the point the book seems to be making is that both the Left and the Right tend to describe each other in psychological terms, perhaps the Left more so. — Apollodorus

I'm not sure I'd describe it as 'the point' of the book, but I wouldn't deny that there's been a growth in interest, and perhaps leaning more toward psychologising right, rather than left wing views.

I think the trend (small though it is), is partly about the way psychology is practiced. The interest is partly in getting behind the surface-level analysis, so one is less likely to get hits from "left wing voters vote for social policy because they care about social policy" than "right wing voters vote for less regulation because they're greedy". I'm exaggerating, of course, but the point is individual gain (at the expense of others), is a motive, yet not a socially acceptable one, so there's more deception and therefore more to discover.

You may disapprove even of that narrative, but ask yourself how many classic folk heroes would have voted for Thatcher. Robin Hood? Aragorn? King Arthur? Can you see any as poster boys for Thatcherism? The cultural moral narrative is simply not in favour of the kind of individual gain right wing politics strives to support, hence the deception, hence the interest of psychologists.

I think there'll be more interest in left wing politics now we have social media creating viral causes and strong polemical groups, and the move of the left wing away from economic equality toward identity politics. There's now a greater incentive to be deceptive about motives with left wing activism too (not that there wasn't before, but more so).

Oh, thanks for the link! — Apollodorus

No problem. If you want any more resources just ask, I've got tons.

By the way, if anyone is interested in the state of research on this, Darren Schreiber has published a retrospective, only a few years out of date

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/abs/neuropolitics-twenty-years-later/51C39AA6539B1979FEA6D36C44E216BF

I do agree that political slogans are not psychology but they may point to deeper psychological factors. — Apollodorus

They may, but it seems likely, given their purpose, that the psychology they point to is more that of the closest socially acceptable narrative, rather than the underlying motives. That's why I gave the example of wildlife conservation. Rarely do we see the right wing get agitated over the extinction of a species of invertebrate. Why not? If the underlying psychology were one of preservation, of not making rapid change for fear of unpredictable consequences, then wildlife conservation should be top of the agenda. But it isn't, because wildlife conservation interferes with the individual's ability to commandeer communal resources from things like surrounding ecosystems.

As I said, I think the underlying psychology is interesting, but we'd need to isolate some behavioural commitments from each side which give us a flavour of their beliefs and motives, rather than use the labels they apply to themselves in the public arena.

The main reason for this is that it's easier to call people names than to listen to them and answer their arguments. — Cuthbert

That might be true, but do you think it actually matters? Are there situations in which you think either side remain unaware of the arguments of the other, despite the mudslinging. It seems unlikely to me that if one were to ask a right wing political science graduate or economist what the arguments of their left wing counterparts are, they would be unable to answer. Most are quite conversant with the arguments of the other.

I think views tend to crystallize in two opposite categories: one oriented towards "change" ("left") and the other oriented towards "conservation or preservation" ("right"). — Apollodorus

Which political wing most supports environmental conservation?

'Conservation' is just a gloss for the right. It's about individual's rights to take from common resources, but that doesn't sell well.

The differing psychologies might be an interesting topic, but political slogans are not psychology.

No, I'm saying that having the avoidance of all suffering as a moral maxim is incoherent because moral maxims by their very nature, require at least some small degree of suffering to carry them out.

So you exclude the possibility that the two can overlap?
If you do, on what grounds? — baker

I don't exclude the possibility that the two might sometimes overlap, but if they necessarily overlap, then morally 'right' (as opposed to morally 'wrong') becomes a meaningless judgement of an action. "Is this right?", would be exactly the same question as "would I like to do this?"

So you're saying that morality causes suffering? — baker

Yes. Enacting a moral course of action, in order for it to not count simply as 'whatever we wanted to do anyway' inevitably involves suffering either the burden of doing other than one would otherwise prefer or that of refraining from doing that which one would otherwise prefer.

Perhaps buy a gun? — Isaac

So much for "suffering an inconvenience for the sake of others". — baker

Well, there's the cost of the gun...

he strongest position that the antinatalists can take is something like this:
"I do not want to cause any suffering to others." (Formulated in 1st person singular.) — baker

Which leads to moral absurdities like not wanting to trip up a gunman who's about to massacre a thousand innocent people. So that should be discarded without a second thought. By the time they face their first moral dilemma they'll already be faced with weighing smaller harms against greater ones.

The problem is that a moral is about how we treat others and we consider them to apply to others, so the enacting of any moral, by definition, causes suffering. It either restrains someone from something they otherwise wanted to do, or it pushes someone to do something they otherwise would rather have not done. If it does neither, then it's not a moral, it's just 'whatever we wanted to do anyway'. Both of those consequences are a form of suffering (not being able to do something you want, having to do something you don't want). In fact they're basically the archetypes of suffering. So morality based solely on avoidance of suffering without any aggregation or weighing is simply not morality from the outset.

I want to see what you consider "suffering an inconvenience for the sake of others". — baker

Anything from opening a door for the person behind you to throwing yourself on a grenade to save your comrades.

seeing how you'd deal with someone who doesn't care whether you live or die and who has no qualms about endangering your property and your person. And the authorities side with them! — baker

In the past it's generally come down to physical violence. I don't know now I'm older. Thankfully it's not something I have to endure. Perhaps buy a gun?

Where that came in, was the question of whether science ‘oversteps its mark’ and my claim that such speculative physics might well do that. And there are heated arguments within science as to whether string theory is a scientific theory or not. — Wayfarer

No, the context was comparing faith in 'string theory' to faith in God/Religious claims. The two are completely dissimilar for the reasons given. String theory is a conjecture about what follows from established universally applicable principles in physics. It may not ever be testable, but it may - there are arguments about that (and what's more those arguments themselves are based on the universally applicable principles of physics and how they might apply to the possibility of testing string theory). See how these principles of physics both inform and limit the discussion at every level - it's no coincidence that those engaged in it are all physicists. The conjecture of a layman would be demonstrably less reasonable than that of an expert.

With faith in God there is no such foundation. There's no universally applicable principle from which 'God' is one of the possible derivations. The nature of 'God' is not constrained by a set of universally applicable principles, nor is the conversation about what type of theory it is. Which is why every man and his dog can (and usually does) have a theory about 'God'. There's no body of universally applicable knowledge from which 'God' arises as a reasonable conjecture. An expert's conjecture is not demonstrably more reasonable than that of a layman.

It's just yet another argument from negation. "String theory isn't proper science, therefore it must be just the same as any other woo". It's the same issue you dodged in the other thread. Just because science (or the claims of scientists) don't meet some standard, doesn't put them in the same category as everything else which doesn't meet that standard, there is more than a single standard by which we differentiate the reasonableness of conjecture.

Do you believe that you are "suffering an inconvenience for the sake of others" when you read posts here that you disagree with? — baker

No, not particularly. Why do you ask?

I'd love for you to be in my shoes, to have a neighbor like I do. I really do. I want to see how you'd handle that. — baker

What an odd thing to want.

I don't disagree that a lot of people are not successful at this though. I'd say relative success at the project of living well would be good evidence of having attained some measure of wisdom. — Pantagruel

Right. Seems at odds with...

the kinds of things they learn grow beyond the quantifiable knowledge — Pantagruel

and

every individual has a unique set of experiences (because that is part of what it means to be an individual) all of these life lessons are different, and yet they all reveal different aspects of a fundamental set of truths. — Pantagruel

and

wherever one experiences the greatest aversion is usually where one has the most to learn. — Pantagruel

I have great aversion to learning from people who's lives seem like they're not living well, and many aspects of 'living well' (though not all of them) are perfectly quantifiable. So if we accept that this wisdom has effects on life choices and outcomes it becomes certainly filtered, and in some cases directly quantifiable. If we don;t accept that, then there seems little point in acquiring it since your life will demonstrably be no better for having done so.

Still not seeing what any of this has to do with the issue. What's at stake is whether (to rephrase it in your terms) it is reasonable to have an expectation of the individual that they will care about the well-being of other individuals sufficiently to want to suffer minor inconvenience for their benefit.

Your neo-liberal philosophy is that no, that's not a reasonable expectation, some people may not care about the well-being of others enough to want to suffer some minor inconvenience for their benefit and it's not for us to interfere with that. I don't agree that we cannot have expectations of others which inform our actions toward them.

What is meant by the term 'construct' is not our conscious building or formation of concepts by putting together parts of our experiences; but rather what it is meant to describe is how our experiences have, since before our birth, 'constructed' our concepts of the world by affecting the development of the brains physiological architecture. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

You're confusing active inference modelling with synaptic pruning, they're not that same thing.

What you mean by saying, 'We construct,' is more or less the same as saying, 'The processes of the brain construct,' or, 'The human race constructs,' or, 'A psychological construct,' etc, not the deliberate efforts of our conscious executive control over our cognitive processes—that I am speaking of. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

No, many of the processes are deliberate and conscious.

Have a look at Carmen Morawetz's meta-analysis here - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27894828/ . Out of the nine regions they identified as active in both emotional valence and category control there was consistent activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex both of which are associated with conscious control and modulation. In addition, both the cingulate cortex and the temporoparietal junction which also show involvement in a large number of emotional assessments are know to be highly modulated by experience and prior assessment.

Even if I were to grant that we do possess such executive control over our subjective states, it would nevertheless fail to deliver an adequate objection for the premise that our subjective states exist and thus necessitates the truth of our evaluative propositions that describe our subjective states — Cartesian trigger-puppets

It would, because one of the feedback processes involved through the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, as Morawetz shows, is to modulate emotional valence via our evaluative processes. The very act of attending to emotional valence changes the emotional valence assessment. In fact, as shown only recently by Ralf Wimmer https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26503050/ the PFC can even modulate signals from the thalamus, affecting directly the interoceptive sensations that we use as data of the inference models.

we know the phenomenological reality of our own qualia (the individual instances of subjective, conscious experience). — Cartesian trigger-puppets

There is no "individual instances of subjective, conscious experience". There's never been any demonstration of the existence of such a thing and every study I've read on the subject has shown the concept to be shaky at best, if not completely fabricated. You construct your 'individual instances of subjective, conscious experience' in the process of introspection by selective attention, what type of experience you come up with will depend on what you're looking for at the time. It's like trying to give a judgement about the quality of piece of equipment - if you're in a good mood, like the manufacturer or want to please them, you'll hit on all the good points, if not you'll hit on all the bad ones. All those elements are there anyway, but you filter them according to your objective. The same's true of introspection. You don't just get an exhaustive and unbiased readout of your subjective mental states at the time, you find what you want to find.

how do we draw the line at who is able to parent? Can they only parent if they have good reason to believe their children will only be harm reducers? — Albero

Yes, morally I think that's a necessary boundary. I don't think any external authority could possibly take on such a role though (if that's where you were headed), it's just a moral question. If you don't feel confident that you're going to provide the best environment you can for a child, then you didn't ought to be having one. That's not to be taken in terms of material comforts or circumstances though. As I said, some social projects take more than one generation to complete so it follows that some children will be born into difficult circumstances to complete the project of ameliorating those circumstances for the benefit of generations ahead of theirs. But I think if parents have no reason to believe their children will help in anyway, then creating a life which you know will experience those circumstances seems to have reckless (if not outright cruel) intent.

This is why I keep circling back to neo-liberalism. I think, despite all the tangled dead-ends @schopenhauer1's torturing of english grammar takes us down, we're actually on a very similar page. We can imagine what life would be like for our children and it would be cruel intent if we imagine it to be needlessly bad but went ahead and set things in motion to bring about that future anyway.

The point is that it is not unreasonable to imagine (in that future) that the child will have to tolerate some suffering for the benefit of their community. That's part of being human.

I really can't see how any of that actually meets the charge of neo-liberalism. It seems completely unrelated. Hyper-individualistic notions like "why should I suffer any inconvenience for the sake of others" are toxic. Your philosophy boils down to the principle that we cannot expect anything, even the slightest inconvenience, from any individual, for the benefit of their community. I've simply no time for that kind of bullshit.

this is the Benkei absurdity of "You have to live so you can not like suffering". But it's preventing another person from suffering in the first place and being in the game in the first place. — schopenhauer1

Repeating it doesn't make it less absurd. Suffering is a very complex state of a human mind. It's only relevant with the alternatives in play. If there's no-one to benefit from the absence of suffering, then there's no point in bringing it about. You're reifying 'suffering' from a complex psychological state to some transcendental target which ought be met no matter what. Why ought it be met?

f one's mantra is "always reduce suffering" it seems intuitively correct to give birth to someone who will lead a lousy life but you know for certain they will cure 10 different types of cancer. Alternatively, it seems completely wrong to force someone to be a lifeguard for 40 years even though they'll save thousands of lives. — Albero

Yeah. I think that there's no reason to assume our intuitions will not ever prove contradictory if we imagine scenarios that we've never encountered before. Intuitions are just the culturally mediated models of mental processes, which came about (and were learnt) in an environment in which we did not have to consider compelling lifeguards to teach forever, or having certain knowledge of the contribution of one's offspring. It's unsurprising, to me, we don't have any intuitions which cope with such circumstances, having never encountered them.

Well said. The issue here is quite easy to resolve, in fact. If @Wayfarer can explain string theory without any reference to established an universally agreed on models of physics then we can accept that it is just like a religion, otherwise (and it will, of course be otherwise) it is very unlike religion in that it postulates from a basis of very sound knowledge. Knowledge unavailable to the layman but which demonstrably satisfies the requirement of universal applicability through predictable results.

There's a massive difference between taking what we know and conjecturing an answer to the remaining questions within its framework (string theory), and taking what we desperately want to be the case and elbowing it into what we now know by claiming everything's a metaphor (religious apologetics).

Because the project of life is to live well — Pantagruel

What I'm trying to establish is why everyone would have some perspective on how to live life well. All that everyone past middle age has done is lived life. There's no reason to believe any have done so well, in fact most seem to have done so appallingly badly and continue to. I'm wondering what you think their insights are going to contribute the your project of living live well.

It's the actual level of expertise — Bartricks

No, it's about whether we have any cause to believe your expertise. Everything about the way you've acted since you started posting has indicated that you're not an expert. The very fact that you're trolling an internet forum with your messianic drivel rather than publishing it has indicated that you're not an expert.

So we're at a place where we've good cause to disbelieve your claims.

People see the same evidence, but there’s enormous differences in interpretation, in what they say the evidence means. And that is not a matter of science, obviously - otherwise there could be no such divergences of view. — Wayfarer

How on earth are you interpreting 'science' such that practicing it cannot include more than one interpretation of the raw data?

Yes! Full house!

Is anyone else playing Dunning-Kruger bingo?

The last phrase I still think is focused on an observable/measurable reality - specifically evidence of potency. Why does someone need to be the first to volunteer? If you’re second or third, what does that mean? — Possibility

I think this is key. Much of what makes hero archetypes toxic in modern society is nothing to do with the virtues they exemplify but the way in which they're measured. If I say "head North", the degree to which you've complied is not measured by how far north you have got, but rather by the relationship between where you are now and where you were.

as people age past middle-age and into deepening maturity, the kinds of things they learn grow beyond the quantifiable knowledge that defines us as working members of society, words, names of things, facts, figures, conventions of politeness, technical skills, and become instead a deeper form of understanding, lessons learned from situations that may unfold over months or years, or may still be unfolding. And because every individual has a unique set of experiences (because that is part of what it means to be an individual) all of these life lessons are different, and yet they all reveal different aspects of a fundamental set of truths. So it becomes a challenge of vocabulary and semantics to translate between the meanings of different perspectives of deeper wisdom. — Pantagruel

Why would you bother with that challenge?

I actually agree that given climate chaos, the scourge of neoliberal capitalism, and the rise of authoritarian governments that having kids is a decision on behalf of someone else that will be unreasonable in the near future. But this still doesn't get us Hard Antinatalism, only "don't have kids under predatory capitalism and severe climate breakdown" which seems to be popular given how lots of people aren't having kids. — Albero

The problem with this is that it is almost an inevitability that some people will have kids. There will be a next generation which will have to live in those conditions. As such it is only necessary for you to think of yourself as an above average parent and your children will be more likely to help that next generation that they will to worsen it. Given that, even in these difficult times, most people still prefer to live than not, the harms you imagine your future child will have to suffer in order to bring about this benefit are relatively small (relative to the benefit, that is).

Some projects which benefit society take more than one generation to complete. Benefiting society is something which most people think is good and worth a little sacrifice to achieve, most people also enjoy life more than they hate it. Put those two things together and (assuming you're a reasonable parent) having a child is not an unreasonable risk. They'll probably grow up liking life more than hating it and glad to contribute toward the multi-generational project of making society better. If they really don't, then with only minor inconvenience, they can opt out (but see my comments about suicide to understand what I really mean by this - I'm talking hypothetically because I don't believe most suicides are a rational choice to 'opt out' at all).

It's really not that unfair a position to imagine the person you'll create will find themselves in.

the state of affairs of X will do (being trapped in a harmful game). — schopenhauer1

See my response to @Antinatalist. Life is not analogous to being trapped in a game. Being trapped entails that there are other options you'd prefer but cannot obtain (the trap prevents them. If a trap left all options open to you that you might desire, it's not a trap, by definition. There are no states one could prefer other than states within life because when not alive one cannot prefer anything. People who do not like their current state of affairs want that state of affairs to change to some other state of affairs. Existence is a prerequisite for experiencing any states of affairs.

The indignity is overlooking the person who will exist for some other cause, but in some egregious way. But what is this egregious way? — schopenhauer1

Yes. If we could just stick to exploring this I'm sure the conversation would be more productive. Your kidnapping the lifeguard example.

It is possible to imagine what life would be like for a future person and reasonable to take steps to avoid their suffering. I think we all agree on that. It's the basis of any long-term social strategy, making the world a better place for future generations.

It is also possible to use people to achieve ends which are not solely (or even partly) for their direct benefit without acting immorally. We do so all the time - taxes, waking the sleeping lifeguard, imprisonment of criminals... again, I don't think there's any disagreement here.

There is, however, a threshold of using someone for the greater good which we seem to cringe at. Forcing the lifeguard to attend lifeguarding school for decades even if it would save thousands of lives. Here the waters are a little more murky because to explore this instinct we have to create scenarios which don't seem to exist in real life. Maybe we would feel OK about the lifeguard school if it was normal, maybe not. Personally, I'm inclined to think not, I favour a view that personal autonomy has a value in itself to be weighed against other values like the greater good.

We all also seem to agree that some people can have weird intuitions about what's right and wrong (psychopaths, sociopaths, saints), but that's not all that philosophically interesting, though psychologically fascinating.

So for those people who feel there's a balance of autonomy against the greater good to be made (and I'd count myself in that group), the only question is whether conception qualifies as such a balance and if so, in which direction does it weigh out.

I'm arguing that it doesn't in either case.

It doesn't count as an autonomy vs greater good balancing exercise in the first place because the root intuition about not ignoring someone's autonomy is that they might rather experience some other option. It is not possible for a pre-existing possibility to consider experiencing another option, nor are there any other options it is possible to experience. So I don't think autonomy needs to be weighed against the normal balance of harms we might consider when imagining future generations.

Even if we were to circumvent the first objection, I don't see how giving life could possibly weigh out negatively when considering the harms wrought on a person for the greater good. The harms within life are mostly outweighed by the benefits anyway, so creating someone you know will find themselves in that situation, for the benefit of society at large, doesn't weigh out badly. The greater good is large, the net harms small.

The sticking point, and the point at which I'm afraid I have, and will, lose my civility, is this neo-liberal bullshit about individual harms being the only matter in moral decisions. I'm afraid I just find that kind of view toxic and can't just discuss it as if it were a reasonable option. We're social creatures, we don't just think for ourselves. Even a six month old child shows degrees of empathy and concern for others, it's deeply ingrained in our core being. It matters. I mean, how many great stories have been about people caring about their own suffering and screw everyone else?

Once born, however, a human being is highly unlikely to have the sufficient skills to commit suicide before the age of five — Antinatalist

Nonsense, it's incredibly easy, just run out into traffic. Under fives do not have the desire to take their own lives (thank goodness), and if you think parents would just stop them, then you need to explain the thousands of road traffic accidents involving under fives every year.

When this wish arises and the individual aims to fulfil it, surrounding people strive to prevent the suicide almost without exceptions if they only can. — Antinatalist

Again, I didn't say anything about there being no barriers to circumnavigate. We put people in situation it is inconvenient to get out of all the time without considering it immoral, you need to explain why this particular situation (the 'game of life' as you want to put it) is an exception.

not even suicide guarantees that the individual will achieve the state or non-state where s/he “was” before the decision of having a child was made. (Be it complete non-existence, for example.) — Antinatalist

Just going to repeat here what @Benkei has already said. This sentence is incoherent.

For some (many?) people, life is like being caught in a trap. — baker

No, because a trap, by definition, restricts free movement, removes choices for activity which would otherwise be available. That's the whole reason why it's bad, the people in a 'trap' want to do something else (or might want to, if they can't be asked for some reason)

Life itself, however, is the very necessary pre-requisite for free movement. There's no 'other option' people within life might prefer to do because life contains all experiences.

What people who feel bad in life want is a better life, not no life.

And it's possible to provide with that better life, but the push to do so is significantly watered down by this nonsense about non-existence being a preferable option.

if you stumble upon a venomous snake, you may experience the emotional state of fear which comes from your desire to live and avoid pain. Now, we can moderate such emotions and desires do change with time, as with everything else, but we do not have the ability to just will fear away or keep it from emerging, nor do we have the ability to simply not desire things or keep desires from emerging. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Again, this is exactly what the paper disproves. We do not necessarily have the emotion 'fear' deriving from our desire to live and avoid pain. We construct the emotion 'fear' as a model of physiological interoceptions and part of the construction of that model will be other experiences (which we obviously can control), social influences (which we obviously can control), upbringing (which we obviously can control - as a society at least) and the cognitive process of construction itself (which we may be able to control - the jury's still out).

Desire is most likely to be the same thing (although, to my knowledge only a little work has been done on desire, not sufficient to draw any strong conclusions). It's certainly a reasonable theory, given the work on both emotion and perception, that 'desire' is also a constructed model. We don't uniquely 'desire' that ice-cream, we sense a slew of physiological and external data and look for an explanation which makes sense, but since the data underdetermine the theory, 'desiring' an ice-cream is an interactive predictive model, not a 'discovered' state. We don't 'find ourselves' to be desiring of an ice-cream, we create that desire in an interactive process between our desire modelling pathways, our physiology and the external world.

The point of all this for ethics is that with individual subjectivism, it's not possible to use truth-based models of 'right' and 'wrong' because those feelings are constructed, not discovered. They can't act as truth-makers because a pre-conception about their truth value (which may be situationally mediated) will form part of the construction of the feeling 'this is right'.

Especially during these fucking lock downs, we need to take extra care of each other. — Benkei

Yes, indeed.

Just two days ago when we're debating a point and someone's rebuttal is based on issues discussed years ago (getting into the metaphysical problems of ascribing states to non-existent people) my interest deflates to negative 100. — Benkei

I get what you mean. It is fascinating though, to me, the way beliefs interact with the articulation of them in the shared space. We create this 'public model' of what we believe which has a purpose, at times detached from the actual belief. Like the recent sentence "Once that situation has started, the dignity was violated." It can't possibly express an actual belief because it doesn't make sense (it's in the form 'some consequence of an event at time t2 causes the event at time t1 to change properties'). It's simply not possible to believe that and believe in normal causality. So what is it doing in the public model being constructed? Those are the interesting bits, the bist that keeps me posting, trying to figure out what the other person was trying to do psychologically, what their process is.

Nice that someone's reading though.

Dutch people should be fucking like bunnies. — Benkei

Ha! Are they not already? (Everyone in the Netherlands is basically Marlon Brando to us repressed English stiffs, we think you're constantly at it. I've only known one Dutch person, the parent of a client - and she was apparently a sex therapist. Did little to undermine my prejudices I'm afraid!)

now (how?) exactly is the way out (if someone TRULY hates life) a minor inconvenience? Last I heard suicide is incredibly difficult to do — Albero

Yeah, it's important to emphasise (and I should have been clearer in my post really), that I'm making a hypothetical argument. I don't really think there actually exist many people in that situation, of truly hating everything about life.

Most people who contemplate taking their own life do so at moments where the pain they're in is occupying too much of their thought for any rational weighing exercise to take place. It's often only temporary (which is why removing opportunities works) and it's almost never a result of having calmly balanced the harms against the benefits.

So that said, in @schopenhauer1's hypothetical example where life is seen as a game one might rationally decide one would simply rather not play, in that specific hypothetical, the way out is only a minor inconvenience. I'm not going to get into the methods.

The reason it seems an odd thing to say is that it's almost never the case, but that's because the person doesn't really want out of the game, they're glad there's a game, they just want the pain to go away. It's possible for that to happen. If, instead of being self-absorbed whingers (I'm referring to modern society here, not antinatalists specifically), we actually got out and helped each other, far fewer people would be in such pain.

I'm saying that the relevant point here is how one deals with such exclusion. How does one deal with unknown things, things currently unknowable to one, things currently undecidable to one. How does one deal with ambivalence and uncertainty. — baker

Well, mostly by trying to resolve it (if one has the time and inclination) or ignoring it if not. Since most people engaging here are doing so as a hobby outside of their normal jobs/lifetasks I'd say most are of the former persuasion - "let's have a crack at resolving a bit of this uncertainty". It's better than Netflix.

"Rational" is one of the most debated terms. I refer you to Elster's classic Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality.
Like I said earlier:

If you want to limit the meaning of "rational" to a particular flavor of secular academic discourse, then you should recognize this as a matter of your choice, not a given. — baker

Who's not recognising it as a choice? I just presume I'm discussing the matter with people who consider 'rational discussion' to be an activity non-experts can engage in, otherwise what the hell are they posting on a non-specialist internet forum for? What's the point in putting up a post purportedly to discuss some matter and then saying "Oh no-one can actually discuss this because none of you are initiated into my sect"? I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption to make that no-one would do that.

Neither are the point at hand though, which is the argument for hard antinatalism. — Isaac

"It's evil to act on evil intentions" -- this seems to be the basic argument for AN here.
"To intend to procreate is to set a trap for another person. Setting a trap is evil. To procreate is evil." — baker

@schopenhauer1 has already dealt with the main substance of this so I won't repeat too much, but basically, yes, it is evil to act on evil intentions and yes, setting a trap is evil.

Life, however, is not like being caught in a trap. Life is generally perfectly nice, being caught in a trap is unpleasant. Life is useful to others whose intentions are morally neutral at worst, being caught in a trap is not useful to anyone whose intentions are morally neutral.

Basically you've just come up with an analogy which is unlike the thing you're trying to analogise.

once the situation is "inescapable game, that 'hey you might like some aspects'" I believe there to be a problem, even if it has 'hey you might like some aspects' qualities". At that point, what other choice except suicide or slow death is there of course.. It's not like there's a button that we can just say.. "Next!". — schopenhauer1

At no point was there any choice. There are no yet-to-be-born souls wishing someone would ask them. If people really truly don't want to be in the game any more, they can always opt out. For someone who really does not like the game, it would be nothing but a brief inconvenience. It would be ridiculous to argue that causing people minor inconvenience is immoral. The problem is that most people contemplating suicide do like the game, they just wish they could experience it without the pain they're feeling.

The thing that occurred in the past is going to affect the person in the future..that developing fetus will become a person at some point. It's just like suffering.. I have a board ready to smack you in the head when a you step in a certain spot.. you step there, as intended, and it smacks you in the head... — schopenhauer1

I've just explained how it's not like suffering and you've ignored all the arguments there and repeated the assertion. The bad thing in your example is being smacked by the board - that's the harm - and that is in the future - a consequence.

With making a decision against someone's will, the bad thing is ignoring a person's autonomy. That is not going to happen in the future, as a consequence of your actions. What's going to happen in the future is that someone is going to be created, with a will (that's not bad), someone will find themselves in a game they may or may not like, but that's just the harm principle again and so suffers from the same problem - we risk minor harms for people all the time for the greater good.

At the moment a person was put into this scenario, that is the violation of dignity — schopenhauer1

No person was put into the scenario. There wasn't a person beforehand.

Doing an action that affects someone is messing with someone else's autonomy. — schopenhauer1

Yep, but since there is no person on whom the act of creating them is being performed this doesn't apply.

Any point where someone's existential situation is assumed for them, would be a violation once someone exists to be the recipient of that existential situation. — schopenhauer1

Again, this defies the law of cause and effect. You can't have a point where it's state is determined by some other point in the future. It's physically impossible.

I never originally defined dignity in terms of autonomy of will, so if that is a sticking point for you (because you limited it to this definition) then refer to my broader point here: As I said...

I don't think "dignity" just covers autonomy of will, but a basic unfairness or injustice that might be more fundamental (you don't need a will involved at point A, let's say). — schopenhauer1 — schopenhauer1

I know. But without the dignity-as-will argument your point collapses because we do things to other people all the time for the greater good, taxes, punishments, schooling etc. You need the dignity argument to counter those. IF all you've got is life contains suffering and we shouldn't cause people to suffer without their consent then your argument's rubbish, we do that all the time and nobody thinks anything of it. It's clearly not a moral intuition at all.

The reason why we're here is because the only way you could answer @khaled's sleeping lifeguard example was to invoke a threshold of consequence above which we ought not act against someone's will. You can't revert now to arguments just about the harm principle, they've been lost already - life is mostly a good thing - most people enjoy it - having children creates more good than it causes harm, and if someone really truly doesn't like life, the way out is only a minor and passing inconvenience. The harm principle alone simply doesn't work with our common intuitions about harms. We cause people minor harms all the time for the greater good.

The reason I'm so strongly opposed to antinatalism is this. Underneath it is essentially the same hyper-individualist, neo-liberal bullshit that's rotting our civilisation at the moment. "I shouldn't have to suffer even the tiniest inconvenience to benefit others"...that's what I find so offensive. Peel away all the post hoc rationalisation and that's what you inevitably find underneath, just a plain old sociopathic refusal to suffer any inconvenience for anyone else's benefit.

Now you may well be an exception, and I really am trying to see how that could be the case. But the more evasive you are about the arguments, the more you return to things like the harm principle, the more difficult it becomes to believe that.

In this case, it's about the intention, and it's the intention that is evil. Setting a trap is already evil. The fact that nobody got trapped so far doesn't change the intention to set the trap, it doesn't undo the evilness of setting the trap. — baker

Yep, agreed.

the focus on intention applies only insofar as people really carefully think through why they want to have children. (But which they usually don't seem to do, so the point is moot.) — baker

Again, agreed.


Neither are the point at hand though, which is the argument for hard antinatalism.

To be harmed is to lose one's dignity. — baker

Maybe, but I was referring to the specific use @schopenhauer1 made in his kidnapping for a fantastic game example. No-one harmed at all, but 'dignity' trespassed upon by ignoring the kidnaper's will.

My point was that we have desires and that we experience emotions, though we seem to not have much control over these things — Cartesian trigger-puppets

That's what the paper disproves.