I would be upset with someone taking the fruits of my labors, even if it was for a perceived positive reason, but that's because I already have a direction I'm going with life. I wouldn't expect to be that furious if I just started living at that moment. I would just be confused, since I would have little understanding of the positives or negatives.

That's why education is a useful tool. After starting off, shaping an existence out of genetic mishmash, the reasonable and moral thing to do, in this modern world, would be to work on educating that being. You have the greater potential to direct its view, and therefore its perceived pains and pleasures, in a useful and positive way.

Also, I don't really consider death to be such a great negative, since it just actualizes everything back to zero. It's just the end of the journey, the evening out of the highs and lows.

I can understand the opinion, and I personally wouldn't bring a child into this world, as I don't believe I could provide a suitably positive environment to outweigh the negatives they might experience.

However, I still disagree on principle with preventing further births, as I don't believe a person is having suffering inflicted upon them. They are simply having the neutrality of the void polarized. Pleasure and pain are just two sides of a coin, and I consider them equal on a whole.

After the entity exists, any further action toward them would of course have to be either neutral or positive, unless consent is given, which I feel is just a natural progression of ethics in life. The reason I brought up art is that I still consider the act of creating to be a potential neutral thing.

Don't intend to do harm, and a neutral action remains neutral. However, with the way you see it, any procreation is by its nature, harmful, so I suppose you should avoid it, for ethical reasons.

Wow Andrew, you flew in there before I could finish.

I was responding to khaled, but I'm on my phone and can't quite figure out the quoting mechanic.

Fair enough, but I'm simply pointing out that existence is zero sum. If you are in a position to grant a good life, then you can bring a being into existence that may potentially flourish. On the other hand, if you view existence as a negative, I fully encourage you to not procreate, as that would weigh heavily upon your conscience.

I get that you are trying to combat harm, but if the entity doesn't exist before you bring it into being, then you aren't in fact harming anything. You are granting it the potential to feel positive and negative experiences, i.e. life. The alternative is absolute nothingness, so it's just a balancing act.

Is art ethical? Crafting positive and negative images, granting the potential for enjoyment and disturbance, intending for the love but preparing for hate, it's a lot like bringing life into the world, and I don't think it's rational to judge any individual life until the work is finished, like letting an artist get into their groove and witnessing their eventual portfolio after they are finished.

If one considers life to be either positive or negative, from a purely logical standpoint, I would like an explanation. As far as anyone can really tell, life happens, a brief explosion of something, before fading into nothing again at the end. There may be happiness or suffering, but those things are temporary chemical changes and have no intrinsic value. Once the person is dead, no good or bad is left, as those things are opinions, and opinions require living.

Christian2017, do you consider your initial argument to be intellectually honest?

Owing money to a person is quite different to being permanently enslaved to them, and if you do not wish to admit that, I will not discuss it further.

As to your later statement that women only gain rights in stable environments, does that not clearly prove a misogynistic society? "Might makes right" is common amongst uncivilized people, for sure, but are you saying that should always be the way it is? The Bible encourages this approach, stating that it takes twice as many females to legally witness a crime, as well as decrying the menstrual cycle as "unclean", labeling women as part of a man's belongings, and rarely even giving names to the females in stories. If a person made such comments and generally behaved as such, I think one could very reasonably assume he didn't like women very much...