Or are you saying that the intuitions of other people are irrelevant. That simply whatever you think is right is right? — Isaac

It’s precisely what Harrison was getting at. If a sociopath has no moral intuition then it doesn’t mean it’s right. That’s what analysis of given situations is about..I have a vague notion harm is wrong..therefore where does that fit. Unless you are indeed a sociopath, in which case they’d have to purely learn morality from analysis and mimicry.

I'm asking you how we come to learn of these patterns which we are to rationally assess. — Isaac

Intuition is usually a vague sense that’s all. This feels wrong or right. Sociopaths don’t get to have cart Blanche for example.

How do we learn about these patterns — Isaac

Are you trying to get at the idea that what people report is simply what is morality?

And how do we gather these vague intuitions from other people? — Isaac

Look again at Harrison’s implications. There are patterns in moral intuitions that are consistent but then misapplied for procreation. So it’s interpreting and weighing where things fit and where one’s own preferences (based maybe on current cultural practices) make a blind eye to it.

The patterns of what? — Isaac

Rational analysis of vague intuitions.

Ad populum arguments are not fallacious here unless you're arguing for moral absolutism. — Isaac

More tripe. Moral intuitions aren’t equivalent to ad populism. Pro life is now the federal law in the US. Even if that was because 51% of people think it makes sense, it doesn’t (though in this case it’s a minority that wins here). Nothing has changed because an arbitrary majority dictated it. Moral intuitions can be misapplied or wrong. It isn’t bare moral intuitions that morality takes. It is then distilling out the patterns for consistency and not just arbitrary personal preference or cultural indoctrinations. Hence the bridge and difference between meta ethics and normative ethics.

Children deserve a good life, free from harms but no-one is under any obligation to give it them so procreation is fine. — Isaac

Ridiculous. Creating that situation he’s talking about. If you create a mess for someone else and say that no one is obligated to get you out of that mess…Don’t create that situation for someone in the first place. Your other bad arguments I’ll get to later.

For someone to deserve something means (in the context it's used here) there is a duty of moral agents to provide them it. For someone to not deserve something does not impose a similar duty on moral agents to prevent them from having it. It may be that they obtain it by chance, and no moral approbation comes along with that.

So the argument that we have a duty to avoid harm befalling innocents cannot be derived from the intuition that innocents do not deserve harm. They don't deserve harm, but they don't deserve non-harm either. — Isaac

Perhaps I'm not quite following. I think my rephrasing clarifies otherwise confusing terms.. That is to say, no one "deserves" to be unnecessarily harmed. That is to say, there is no circumstance where someone should be harmed unnecessarily. Harm can come as punishment perhaps, or to mitigate worse things (like schooling children), but to do it with no mitigating reasons, is "undeserved" in a sense that there was no reason for that to befall someone, if you could prevent it.

So is that one of the contexts which makes non-consent OK, or one of the contexts which doesn't? Seems you've just arbitrarily decided it's the latter. — Isaac

To be fair, that is the part I least care about in his argument, but to be charitable, I think he is saying that the conclusions of one act doesn't normally go with the conclusions of similar situations that aren't that particular case, and therefore one would be simply following preference and not what one's moral intuition is, if X, Y, Z is normally that moral intuition. It's a call to not let moral particularism turn into merely preference-maximization.. That is my interpretation of it at least. I see his argument actually applying to moral generalism too. The examples he gives of the inconsistent application seems most important in that paper.

Of course you are. There's an existing generation which will suffer from a lack of children. You're mitigating a circumstance. — Isaac

But that would indeed be breaking the very normative claim that people should not be used. To create harms for someone in order to justify some outcome in mitigating harms for another person, creating possibly significant harm to one person to try to ameliorate preferences that others may have, is to me, using that person for some agenda. I don't believe creating purposefully, known (significant, inescapable, long-term) harms for others to mitigate other people's harm would fall under the kind of "mitigation" I am describing. I am talking about mitigation for the very person being harmed. Thus, schooling a child or mildly punishing for wrong behavior, is mitigating for the person being harmed to prevent future harm for that person. Once that child is of adult age, notice these same acts would be inappropriate and wrong due to issues relating to consent and autonomy of individuals.

Who said anything about 'trivial', the word used was 'normal'. There is a threshold of harm at which it would be morally wrong to subject another to them no matter the benefits. Most harms we consider reasonable to impose are those outweighed by benefits. Harrison just arbitrarily draws the line at 'the harms of life'. He give absolutely no argument as to why it should be there. — Isaac

So here is where I think the largest difference in our values lie. I would not presume for another person what is the "right" or "normal" amount of harm that another person should be able to endure. As Harrison noted, these harms are not trivial but significant. I would add, inescapable, long in duration, and at the end of the day, whatever your intention for "normal harm", you just DON'T KNOW what a) That person would have wanted as an adult consenting person and b) There are many many harms that you cannot foresee, even in your best attempts at evaluation. I would characterize this thinking as "messianic" in that there seems to be this "mission" that "needs" to be begotten by yet more people, and that you are the judge and arbiter of people following this mission. Notice that on the other side of the equation, there is no mission. There is no person to need a mission.

Innocent is only the one who can become guilty. — spirit-salamander

The term “deserve” can be preserved here. No one “deserves” to be unnecessarily harmed. To me, that’s basically what this translates to. That way, you needn’t get caught up in the particular term innocent if that is the only objection.

No it doesn't. We do this all the time. Practically the whole of modern child-rearing involves this, our entire criminal justice system relies on this, all actions on shared resources (air, water, built environment) rely on this. Practically everything you do has a profound effect on the others who share your world, we do not ask their consent. In fact the number of things we do assuming consent far outweighs the number of things we do asking for it. — Isaac

So in moral particularism and particularism in general, you can look at context. Here, for example, are we doing something to a specific individual or on the level of government action? Child rearing is relative to weighing against worse options. Procreative decision is deciding on all X harms. It’s deciding that a life with known and unknown kinds of harms that will befall a person should take place unnecessarily on someone else’s behalf. Unlike child rearing, you aren’t mitigating a circumstance. Quite the opposite you are creating the circumstance in the first place which then needs mitigating.

As Harrison said:

The point here is that there are many of them and that, other things
being equal, the fact that an act will subject another person to many harms is a fact
about an act that, typically, operates with a negative moral valence. The fact that
stepping on your toe will cause you the harm of pain provides me with a moral reason not to step on your toe. Likewise, then, the fact that procreative acts will subject
another to a catalog of harms of the kind mentioned above, and others besides, is a
fact that — Gerald K. Harrison- Antinatalism and Moral Particularism

Harrison gives no argument at all as to why the threshold ought to lie with the normal harms of life. — Isaac

Normal harms? Fuck that idea. More of the same logic whereby anytime a person debates harms with an antinatalist all harms become trivial harms :roll:.

See my comment to Bartricks above.

People like to do the old switcheroo and pretend that all harm in life is trivial harm. But only when debating against antinatalism :roll:.

Yes, I get that that's your point. It's just completely wrong. — Isaac

Did you read the article? Shall I quote from it?

It clearly isn't misapplied. People have children all the time and virtually no one judges it to be moral problem, so the application (to this unique circumstance) is clearly faultless. — Isaac

That's the damn problem! Misapplication.. Because "people" do things "all the time" doesn't exempt the misapplication.

Unless you're reaching for some magical, or supernatural source of moral rules, you've got nothing to go on to judge intuition other than how people actually behave. — Isaac

Cool, I guess I will quote extensively then since you can't be bothered to learn.

Introduction
I am a moral particularist and an antinatalist. That is, I believe in the inherent variability
of moral valences, and I believe that, exceptional circumstances aside, acts of human
procreation are most likely wrong.
At first glance this seems like an odd combination of views. Most acts of human procreation appear to be morally permissible to most people. Other things being equal, this is
excellent evidence that this is precisely what they are. Even if I can locate in them many
features that in other contexts seem typically to operate as wrong-makers—and this is
exactly what I will be doing in what follows—the fact that procreative acts themselves appear morally permissible suggests that those features are not operating as wrong-makers
in the context of procreative acts in particular. So, of all plausible views about the nature
of ethics, moral particularism seems especially inhospitable to antinatalism.
However, I shall argue that such appearances are deceptive. The widespread intuition
that, in the main, procreative acts are morally permissible, lacks any real probative force.
By contrast, there is no similar reason to believe the same thing about the intuitions that
find many of the features of procreative acts to be wrong-makers. As this is now our most
reliable source of insight into the ethics of human procreation, I conclude that it is most
likely immoral.

Moral Particularism
I call myself a normative particularist because I am at present convinced that any consideration that generates a positive normative reason—which I, in line with most others,
would characterize as a favoring of doing or believing something—in one context can
just as easily generate a negative normative reason—a disfavoring—in another, and no
favoring or disfavoring at all in others. That is, to put it in the terminology that some
prefer, a consideration that has a positive normative valence in one context can have a
negative normative valence in another, and no normative valence whatsoever in others.
By itself this does not entail normative particularism, because it is consistent with this
thesis that there may be a rigid pattern to how any particular feature’s normative valence
behaves, such that one could, in principle, formulate rules that describe it.1
But, and for me this is essential to being a normative particularist, I believe there is no necessity to any pattern there may be. That is, there is both no necessity to there being a pattern—so though there may be a pattern, there does not have to be—but even if there is a pattern, it
does not have to be rigid across time and space. Normative patterns, if patterns there be,
are always contingent, not necessary. So, even if consideration P seems to have a negative
normative valence in every situation we can conceive of, this does not entail that it must
do so, and will always and everywhere continue to do so.2

For clarity, consider an analogy. Put aside the favoring relations constitutive of moral
and other normative reasons and consider instead the favoring relations constituted by
my (or your) attitudes toward things. There is normally going to be a loose-ish pattern
to them, though one shot through with exceptions. For example, in the main I like chili
because, in most cases, adding chili to a dish leads me to like it more. But it is not as if
I have to like a dish more just because chili has been added to it. There are some dishes
to which adding chili has the reverse effect—its presence makes me like the dish less, or
not at all. And there is an amount of chili which, if added to almost any dish, will make
me dislike it. Nevertheless, there remains a pattern of sorts to when I like and do not like
chili and, as such, it seems true to characterize me as someone who likes chili, because
typically I do. There is no necessity to any of my tastes—they can and have changed—
and I am not being inconsistent if I like chili in one dish and not in another, or if I like
chili one day and not the next. So I am a particularist regarding my own favorings and
disfavorings. Yet this doesn’t stop me, or anyone else, from being able to make informed
judgments about what I might like—it doesn’t stop anyone from making statistical generalizations, or inferring that I will most likely enjoy dish p because I enjoyed dish q, and
dish q seemed relevantly analogous to p.

I think everything I have said about my favorings is also true of the favorings constitutive
of normative reasons, and thus of moral reasons.3
We are primarily aware of normative
reasons through a faculty of rational intuition—we call it “our reason” or “intuition”—
and the job of work of our theories is, I think, to characterize the clearest and most
widely corroborated deliverances of our reason, other things being equal. As a moral
particularist, moral reasoning about difficult and unclear cases—cases where rational

intuitions conflict, or are unclear or untrustworthy—is akin to the kind of reasoning a
good chef might engage in when trying to devise an original menu for someone whose
tastes he/she has a fairly good grasp of. The chef will have to make informed judgments
about what to concoct, based on their understanding of the client’s attitudes toward other
dishes. The chef will no doubt try and build a mental picture of the client’s taste personality and use this as an imaginative simulation against which to test proposed dishes and
flavor combinations. But no matter how careful the reasoning, the proof of the pudding
is going to remain in the eating.
Likewise then, though I am a normative particularist—and so, by extension, a moral
particularist—this does not mean I deny that there is any kind of pattern whatever to
the normative aspect to reality, nor does it mean I deny that we can make statistical generalizations based on how some feature or features have behaved in other contexts. Just
as the fact I typically like a savory dish more when chili has been added to it gives me
default but defeasible reason to believe I will like dish p more if some chili is added to it,
so too the fact that typically consideration X has, intuitively, operated as a wrong-maker
in those actions in which it has featured gives us some default but defeasible reason to
believe that it will operate as a wrong-maker in some other action in which it is featuring. But if it appears, intuitively, not to be doing so, then, other things being equal, that
is good evidence that it is not doing so in this particular context.

Typical Wrong-Makers
In this section I will describe numerous features possessed by (typical) procreative
acts, and will draw attention to the fact that in other contexts these features seem,
at least in the main, to operate with negative moral valences.4
That does not, of
course, entail that they operate with negative moral valences in the context of procreative acts—not given the truth of moral particularism, anyway. Nevertheless,
the fact they typically operate with a negative moral valence makes it reasonable to
suppose that they will operate this way elsewhere as well, other things being equal.
Again, and to stress, other things may not be equal in the case of procreative acts.
But whether this is the case will be the matter addressed in the subsequent section
and not this one. The point of this section is simply to highlight that a) procreative
acts standardly possess all of these features and b) these features typically operate
as moral negatives.

Consent
No one gives their prior consent to be born. To procreate is therefore inevitably to
subject someone to a life. And to subject someone to a life is, fairly obviously, to have
subjected them to something very significant. To procreate is therefore to subject
someone to something of great significance.
In other contexts, the fact an act will significantly affect another person without their
prior consent typically operates as a powerful wrong-making feature of such deeds.

For example, if someone has not consented to have sex with you—a significant activity—then, other things being equal, that generates a powerful moral reason not to
have sex with that person.

It should also be noted that even when an act is likely to benefit the affected party, an
absence of prior consent still seems, in the main, to operate negatively. For instance,
if you hack into my bank account and start gambling with my money, then even if
you make me a fortune, the fact you did not have my prior consent to do so seems
to be an ethical negative. And this seems to remain the case even where consent is
not possible, and even when the act seems overall justified. For example, imagine an
unconscious patient needs an arm removed if they are not to die of septicemia. Due
to their unconsciousness, they cannot consent. Strange circumstances aside, it is no
doubt morally justifiable to remove the arm because of the great harm that would
befall the person otherwise. Nevertheless, the absence of prior consent still seems to
operate negatively in this context, for it is regrettable that consent was not possible
and it would have been better had it been given. It is just that in this case the positive
moral valence possessed by the fact removing the arm will prevent the person from
dying outweighed the negative moral valence of the fact they did not consent to it.

Of course, it is “in principle” possible to consent to have one’s arm removed in a way
that it is not even in principle possible to consent to be created. But affecting another
significantly without their prior consent seems to operate negatively even in cases
where consent is more robustly impossible. For instance, if I want someone to work
for me against their will, then clearly the very nature of what I want prevents me
from getting anyone to consent to it. Yet this doesn’t mean it is ethically okay for me
to make someone work for me against their will. Other things being equal, it would
be wrong to make someone work for me against their will, and wrong in no small
part because it would involve significantly affecting someone without their prior
consent. The fact it was impossible to get their prior consent does not seem to alter
this.

It would seem, then, that the fact an act will significantly affect another without
their prior consent is a fact that can reasonably be expected to operate with a negative moral valence in an act that features it, other things being equal. As has already
been noted, procreative acts possess this feature. Yes, it is not possible to give one’s
prior consent to be created, but we have already seen that in other contexts this
does not seem to alter the negativity of this feature’s moral valence. And yes, maybe
procreative acts are ones that are likely to benefit most of those they affect. But we
have also seen that in other contexts this does not seem to alter the negativity of this
feature’s moral valence either. In summary, then, procreative acts subject someone
to a life—which is a very significant thing to do to someone—and they do so without
the prior consent of the affected party. In other contexts to subject someone to something significant—even when consent is not possible, and even when it is likely to
be overall beneficial to them—seems to operate with a negative moral valence. And
thus if other things are equal, we have reason to believe it operates with a negative
moral valence in the context of procreative acts as well.5
Harm
Living a life is a job of work, and a considerable one at that. Granted, the odds are
that most parts of the job will be enjoyed by most of those who have been made to
do them (though there is absolutely no guarantee of this). But by no means is all of
the work pleasant. Indeed, large parts of the job are extremely painful, demeaning,
undignified, and frightening.
For instance, it begins badly. We emerge naked and screaming from the nether regions of another person. A less dignified way of beginning one’s career here is hard
to imagine. And then we find ourselves ignorant, uncultured, and unsophisticated.
We cannot feed or clothe ourselves for a considerable period of time, and will be dependent on the goodwill of others for our survival for many years. To stand any real
chance of thriving in the rest of our lives, we will need to be forced to endure years of
careful, dedicated schooling by a host of experts. And for many of us our ignorance
and dependency will return once more at the other end of life, as our bodies start
degenerating. And whether our bodies go to wrack and ruin or not, nearly all of us
will live in fear of this happening.

There is also the indignity of not knowing what our lives are about, if anything, and
yet being addicted to living them. Most of us would do virtually anything—including the most degrading of things—to stay alive. This, it seems to me, is an indignity
and therefore a harm. Life is a gift, it is said. But it is a gift in the way that injecting
someone with heroin and then providing them with a lifetime’s supply of the drug
is a gift.
Furthermore, and as anyone who has lived here for any period of time knows only
too well, this world is an extremely dangerous place. It contains large numbers of
murderers, rapists, and thieves and even greater numbers of lower-level mean-spirited, ungenerous, unkind people. It also contains almost every conceivable disease
and disaster. They happen all the time and they befall people largely arbitrarily, at
least from the perspective of justice. And as such it is practically impossible to avoid
these harms.
And anyone who lives here will, it seems, eventually die. So they will become invested in a life, and then they will lose it. And they will become invested in other people,
and then they will lose them.
I do not wish to catalog any further the harms that we all know lie in wait for anyone living a life. The point here is that there are many of them and that, other things
being equal, the fact that an act will subject another person to many harms is a fact
about an act that, typically, operates with a negative moral valence. The fact that
stepping on your toe will cause you the harm of pain provides me with a moral reason not to step on your toe. Likewise, then, the fact that procreative acts will subject
another to a catalog of harms of the kind mentioned above, and others besides, is a
fact that—other things being equal—can be expected to generate moral reason not
to perform the act in question.

Of course, life also contains many benefits. We fall in love with people it is good for
us to fall in love with, we enjoy ourselves a lot of the time (if we are lucky), and we
witness much beautiful scenery and often perform good deeds and exhibit fine character traits. And if an act promotes these sorts of benefits, then that is a fact about it
that, typically anyway, operates with a positive moral valence.
But importantly there seems to be an asymmetry between benefits and harms here.
Consider: if I know that, were I to have a child, the child’s life would be one characterized by intense suffering, then—other things being equal—that fact seems to
generate a powerful moral reason not to have a child. That is, it operates as a wrong-

maker, and, other things being equal, it would be wrong for me to create that child.
But by contrast, if I know that, were I to have a child, the child’s life would be characterized by intense joy, then—other things being equal—that does not seem to generate a positive obligation to have the child.
There are different diagnoses one might offer of this quandary. The most influential
has been offered by David Benatar, who draws the moral that absent benefits are not
bad unless there is someone for whom they constitute a deprivation, whereas—by
contrast—absent harms are good even though there may be no one for whom they
are a benefit.6

But for my purposes here it is enough that we merely note that though
procreative acts create benefits to those whom they create, in this particular context—that is, in the context of acts that create the person that they affect, as opposed
to acts that affect an already existing person—this fact does not seem to operate as a
right-maker. That is, the benefits contained in a potential life do not seem to generate moral reason to create the life in question. By contrast, the harms contained in a
potential life do seem to generate moral reasons not to create the life.
....... — Gerald K. Harrison- Antinatalism and Moral Particularism

Except the bolded is not an argument. It's just a statement. Therein lies the basic problem. You keep just declaring this moral rule to be the case, but it clearly isn't, literally everyone here is disagreeing with you about it, they clearly don't feel that way, so your assertion that it's a moral instinct is clearly false. — Isaac

What, did you go to Mean Girls school.. Everyone's coloring their hair today, so should I.. Ridiculous.

Or perhaps it's more of a Carrie situation.."They're all going to laugh at you!".

The point is it is the MISAPPLICATION to procreation of a moral intuition. Did you read the article I sent going into greater detail about this?

It is a moral intuition.. Look again at the example I gave:

If I decide that you NEED (whether you could tell me or not.. maybe I even have a hunch you would just love it) to play this game I think is really cool, and you are harmed by it (and I full well know that there are many harms in this game, often ones I didn't even expect that you would encounter) and it wasn't necessary to force you to play it, it was wrong.

Widening the scope a bit..
If I had a set of games you can CHOOSE from, but you could not get out of this choice other than death itself, that would still be wrong.

You can see where this is going in its parallels...

The idea of choice (illusory or otherwise), does not give procreation a pass, period. — schopenhauer1

The articulation of that moral intuition is to not use people for your/an agenda.. Harming someone unnecessarily is certainly doing so.

People DO NOT derserve either harm nor good. Agree or not? If not why? If you do then why are you focused on harm being deserved rather than good? — I like sushi

Not even my argument. People DO NOT deserve to be UNNECESSARILY harmed.. In other words, there's no good reason to harm that person (other than let's say AN AGENDA..aka using that person because YOU think you know what's best to happen to THEM).

As for "good" side of the equation... As some sort of purpose of the universe, no one "needs" to experience good. However, in a relative sense.. it is better to experience good than bad, as is obvious.

Anyway, until I write it have fun not having fun or have no fun having fun. Whatever just don’t expect others to sit idle when people are punching themselves in the face and hitting ‘innocent’ bystanders too. — I like sushi

Don't know what you're getting at. Are you saying, not to unnecessarily harm people? Actually, I probably don't care what you're getting at cause it probably won't be pertinent.

You speak just as much gibberish. — I like sushi

You can say whatever you want. Not true though.

People do not deserve harm nor good. — I like sushi

People don't deserve to unnecessarily be harmed..This implies not an impersonal thing, but by the action of others.....

people just end up laughing and leaving the discussion because the discussion cannot begin if those posing some idea cannot grasp the most simplistic criticisms throw at their half-baked ideas. — I like sushi

This is all rhetorical gibberish actually.

I can argue better for antinatalism than both of you combined. The question is have either yourself or batricks bothered to argue against antinatalism? I doubt it. — I like sushi

Big words little sushi..Prove it! :D.

Anyways, you guys make the bad arguments contra antinatalism again and again.. no reason for me to participate in what I see over and over.. Of course I anticipate the usual very predictable responses.. not hard.

But anyways, sushi-bro, the logic of moral reasoning has always been on the AN side.. It is the anti-ANs that are on poor footing.. All the moral intuitions that we usually apply to other areas of life are given a blind eye because procreation is a strong preference for many people.. and it is so engrained in our cultural practices and is a natural consequence of a pleasurable activity, so seems to give the impression of some sort of permissible act.

Again, the moral reasoning is in ANs favor.. Unnecessarily harming people and using them (For an agenda/purpose) is always wrong. Procreation doesn't get a pass. You can try to make rhetorical games to discredit the arguer (ad hom), but when it comes to the actual reasoning, you can't get around it. You can give non-analogous examples, you can obfuscate.. but it's all BS tactics to try to get out of it.

Thinking in terms of deserving or not deserving is a category error when it is taken out of the context of what is earned and of reward and punishment. — Janus

I think this argument can be subsumed in a more general one of simply not using people. That is to say, no one deserves to be harmed for X reasons, and unnecessarily, period.

If I decide that you NEED (whether you could tell me or not.. maybe I even have a hunch you would just love it) to play this game I think is really cool, and you are harmed by it (and I full well know that there are many harms in this game, often ones I didn't even expect that you would encounter) and it wasn't necessary to force you to play it, it was wrong.

Widening the scope a bit..
If I had a set of games you can CHOOSE from, but you could not get out of this choice other than death itself, that would still be wrong.

You can see where this is going in its parallels...

The idea of choice (illusory or otherwise), does not give procreation a pass, period.

Yeah same bro. See reply to sushi.

Ugh I get Bartricks frustration and turning aggressive. The ethics is NOT based on ends justifies the means reasoning. That’s in fact quite the opposite of the argument based on not using people.

See my amendment to the argument above.

So people can't get past the word "deserve" because it sounds like something to do with retribution. In other words, in this conception, deserving or not deserving requires a past action. Since a newborn doesn't have full control of their actions, there is no rewards or punishments to be deserved or not deserved. Rather, you can restate it without the retribution aspect (which seems to imply someone who can make decisions deserving or undeserving of punishment or rewards), you can simply say that new people born are harmed unnecessarily. One can prevent needless harm to that individual if one refrains from procreation. I'm open to the deserts argument though.

Great, more unnecessary births. You natalists will find any way to fuck over yet another life. More workers, more adherents, more sufferers. Let them eat cake.

There are things that can exist but don’t and things that can never exist. Cmon you know this (I hope).

You ought to "take that into consideration" iff that "someone" is an existing person. — 180 Proof

Why?? Someone WILL be harmed if you do X. Don’t do X.

Want to do the right thing morally? Do not harm any existing person unnecessarily. :death: :flower: — 180 Proof

If I intend to put someone in harms way at x time in the future, not sure why I can’t take that into consideration.

But the way to cut the Gordian knot is not by kvetching about it. As some wise sage said, 'the only way out of it is through it'. — Wayfarer

That has too much of a teleological claim for my liking. Like we have to be here to go through it. Rather, we were placed here and we have to go through it or die. Well, we die either way.

Yeah, it is. And THEN as much as possible, however, do not harm that (any) actual person unnecessarily. As you say, schop1, 'to be born is necessarily to be harmed (i.e. to suffer).' That harm / suffering is existentially facticious, not itself morally wrong; it is 'voluntarily increasing and/or neglecting actual harm unnecessarily to an actual person' which is morally wrong. — 180 Proof

I don't know @Bartricks claim actual makes sense then to your argument.. An innocent person then doesn't deserve harm, but they will be harmed. So that bypasses your poor reasoning in that quote.

But even without that, you are willingly creating the situation whereby someone WILL BE harmed. If you think that they will have a charmed life then you are empirically wrong... Though I guess you can make a broader case that induction itself is just not founded (pace Hume), but that's a different argument.

@Wayfarer, I guess I'll rephrase it to fit your more Idealism leanings..

If no person was ever born, would there be a need for release (ala gnostics, Buddhists, Schopenhuarean ascetics, etc.)? So for us, for sure too late.

That is true, but in that case that genetic line or species gets eliminated. — punos

So? No one has an obligation to a species, but a person(s).

That someone or an entire species decides not to procreate indicates that it is not viable, and thus self selects for exclusion. — punos

That is simply a fact, not a moral claim.

I feel like I'm playing speed chess: antinatalism edition :lol:.

That is based solely on your conviction there isn't one. — Wayfarer

I mean, the argument goes:
"Don't use people for an/your agenda". Using them here would be harming them unnecessarily. Why would you harm someone unnecessarily? For your goal/agenda of course. And I am very much assuming there is one when someone has a child. Accidents are plain old negligence, also to be avoided of course.

'Harming actual people unnecessarily' – I agree is wrong. — 180 Proof

Gee whiz, what is the outcome of procreating someone? Is it, wait, an actual person?

All the potential harm, or problems the child might face in this world is part of the evolutionary pressures of the selection process. — punos

This is the naturalistic fallacy. Just because of "evolutionary pressure" doesn't mean we MUST decide to go along with that pressure (whether cultural or somehow preference).

You can observe that being born inevitably entails suffering, without necessarily agreeing that it negates the entire process — Wayfarer

This is no difference then "The ends justifies the means".. You get to harm people because YOUR ends matter. And of course YOUR ends are sacred and MUST occur. Right?

they also believed that there was an escape from that, a higher truth. — Wayfarer

But to bring someone into the world just to gain a higher truth is using/harming them unnecessarily for an/your agenda.

So you're arguing for more than 'anti-natalism', you're actually arguing that existence is evil. (Hey that's why Schopenhauer1 likes your post!) — Wayfarer

Though I tend towards Schopenhauerian Pessimism, this particular AN argument I made earlier doesn't need it. You simply have to agree that harming people unnecessarily and for an agenda (yours, society's, even what you the parent think is the "best" outcome for the child born), is no good/wrong/misguided.

My argument was:

I see this more clearly formulated in an argument I've made in the past that goes something like, "If you can't bring a person into a perfect version of their Utopia/Paradise, then it is wrong to bring that person into the world, period".

Other moral considerations:
WHY would you bring someone into a world where they would be knowingly harmed? The problem here is that any answer you provide violates some moral intuitions of not using people.

For example, "Oh well, they NEED to be harmed because X needs to happen (for them, society, for yourself)". A false sense of what YOU think is right for someone else doesn't justify harm.. even if you think that you can do a good job mitigating collateral damage to the person you know you are going to harm. And I would say that this is a violation of using a person, for certain regards (for your agenda/mission/purposes/goals).

Don't get me wrong. I don't think the potential parents are trying to be nefarious.. I just think that usual instincts of what is wrong are misapplied to this specific case of procreation. — schopenhauer1

Shouldn't logic begin with a fact rather than a personal judgement? Unpleasant Pain is a necessary part of life. Existence means painful unpleasant experiences. Not bearing children prevents more humans from painful unpleasant experiences. — Bitter Crank

But you just made a fact-based argument for AN, no? :D.

Yours is no exception. We cause harms to others to achieve what we think is right all the time. So long as we feel satisfied that the harms were the minimum necessary most people consider this quite ethically unproblematic. — Isaac

I wouldn't cause harm unnecessarily to others to achieve what I think is right though. I wouldn't create suffering when I didn't have to for mitigating circumstances. I think that is rather common intuition. I wouldn't do harm to someone (when there are alternatives) because it suits my interests either. At least, not if I am trying to be moral and act with integrity.

As I said earlier, often people don't apply moral intuitions to the case of procreation when otherwise they would. I am sure evolutionary pressures helped with this. Here is a good article on just this subject: https://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/14444/Antinatalism%20and%20Moral%20Particularism.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

Here is the abstract:

I believe most acts of human procreation are immoral, and I believe this despite also believing in the truth of moral particularism. In this paper I explain why. I argue that procreative acts possess numerous features that, in other contexts, seem typically to operate with negative moral valences. Other things being equal this gives us reason to believe they will operate negatively in the context of procreative acts as well. However, most people’s intuitions represent procreative acts to be morally permissible in most circumstances. Given moral particularism, this would normally be good evidence that procreative acts are indeed morally permissible and that the features that operate negatively elsewhere, simply do not do so in the context of procreative acts in particular. But I argue that we have no good reason to think our intuitions about the ethics of human procreation are accurate. Our most reliable source of insight into the ethics human procreative acts are not our intuitions those acts themselves, but our intuitions about the typical moral valences of the features such acts possess. If that is correct, then acts of human procreation are most likely wrong

If you take a hyper-individualistic, neo-liberal type approach, then maybe this isn't going to work. Maybe it does lead to antinatalism. One good reason (among many others) to discard such a morally decrepit position. — Isaac

Odd, since politically speaking, I am far from neo-liberal. But indeed, ethically, I do think the locus of ethics is the dignity of the individual. I don't think antinatalism needs to be based on individuals to work though. There are negative utilitarians for example. Also being individualistic, if you want to characterize it like that (which I think is just your little construction), doesn't disqualify from being moral. That itself, would have to be proven. What I think you mistake for "group" is actually a construction of a particular end goal you have in mind. And what doesn't fit that end goal you call "morally decrepit". That is just reifying your preferences to moral standard.

@Bartricks @Isaac, I see this more clearly formulated in an argument I've made in the past that goes something like, "If you can't bring a person into a perfect version of their Utopia/Paradise, then it is wrong to bring that person into the world, period".

Other moral considerations:
WHY would you bring someone into a world where they would be knowingly harmed? The problem here is that any answer you provide violates some moral intuitions of not using people.

For example, "Oh well, they NEED to be harmed because X needs to happen (for them, society, for yourself)". A false sense of what YOU think is right for someone else doesn't justify harm.. even if you think that you can do a good job mitigating collateral damage to the person you know you are going to harm. And I would say that this is a violation of using a person, for certain regards (for your agenda/mission/purposes/goals).

Don't get me wrong. I don't think the potential parents are trying to be nefarious.. I just think that usual instincts of what is wrong are misapplied to this specific case of procreation.

Well, You're here now! You might as well help try to improve things for others whilst recommending that life should fade away asap.
You can advocate for antinatalism all you want, but meantime, you can do your best to help those who are suffering. — universeness

No one cares about my suggestions for improving things, just about complying with the agenda at this stage. Like everyone else.