly rational or good or desirable for a human being to strive. — Susan Wolf

That is the asymmetry part of the argument. — schopenhauer1

I suppose I'd just say this asymmetry is false, then. Or, at least, I do not believe in the asymmetry between these. Preventing harm is only important if someone is there for harm to be prevented. And, even then, preventing harm is also a relative good -- causing harm can be the right thing to do, in certain circumstances. This is because all ethical claims rely upon there being ethical agents; there is no absolute or ultimate ethical rule which must be satisfied, come what may, even if we do not exist. Ethics are a human concern, and so eliminating the agent from which they spring sort of undercuts the very basis of any ethical claim.

Just a quick side-note -- valuing life unto itself differs from thinking that we should experience life, too. We do, after all, keep people in a vegetative state because we value life, even though they do not have experience -- certainly with some hopes that they'll come back to us, but this is just to note that the experiential angle isn't exactly what I'm getting at by saying people value life.

but what does it matter to a person not born in the first place? — schopenhauer1

Exactly! :D It does not matter until the child is born. Mattering can only happen if there is a someone. There is a cost associated with your axiology -- the cost is life. And people do, in fact, value life. For yourself this seems like no cost because life is not worth much. But for most that is just not so.

Do not "saddle" a child with the burdens of life by procreating them into existence is the argument. — schopenhauer1

Yeah, but why? This connects to what I was saying later about how people value life -- not for some end or other, but unto itself. There isn't an agenda, it's just something considered vauable -- that has currency. So it's not about a deprivation or a benefit to some non-entity. Valuing life isn't really about what we are doing to non-entities. The consideration isn't about saddling or burdening someone else with the horrrors of life.

Life itself is just valuable, so procreation is as a relative good. That's the whole of it. Just like suffering has no real why behind it, but is generally seen as something that is worthwhile to avoid, prevent, or lessen.

It doesn't address your argument at all because @schopenhauer1 is making a different argument from you. :D

Click on my highlighted name and you should be able to read my argument to you:

— Moliere

Well, if life itself didn't have suffering, then that wouldn't be a target. What is it about life itself that needs to be carried out in light of the fact that no one needs anything if there is no one there to care or be deprived in the first place? That is my question to you? Isn't it all about the projection of the parent in any of these cases you could possibly present? Why does the child have to bear out this projection? — schopenhauer1

There is nothing about life itself that needs to be carried out, because needs only happen within life -- just like suffering only happens in life. Valuing life isn't an ends-to-means kind of care, so it doesn't make sense that the child is "saddled" with the desires of some parent just by the mere fact that they are born.

Not to mention that this is kind of far astray from suffering and has more to do with valuing autonomy and individuality.

By entirety of life, I mean, you have the unique ability to prevent suffering for an entire life. — schopenhauer1

For me, then, this is reverts back to thinking of un-real persons as receiving some kind of benefit, which is just absurd. I'd say that valueing life isn't the sort of value that one is doing for the sake of which -- hence why it seems strange to me to say it's an agenda. The child is not a means to an end.

This valuing life as an end unto itself you mention as a reason, can stand in place of the "agenda" the parents have in mind when creating a child. In this case, life itself is the agenda, and the child is the bearer for this agenda. The child needs to be born in order for the agenda to be carried forward- that is life itself. Why does life itself need to be experienced by a person though?

Why does the suffering of a person matter? Why should autonomy figure in our moral reasoning?

Of course there is no why. All reasoning comes to an end, including moral reasoning -- and the sorts of appeals being made here are not being made for some other reason. Suffering is bad, life is good, autonomy should be respected. These aren't values of the ends-means variety, but are the values by which we reason about how to act. They are a kind of terminus to moral or ethical reasoning.

The big difference here is not an answer to these questions, but the degree of attachment you happen to feel to these sorts of things. You don't feel attachment to life, or at least not enough to balance out your attachment to the badness of suffering -- suffering is so bad, and a necessary part of life, that life does not have value for you to the degree it has for others.

But is there really an answer you can provide to the answer of "why?" other than that suffering is really, really bad?

One argument is that by preventing people, the injunction itself is annihilated. I just don't see the problem. If there are no people, the injunction is unnecessary. As long as there is the option for procreation, would this be an issue. This is supposed to be some sort of "tree falls in the woods" conundrum that I don't think really has any bearing because as stated, only in cases of decisions of procreation exist does the injunction matter. Otherwise, it's not an issue. — schopenhauer1

I don't know if it's an issue as much as I would say that you should rephrase your argument -- because it's not the injunction that matters to you. Suffering matters -- suffering matters so much to yourself that you believe people shouldn't even exist because their life is bound up with suffering. But that isn't really what most people mean when they say they believe that preventing suffering is good.

So saying that preventing suffering is good sort of conflates, or at least confuses, where you're coming from -- it's not a commonly held belief, but rather something that is specific to the anti-natalist. The presence of suffering is so bad that life shouldn't exist. Whereas most people see the worth in preventing harm, they also don't think that preventing all of human life from continuing is a good way to go about that - and I'd argue from these considerations that it isn't from some kind of problem of consistency, but because your belief is actually very different from what people really mean by saying that the prevention of suffering is a good.

The other argument is that it does not fulfill commonly accepted injunctions of aiming at things that do exist, but rather it aims at the feelings of people who will not exist. Again, I don't see a problem. The people that could exist will suffer, don't have make this condition an actuality. It is odd because it is about procreation which is the only instance when life as a whole can be considered rather than various decisions of someone who is already born. This is not about improving or getting a better angle on some issue in this or that situation, but situations as a whole. That does make this unique which is why I see it as THE philosophical issue, more important than other ethical matters. Should we expose new people to suffering is the issue? However, what other priorities should take place. You didn't propose anything, but if the answer is other than harm, clearly an agenda is there, unstated. The agenda could be to form a family, to watch a new person overcome the adversities of life, etc. Either way, the parent is wanting something to happen from this birth. The non-intuitive notion, that is still valid despite being non-intuitive or unfamiliar, is that anything other than preventing harm does not need to take place, if there was no actual person to need that particular agenda to take place. — schopenhauer1

The issue, at least from my perspective, is that you're treating non-existent persons as the same as persons. These are persons who will not be, given your prescription, so it's not even the same as considering people who will be -- such as responsibilities to future generations. From this post I gather that the difference between these persons and fictional persons is that you believe that procreation is the only action where the entirety of life can be considered.

If I'm right in reading you so, then that's progress! :D I did say before that you at least needed some reason to differentiate the two from each other.

But here again I think we can see why it is the anti-natalist argument tends to fall on deaf ears. Why does it matter that we are able to evalaute the entirety of life? And, in fact, don't most persons view the entirety of life as a good thing? Perhaps if they thought suffering was so bad that any amount of it is a good reason to eliminate it by any means necessary they wouldn't think so. But most people are more tolerant of the existence of suffering than this. To the point that, in spite of life being full of suffering -- and I am not at all convinced that there is more pleasure than suffering in life, so please don't mistake me as giving the usual utilitarian retort that the pleasure outweighs suffering -- we also value life as an end unto itself.

And also I really don't think I'm misrepresenting you at all in saying that your target isn't suffering as much as it is life itself. As you say -- procreation is the only instance when life as a whole can be considered. So your target is life, not suffering -- suffering, in any amount, is what makes life bad, for you, but your injunction is not "prevent suffering" as much as it is "prevent life, because any suffering at all is bad, and this is the only way to eliminate suffering".

Does that strike you as right or wrong, in terms of my depiction of your argument?

.

That's a good point in that "preventing suffering" is incoherent if no one exists.People need to exist for preventing suffering to amount to anything at all. — Terrapin Station

Thanks. :)

That's what I think, at least. I'd characterize the effects of the universal anti-natalist as not so much preventing suffering, but rather preventing life -- and therefore preventing the ability to prevent suffering.

@khaled has said that he is interested in arguments, from the negative utilitarian position, that would counter the AN argument, and that he personally does not subscribe to this view.

Let's just stick to your stronger argument, then -- as I haven't justified much of anything in this thread, I've been concerning myself with the arguments for anti-natalism, and how they justify themselves.

Prevent suffering. (injunction)
Universal birth-prevents fulfills this better than anything else, because then there is no suffering.
So, we should not have children to fulfill this injunction.


That's what I pick up from what you are saying. What I'm getting at is that the injunction "prevent suffering" is developed in a world of people, people who are real, who feel suffering. So universal birth-prevention undermines the very basis on which such an injunction is formulated -- and therefore does not prevent suffering as much as it annihilates our ability to prevent suffering in the first place, and so does not fulfill the (commonly accepted) injunction. Universal birth-prevention is aimed at, given its consequences, the feelings of people who will not exist, which is absurd given that our ethical actions are not normally directed at what will not exist.

With birth comes real suffering, but without it comes nothing at all.

What agenda would you put above preventing suffering in the unique case of procreation — schopenhauer1

My line of thinking here isn't about promoting an agenda, but rather what it takes for there to be an agenda in the first place. If there is no one for whom we are preventing suffering, then we are directing our actions towards who isn't real. It's not that we're preventing suffering, it's that we're so against the world that we find ourselves in that it would be better for it to be gone. In your response, I believe, I have support for this in your language here:

it should be noted that we live in an on average mediocre average universe with a mix and range of harms, goods, and for the most part it is very neutral to mildly annoying/negative for many on a daily basis. — schopenhauer1

The prevention of suffering isn't the belief your anti-natalist position comes from, but rather your belief about the state of the world. It's that there is suffering in the first place, for you at least, that makes the world something worth anihiliating as long as we do so without causing yet even more suffering overtly.

And that's a very different argument than relying upon the belief that suffering is bad and should be prevented (to the extent possible).

Rorty is one of those philosophers I have never really touched, so for me it would just be novel and interesting to see what comes out. The particular paper I picked mostly as a requirement of what I could find that was free -- plus I don't have the "ugh" reaction to Derrida :D.

I also sort of think of Rorty as an "in-between" philosopher, from what little familiarity I have with him, between analytic and continental approaches -- and I noticed how there was a kind of mixture between these traditions in what's already been picked.

EDIT: Also, don't feel bad if it just doesn't catch you -- just say so and I'll keep digging around. I'm just sort of throwing ideas out there, and I'm fine with finding other stuff. It's more important to me that people actually would like to read what we choose.

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Rorty-Philosophy-as-a-Kind-of-Writing-1978.pdf

What does everyone feel about that one?

However, as long as one is preventing someone from experiencing harm, it is always good — schopenhauer1

I guess I'd go along with the other line of thought I dropped with @khaled with you, then. This seems to be the central belief by which you are appealing to anti-natalism here. I'd say to you that you are directing your actions towards nothing, in the event of anti-natalism, and so it hardly counts as a good. There must be some other belief at play other than the preventing harm from someone -- maybe this is where your thinking starts, and in taking stock of the world you note that we all are suffering. But the belief changes from what is a fairly commonplace belief to something else that rejects the entirety of the world because of suffering.

Well, if I had to offer advice I'd suggest either "Philosophy as Rigorous Science" or "Crisis of the European Sciences" as a great starting point. — John Doe

Cool!

I tried to find some free versions online and so far have failed. I think I have copies of those, but I'll come back with a different suggestion once I find something that everyone can have access to without having to spend money. Also it'd be cool if everyone was excited to read it, I think, so I'll try to find something that "fits" with what's up there so far.

The final output would be classical utilitarianism. Negative utlitarianism is the sum of suffering — khaled

I'm going to drop the other part because I think it is less persuasive and somewhat obtuse.

The part I'm saying is not obvious is that the negative utilitarian should rely upon the function of a sum to characterize the negative utilitarian function. Delving into the math aspect of the negative utilitarian we could characterize the NU-function differently.

So in the setup where NU-function is a sum we have three persons with a, b, and c suffering. The negative utilitarian chimes in that a fourth person will have d suffering, and since d is non-zero (part of the agreement in our conversation) the net suffering increases.

My point here would be to say -- why is sum the obvious function to character the NU-function? It does not seem obvious at all.

Say we have our above world with three persons, and we designate that they all have a suffering of 5, respectively. If we characterize the NU-function as an average rather than as a sum, then the anti-natalist argument does not go through universally. It would depend upon the context. In fact, if we are negative utilitarians, and we have a reasonable belief that our child's suffering will be 4 -- in the above world -- then having a child will actually lower the suffering in the world, since the average was previously 5.

It's not self-evident that the sum is the best way to characterize negative utilitarianism. So the anti-natalist would have to provide some kind of reason why, even under the pretense of accepting the negative utilitarian ethic, we should characterize the NU-function as a sum.

What about Husserl? He's one of those thinkers on my "meant to get to" list.

I worry interest may wain in the group if we do just another big canonical book since there are like half a dozen threads doing the same thing. So I'm thinking maybe some essays, lectures, and very short books? E.g. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Sellars, Deleuze, Riemann, Kant, Marx, Ranciere? (Do you have any interest in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason?) — John Doe

That's a really good point. You convinced me! :D

I'm down for Critique of Dialectical Reason as it's another one of those I haven't gotten to but have wanted to.

Honestly the schedule you have looks great to me. Kind of a survey in interesting writers that we can explore together. I'll have to think a sec for your weeks 11 and 12 though.

Eh, at the moment I just don't have that kind of time/energy to put into leading a group. But I'd probably read along with the thread. There are others here too that'd be able to put in a good word -- I know @jamalrob and @casalisbury both have done some deep Kant reading, and I'm certain they aren't the only ones. He's kinda a big figure ;).

I know that I prefer the Pluhar translation for its consistency and readability. But potaytoe potahtoe -- I don't know if it really matters all that much.

But if you want the group I'd suggest just starting up and leading it. It doesn't take any special knowledge -- just energy, dedication, and a willingness to be wrong.

I think I'd like to participate in this. I could use a little structure to my reading schedule -- giving me that extra "umph" that seems difficult to come up with in the midst of work and work and work.

A bit off from other suggestions, and definitely not the sort of thing you read alongside -- it's too big -- but I've always been meaning to finish my copy of Being and Nothingness. Thus far I've pretty much just done selections.

Regardless I'd just be happy to participate with whatever you set out.

I'd say yes. Mostly because the very disease already compromises what would normally be a violation against said person -- namely, it compromises their autonomy. The disease itself is coercing the individual already, so coercion -- whether initiated or merely allowed to continue -- is part of every decision.

I don't mean this in a universal sense, exactly. But rather in a more general way -- more often than not it's justifiable to intervene, because more often than not the sick person's agency is compromised regardless of what we do -- and this would be the main reason why it is normally wrong to intervene on the decisions of others (again, only in a general way -- obviously there are exceptions, and obviously there are other values we have to consider besides autonomy)

Alright, cool. So I think that it would be better to focus on validity after reading your comments, then. I suppose my thought was that soundness was more appropriate because I recall with validity the truth-value of some proposition wasn't something we were after as much.

But, yes, I'm interested in how to justify whether a given form is valid. That's a cleaner statement than what I've been saying so far.

For a utilitarian suffering is like math so 9 billion X 1-10/10 is definitely greater than just 10 — khaled

Even so, it would depend upon the function which measures suffering. So we might say that the mode of the set of all sufferers is the final output rather than, say, the sum.

Ye — khaled

Then do you also agree with me in saying that suffering is not independent of people who suffer?

There is no independent suffering-function to which our moral acts must hue?

That's validity. Broadly, validity is defined as "Truth preservation over all cases", or if one wanted to be a douche, "Preservation of the designated value across propositional transformations" (I wrote this in class once and the professor indirectly told me to chill the fuck out, lol). Soundness requires a valid argument and true premises. — MindForged

You are right.

Here's where I'm getting tripped up in talking about soundness. While validity does not rely upon soundness for its conceptual clarity, soundness does rely upon validity -- since it must satisfy both that the argument is valid and the argument uses true premises. That's what I'm trying to get at at least, though I do not think I'm putting it well since I basically just restated validity as you note.

The conclusion is veridical. — MindForged

Is veridicality the same as soundness?

Not for the validity. That's the logic part. Soundness (at the object language) does need the argument to be valid but the truth value of the premises isn't a question of logic. The logic is the machinery guiding the inferences, soundness is, like, whether or not the machine is doing a good job. — MindForged

Well, I don't know. At least with informal logic usually the procedure is to show some kind of argument that uses a form with true premises and a false conclusion to demonstrate that some form of argument is invalid. Granted that's not the same as validity, but that's where I'm coming from in my (admittedly rambly) ruminations; that the demonstration of invalidity, rather than validity, relies upon true premises reaching a false conclusion.

So I keep on thinking -- might it be the case that we use a (now believed valid) form of argument with true premises that then comes to false conclusions? That doesn't seem correct at all, because when I read formal arguments i feel they are persuasive and they hold regardless of content, and so we can then get on with arguing over the content as long the argument is valid. But then there is this fairly common procedure of demonstrating invalidity that crops up in my mind.

Something like the problem of induction.

Though I admit I'm feeling really unclear right now. I just thought that clarifying soundness might help in getting around the conceptual confusion I've created for myself.

As far as what people generally think, I think @MindForged hit the nail on the head. I don't think it's a moral problem as much as a moralized emotion. For myself...

There is nothing morally wrong with being sick. And in the great majority of cases where suicidal ideation occurs it is the result of sickness, and not deliberate action. So it is right to intervene in those cases since the person's very agency is compromised by the sickness.

Suicide is not morally wrong -- it's a tragedy, not something to be condemned, even in cases where we might say a person is rational rather than sick.

The terribleness of suicidal ideation has more to do with the pain associated, and not with some sort of moral duty or something. There is also the real threat that someone could die from it, just as someone can die from lung cancer.

Obviously the latter is less. T — khaled

Is it? I don't see it as obvious.

The AN is not considering the suffering of people who don't exist. He's considering the suffering of people who WILL exist and that's not absurd at all. — khaled

I like your idea of going piecemeal.

So let me start with this. If the Global anti-natalist's proposal is carried through, how would you classify the people who will exist? Would you agree with me that they are no longer people who will exist, but are actually people who will not exist?

Alright, I'll try one more time --

It's not the "equals" part that you're not understanding, it's the "limit" part.

By that reasoning I could criticize literally anything from a purported position of knowledge as long as the position were written in English. :D

Statistical mechanics? So long as it is in English I know what it means, and can criticize it from the almighty authority of the dictionary. The causes of World War II? I don't even need to read a book on the history, but just need to know English and any opinion put forward on the topic can be criticized from my well-rounded knowledge of the language.

Surely you don't want to double down on that principle.


A bit more seriously:

Sometimes disciplines use specialized language because it's more precise and easier to deal with the technical nature of a topic, and knowledge consists of more than knowing the language that it happens to be written in.

I'd say the negative utilitarian escapes this because it is only harm which is of concern -- so since there isn't anything positive on the ledger, we'll naturally have a world full of net suffering, even if we're only counting things which are important. It's part of why the puzzle is working -- the proposition appealed to is common enough, it's just being taken in isolation.

And not to get too dreary, but I'd say it's also not terribly clear that the world, on net, is very positive on this hypothetical ledger either. And if all we do is quibble over the this hypothetical spreadsheet it at least seems, to me, that we're not really addressing the real concern of our purported negative utilitarian who is wondering if the world is really worth all the pain within it -- or, in the case of our convinced AN, is not just wondering but believes the world should go extinct because there is just too much suffering.

Plus I'd just note that I don't really keep accounting figures on such things in the way that I think of it. Even if the world is full of joy, it is also full of suffering. I don't really see one counter-balancing the other. So from my perspective I'm comfortable with the proposition that the world is full of suffering -- I agree with it. I just don't agree with the rest of the AN's position. But I can at least begin some kind of agreement upon which disagreement can be meaningfully had by agreeing to this point.

I don't know how else, aside from agreeing with antinatalism right out, I could indicate to you that I understand the point of antinatalism. But to spell out my rejection here more clearly:

I'm saying P2 is false. The rest is justification for why I think P2 is false -- birth does not increase the net suffering in the world, it creates the world simpliciter. The (moral, human) world is full of suffering -- but this concern with suffering only happens within this world. The AN should modify their principle to reflect this difference, I think, because it's much more clear -- and also makes apparent why AN isn't very appealing to many people, though the AN seems to make an appeal to what is a commonly accepted moral precept.

Also, as is a pretty common way of arguing in moral philosophy, I'm attempting a reductio ad absurdum on AN. I am appealing to consequences because consequences, while not exactly the same as a utilitarian calculus, are generally more appealing to those inclined towards utilitarianism. The consequences of AN, taken globally, is that we are all acting for the concern of people who do not exist. Given that this is patently absurd I can see why an AN wouldn't want to accept this conclusion, but then I'd say the AN needs to spell out what the morally significant difference between fictional persons and people who will not exist is -- and in so doing I suspect that they'd undercut the basis on which the AN makes a claim (namely, that difference between actual persons and not actual persons), though perhaps there's another way about it.



Perhaps you don't find these arguments persuasive. But then I'd just say that you are right to say I don't understand. And so it'd be helpful to know what you are looking for exactly.

There's a need for something like a suspension of critique to get at what is being said in a philosophical work. — Banno

Yup.

Not that I have a dog in this race. But that's pretty much how I read philosophy in my first brush -- and how I read Kant the some-odd 7 years ago I started that reading group up.

Guess I'm just giving a thumbs up to this interpretive technique more than anything -- since it seems to be something that folks don't pick up on.

Also, I might add @khaled that you haven't done much with being able to differentiate the morally significant difference between fictional entities and potential persons which will not be born.

If there is no moral difference there then, given that these are the consequences of the AN position, there isn't much reason to think that the anti-natalist can speak for anti-natalism without, at the same time, speaking in favor of reducing harm to fictional characters.

No it doesn't. A rock is a rock even without kids observing it — khaled

I stated the moral world before. Sure, the rock will exist without us. But the subjects which are part of our moral deliberations will not. It's this to which I refer. If the goal is 0 human suffering without humans, then I'd submit that I haven't misrepresented the AN's case -- The AN avoids the (moral, our human) world in which net suffering is supposed to be avoided, rather than avoiding suffering within that (moral, our human) world.

It's the entirety of our existence, rather than suffering -- which requires subjects who can suffer -- that the AN rejects.

So if I kill someone painlessly it's okay? Because there is nothing to experience the pain or complain afterwards? — khaled

Of course not. We treat those who are actual different than those who are not actual. The whole focus on harm, suffering, and pain here has more to do with the required ethic the OP sets out.

It's really very simple
Give birth: increases net suffering in the world
Don't give birth: don't increase net suffering in the world

Therefore not giving birth is morally and giving birth is immoral.

I don't think giving birth increases the net suffering in the world. It makes the world in the first place, and the AN position negates said world.

That is, after all, the consequence of global anti-natalism. The principle of reducing suffering is taken to a point where the context in which said principle was developed can no longer be applied.

Except Harry Potter can never be harmed. However, a potential person can be harmed in real life, if it is born. — schopenhauer1

I don't see a potential person as being the same as an actual person. Harry Potter can never be harmed. And a potential person, if said potential person is always a potential person, can also never be harmed. That is because only actual persons can be harmed.

So if we see potential persons in the same light as we see actual persons then sure. But, then, I think I've basically been saying that the AN position basically does exactly this -- it conflates what is actual with what is not-actual. Or, if not conflates, it at least evaluates what is not-actual as equally worth consideration as what is actual.

For me that's just absurd. If someone never has children, then the children they do not have are not as important as the children that someone else does have. I should feed the actual children, whereas I should not set food aside for the children that are not-actual. By choosing to not have children that is all that potential persons are -- they aren't exactly the same as fictional entities, but there isn't a whole lot of difference with respect to how we should act.

I restated P1 as: Taking a course of action that results in more net suffering in the world than there would be without taking that course of action is immoral. — khaled

Cool.

Of course there is something to consider within a moral light. Your choice to give birth results in more suffering in the world than there was previously — khaled

Alright, so we're evaluating actions.

In the case of murder you increase suffering because you are causing harm to someone who is actual.

In the case of birth, though, there is no one who is actual.

Suffering only occurs after birth. I'd say it's something like a transcendental condition for talk about suffering -- without anyone it's not just that there is no suffering, or that suffering is being avoided -- there is nothing whatsoever.

That's a different kind of result than simply avoiding increasing the net suffering of the world. The AN avoids the world in which net suffering is supposed to be avoided, rather than avoiding suffering within that world. The target is different. Perhaps that is the real point of the anti-natalist -- that it is better to not exist than to exist. But then it's time to change the principle originally appealed to because that principle requires a world in which to act within.

The person does not need to be born to know that it is being prevented from harm. If they are negative utilitarian, then it was only good that harm didn't occur. — schopenhauer1

I understand that this is what the AN thinks, but this is the very point that I would say is the most unconvincing part for myself. The language of harm needs an actual person. As we cannot harm someone who does not exist, there is no equation between preventing a person's birth and preventing harm. It would be like saying that we should not harm Harry Potter.

But as a consequence of not having a child there simply is no person that is either harmed or saved -- and that's my point.

So what would be appropriate would be to tend to the needs of children that are actual -- but if there aren't any children, then what's all the fuss about anyway? You're thinking of what is not actual as if it were actual.