There was an “efilist” on here a couple weeks back, seems like they bit the bullet on premise 3 :rofl: I’ve only met one other person who was a negative utilitarian, and even they thought killing everything WASN’T morally repugnant because the goods in life weren’t instrumentally valuable. Kind of bizarre if you ask me

I really don't think I've ever been bored for more than five seconds at a time in my entire life. I have more goals than I know what to do with. I just wish I didn't have to sleep.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous :rofl:

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Show that life is too difficult a game. We all understand you think it is, that alone is not convincing.

Regardless of whether I agree with them, hasn't shop1 shown tons of reasons in other posts why life is too difficult a game to be played?

They talked about it a few comments above:

I will add to what you read there this:
I find it funny that one of our needs is the need for overcoming challenges to give our mind engagement.. Flow states or simply taking up mental space with X. Schopenhauer described this phenomena when he said "What if every Jack had his Jill.. everyone had what they wanted".. People would kill each other (read as make more strife for themselves) because our wants and needs are never really satisfied. There seems to be a "lack" at the heart of everything.Most people are sort of aware of this.. However, because of group-think and the need for social pressures to keep "things going" in its own self-perpetuating fashion via culture.. People try to pretend like this is something to embrace and a "good" when, in fact, it is simply existential/metaphysical turmoil within our self-aware animal nature.

Schopenhauer himself stated that no matter where you are, life sucks because the pendulum swings from striving for goals because of boredom, and feeling boredom after you've strived for it. He thought (and I'm guessing Schop1 does too judging from these posts) that life was just dealing with dissatisfaction, annoyance, toil, and seeking comfort and entertainment to avoid boredom that's always hanging over our heads. To me this sounds like the game shouldn't be played for anyone. I would like to see what you think since I've been enjoying your debate here. I remember you stating you don't agree with pessimistic arguments for AN, but I've honestly been wondering why? Where I disagree with Schop1 is that these seem way more convincing than injustice, pain/pleasure asymmetries, consent, etc

you have the best taste on here

I don't get why you keep pushing the idea that everyone who disagrees with efilism is a completely delusional. I looked at Gary's ideas with an open mind, watched some videos, and read some of the writings and I just think they're littered with tons of mistakes, are poorly written, and even has a lot of contradictions and fallacies. You keep pushing that efilism is "logical" but what does logic have to do with ethics here? What if my intuitive opinion on life was pessimism and that life was horrible, but after thinking about it rationally I came to optimistic conclusions. I guess I'm still delusional then. This whole "everyone is an idiot except for me" attitude isn't the best way to conduct philosophical discussion

we are discussing ethics, I don’t know what logic here has to do with it. Again, I bring up David Pearce because even he thinks that we could theoretically engineer suffering out of all existence, not just for humans. So no need to kill all living things. Sure it might sound like sci fi mumbo jumbo, but if you ask me Pearce actually gave some pretty good reasons as to how this could be possible.

“I never ever said that pleasure is irrelevant. The point has always been the asymmetry, way too much negative often far more intense than the positive can ever be. Thus the positive isn't worth the negative.”

Well positive utilitarianism is a thing, surely they have good reason to think the positive is worth the negative when we weigh moral judgements. But if your response is simply going to be that these philosophers are delusional then I see no reason to continue.

I know you were jesting but this sounds bizarre to me. This forum had a philosopher guest here who thought a bit like you (life is suffering, only preventing it matters) named David Pearce and even he suggested we create technology to alleviate those who suffering instead of omnicide. Why don’t we do that instead of mindlessly murdering people? At least it seems more realistic, your idea is a pipe dream no offense. Besides, it seems intuitive that the vast majority of people who are suffering or are in deep pain still want to keep living, they just want the pain to go away. Killing them deprives them of that desire.

As @khaled mentioned, this is why if you end up with such bizarre conclusions if you think pleasure is irrelevant. You also never answered my question about consent and how it makes no sense with this system. It seems you think “oh, well the people who are suffering only matter, making them happy is pointless” so under your system we NEVER have any reason to fulfill positive moral duties, only negative ones like “murder people instead of trying to make their existence happier.” It’s like pressing a button to kill all homeless people who nobody will ever mourn when you could’ve just housed them. You keep saying life is suffering and that pleasure doesn’t matter, but you still haven’t given us a good reason as to why this is so.

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I know that many academic philosophers will hate me for this but this is why I think the idea of a “good life” is very much subjective. A lot of the problems of this will go away if you just replace “have babies if you have reasonable knowledge of a good life” with “reasonable knowledge they’d enjoy life”. It’s true that a “good life” is still a debated topic but we know for sure that many are likely to enjoy it

What we have suffered under since the 70s is free market fundamentalism. Ideas like the "efficient market hypothesis," and things to that effect. All of it has lead to exactly the facts we see around us: huge income inequality, stagnant real wages, loss of unions, more precarious work, gib economies, corporate consolidation, stock buybacks, shadow banking, government bailouts, etc.

You’re absolutely right that this is a gigantic problem, but I feel like the left is currently going through a dilemma on how to address it. A Bernie Sanders style social democracy would solve a lot of this and is way better than the neoliberal bullshit we’re dealing with now, but is it sustainable? F*ck no if you ask me (and I’m sure you probably know why) but is revolution going to happen any time soon? Also no. I’m interested in hearing some more pragmatic solutions and your thoughts on this. You might disagree and I hate to say it, but I think voting in FDR style democrats is merely a compromise the capitalist class is more than happen to welcome for a few decades before chipping away it again

I honestly think a decentralized planned economy sounds much more appealing than a centralized one. If you go by the libertarian socialist lines of thought loosely organized communities can probably determine what they need and what to produce more than a central government. Gift economies are also very interesting but I can only imagine such a loose and voluntary form of exchange existing in small neighborhoods or rural communities.

I’m looking through this thread and I don’t understand how some here are saying current policies are “collectivist” (whatever that means). Capitalist economics is extremely planned with constant input from governments, central banks, venture capital or private equity firms like Bain Capital or Goldman Sachs. Even further down the supply chain most stores know how much production is needed to fulfill certain requirements of production, my time in grocery stores we knew pretty much down to the hour the amount of stock we would need to fulfill the needs of the people that walk through the door. What makes those levels of administration and direction any more promoting of freedom than government or networks of distributors and administrators?

just wanted to bring this up, but if you accept that things can be good or bad regardless of whether or not someone is around for them how come you’ve stated in previous debates you don’t accept Benatar’s asymmetry? You bring up the example of someone planting a mine set to explode in 300 years. Wouldn’t it be a morally good thing to disable the mine even though nobody who would be harmed by it is alive?

I’m not going to lie to you, it’s true that what I believe would be a better world certainly does sound like a fantasy. Heck, anarchists or libertarian socialists have always been the the butt end of jokes in authoritarian socialist circles (think Marxist Leninists, Maoists, or Dengists) for being too “idealist” or hippy. In some sense, I agree that our ideas could sometimes be less grounded in reality than others, not every writer out there is good. But libertarian socialism has a rich tradition that does do its best to answer your concerns. For example, David Graeber is a contemporary anarchist writer and anthropologist and he actually addresses arguments like “aren’t humans too competitive for this” or “how would we live without money it’s impossible!” in some his books. Maybe some people will never be convinced but that’s okay, at least we tried!

All in all, do I think such a world is achievable in my lifetime? Definitely not. Do I think it could be achievable at some unknown point of time? Certainly. The reason is because if socialism as it once worked in Russia was to be repeated in let’s say the USA, that would be doomed to fail, and social democracy wouldn’t work either. So what are our options? A big part of what interests me in these anarchist writers is that a lot of their writings were devoted to highlighting how decentralized societies did survive and thrive in the not even so distant past, and it could be replicated again

libertarian socialism is an umbrella term for a lot of ideologies like anarchism, anarchist communism, communalism, council communism, etc. A social democrat still believes in maintaining the state apparatus and capitalism, but a libertarian socialist would want to abolish the state entirely. But unlike right wing libertarians which simply want a "small state" and private property, Libertarian socialists want both of these things gone. In terms of policy, libertarians don't really advocate for anything since most are pretty much against authority (hence the name Libertarian, which in Europe always meant the "anti authority" or anti-Bolshevik socialists but has basically been adopted by right wingers) I'd go into more detail but there's a quite a lot to go over. If you're interested in some reading, I'd check out this out: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq
A lot of good stuff on here that's all free of charge

Nothing really substantial the way I see it. They are a party of pure reaction and do not really stand for "small governments" as much as they say they do. For example, most Republicans I've spoken to LOVE it when the government sends in an over-militarized police force to crush protestors or when as you said, the government helps a massive corporation recieve tax cuts to take the money away from "lazy welfare queens". The Republican Party is very much a fascist party in many ways (though fascism is extremely hard to define, and unlike Marxist traditions have a lot of whacky and contradictory thinkers) and they differ a lot from tea party libertarians who while still reactionary (in some sense) retain their fair share of political theorists to land on.

With the rise of groups like Qanon, the Proud Boys, etc and how they've been essentially endorsed by the Republicans during the Capitol attack, it's evident that the GOP only really believes in propagating fruitless, meaningless "culture wars" and retaining the myths of American exceptionalism without putting any thought into it. The contradictory nature of fascism was on full display too as seen from the recent banning of Critical Race Theory in school curriculums. Republicans go on and on about "FREE SPEECH" but are perfectly okay when bills are passed to erase essential history and sociology about the United States as a whole.

Existential threat for some and not all I suppose. Even on the optimistic targets Miami is still going to be underwater by 2050. It would be foolish to think it isn’t existential

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Thanks for reading what I wrote and taking the time to correct me, you're right I didn't really think what I said through. But I'm honestly confused as to what you mean by get things moving. Do you mean get things moving to avoid 4 degrees by 2050? If so, I doubt that's really possible. With pledges increased and continuing to increase, I think that even in 2021 we could get below 2 degrees by 2100 with further pledges in 2025 and 2030. The business as usual scenario would probably be like if we had our current pledges now and stopped doing anything else for the next 50 years which is incredibly unlikely.

If the Hothouse Earth Hypothesis is correct, then stabilising at or above 2°C would lead to a gradual but inevitable drift up to 4°C by say the year ~3000 (because of the tipping points i think) making the 2-4°C range impossible to remain stable in on long timescales. But as you can read here, a lot of scientists are unsure if it would really trigger past 2 degrees:

https://climatetippingpoints.info/2019/10/14/fact-check-will-2c-of-global-warming-trigger-rapid-runaway-feedbacks/

The thing is though is that most climate scientists aren't really saying we only have "12 years" to save the world. The people who are giving this "12 years" slogan are journalists who in my opinion don't actually have the proper credentials or time to sift through dense papers and technical models on the climate.

Here is a paper published and peer reviewed by several sociologists who specialize in human geography, climate change and public policy who disagree with the 12 year deadline idea. https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41558-019-0543-4

And here is Michael Mann talking about doomism and its dangers:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-deniers-shift-tactics-to-inactivism/

You have a right to feel urgency about it, but all I'm saying is that the science shows the most extreme and out there scenarios aren't even on the table anymore thanks to the pledges. A 4 degree rise was once a possibility, but the current rise is projected to be 2.5 degrees by 2050 and is expected to lower even more as pledges ramp up in the coming years (sadly the consensus is that we will probably not get to 1.5 degrees though). Even Mann agrees that corporations are largely to blame for this, and blaming people for their lifestyle isn't the root of the issue (not that you've indicated that, but some here were suggesting market only solutions)

I've said my piece, and I think its fair. Nowhere does this blog say "everything is fine, go back to consuming" it just said "not as bad as the media makes it out to be". There's lots to do, and undoubtedly the third world is going to suffer tremendously so we agree there. But you don't have to be disagreeable and go "oh you're just delusional, you don't know anything. We're fucked and you're an idiot." You've given me two articles, one of which is not written by a scientist and the other which is an interview with a scientist. That's fine and all, but scientists aren't infallible. I could easily flip what you're saying around and just say this particular scientist is being alarmist and going against established literature. You're going to say I have my head in the sand and that I'm trying to make myself feel better, when all I'm doing is trying to make things as realistic as possible. Hell, even Michael Mann who tends to exaggerate the severity of the issue admits that the "we're doomed" mindset is a new form of denialism. I agree with you that the other poster here is being silly-free market capitalism isn't the proper solution to climate change, but it's also false that current governments aren't doing anything about climate change. Many are doing the bare minimum, but a lot of other countries (most notably China) consistently manage to overachieve their IPCC pledges. So no, I'm not a climate denier-I'm just not an eco pessimist or an "everything is fine there is no climate change" moron

I used to think it was too late, and we were all going to die, but then I came across this Quora called Doomsday Debunked: https://robertinventor.com/Quora/DebunkingDoomsday.htm

It's run by a guy and a team of volunteers who made a career out of reading academic/sciency papers so they put this blog together to fact check scary end of the world scenarios, climate change included. No, they definitely aren't climate deniers , more like climate realists and they seem pessimistic/optimistic depending on the scenario. The news really likes to amp up "tipping points" and "earth will be venus" crap but these scenarios are usually cherry picked or blown way out of proportion. Hell, the IPCC doesn't even think "collapse of civilization" is on the trajectory despite what the Guardian articles make you think

In fact, their debunk here on the "Venus Earth" scenario really soothed a lot of my fears
https://debunkingdoomsday.quora.com/Not-as-scary-as-it-seems-Planet-at-risk-of-heading-towards-Hothouse-Earth-state

The Lord of the Rings-JRR Tolkien
The Silmarillion-JRR Tolkien
Dune-Frank Herbert
The Ethics-Spinoza
The World and Will as Representation-Schopenhauer
Beyond Good and Evil-Nietzsche
Enchiridion-Epictetus
The Tao Te Ching-Lao Tzu
Nietzsche and Philosophy-Gilles Deleuze

@khaled I thought your responses for this were pretty convincing, but how would you respond with the interesting objection that enabling the capacity for striving or desire is unethical itself? Someone gave me this intuition pump:

Most people would probably agree that if I made someone addicted to a drug like heroin deliberately and then locked them in a basement room without heroin, leaving them to experience the suffering of withdrawal, squirming in deprivation, that would be unethical, I’m making them suffer by creating an addiction and leaving them to starve, I should have just not done that. Now let’s say hypothetically I had desire serum – not heroin, it’s just liquid that contains any possible random desire one could think of. Some trivial, like the desire to eat spaghetti with tomato sauce, some unrealistic, like the desire to transform into a different animal or travel back into the past, some that would require hurting others in order to fulfill, like the desire to rape and torture for gratification. I take that stuff and inject it into people in their sleep without knowing their life circumstances, gambling with how this will affect them in the future. Perhaps they wake up the next day craving a certain type of meal, perhaps they will crave to live in a different country, perhaps they will crave to become someone they are not or travel into the future, perhaps they will crave to rape a kitten with a sharp object – I don’t know.

Would that be ethical? I think the answer is no.
And that in a sense sums up why procreation is wrong. A conscious lifeform is essentially a desire machine – a pleasure addict. We have to chase pleasure/relief, or we are subjected to the alternative of suffering/harm, having a child is creating a slave to pleasure.

Eat or hunger. Drink or thirst. Socialize or get lonely. Sleep or fatigue. Breathe or suffocate. So on and so forth. Pleasure or suffering. More pleasure of satiation, less suffering of hunger. More suffering of hunger, less pleasure of satiation.

It’s fair to say that before procreating, you also don’t know how this will turn out for the victim.
Perhaps they will largely experience trivial desires, perhaps unrealistic to fulfill ones, perhaps those that require harming someone else, so you are creating an addict to pleasure without guarantee of them always being able to get their fix, and if they don’t get it, they suffer, they are harmed, that’s how sentient life works. No certainty how tormenting the desires will be. No certainty how long lasting the fulfillment of those desires will be. No guarantee the desires can even realistically be fulfilled. No guarantee that the desires won’t require the victim to harm someone else to fulfill. So it’s very similar to the hypothetical of desire liquid, you’re creating an addict with no guarantee that they’ll be able to get their pleasure fix to prevent them from suffering. You force a pleasure addict into an existence where there is no guarantee that they’ll be able to obtain whichever pleasure is needed to prevent painful withdrawal symptoms. Some desires might be easy to fulfill, like the desire to eat a certain meal, some are just basic needs/wants/desires.

It’s already rather high maintenance though and not every pleasure addict/desire machine gets what they need to be properly satiated. So while you aren’t forcibly making someone addicted to heroin and then locking them in your basement room without any heroin, you are risking creating that scenario of experiencing intense deprivation, you create the pleasure addiction with no guarantee of absolute fairness, where the victim is always guaranteed to get whatever they need to avoid suffering. You create someone with a need for movement, they desire to move their limbs, an addiction we usually just take for granted to be satiated at all times, and then they get hit by a car and are paralyzed for the rest of their life. But even if one desire machine/pleasure addict always obtained their pleasure fix just in time, fulfilled every desire just in time before the suffering got out of hand, without harming anyone else in the process, they still wouldn’t miss their life if you never created them, so I still don’t think they justify all the deprived, suffering addicts.

Child A is experiencing a desire for christmas gifts and is happy upon receiving gifts on christmas, child B is also tormented by such a desire and dies of leukemia before christmas, not getting their wish of a perfect christmas fulfilled.

Ibelieve it’s within reason for me to say that if we didn’t risk creating either of these children by stopping reproduction, child A would not be trapped in some kind of pre-birth torture chamber, horribly tormented over their lack of christmas gifts, crying their eyes out over no gifts. So why create child B? Child A would not miss happiness if they didn’t exist, so don’t risk child B.
The would-be happy ones would not miss their happiness if they didn’t exist, their addiction would not exist, so there’d be no unresolved cravings anywhere else if you simply abstain from creating the cravings in the first place, so why risk creating unhappy ones in the process? No matter how great your life supposedly is, it not existing would have not hurt you in the least.

Overall I think your Careful Natalism idea aligns with my intuitions but there are things like this where I'm stumped

But why is the pessimistic view of everything automatically assumed to be more “honest” and the optimists are full of shit with their heads stuck in the clouds? There are equally good arguments to be optimistic, or at the very least affirm one’s life. It’s definitely a popular idea but I don’t buy the notion that things like desire and happiness are inherently lacking in nature.

I think the idea is that antinatalism is pointless because preventing people from suffering doesn’t benefit anyone. I’m not antinatalist but I think this is wrong, ANs think what’s good is that a bad state of affairs was prevented from happening (another human brought into 5he world) which is part of the asymmetry

I think the idea is that the “benefit” is there was no bad state of affairs that occurred, which is part of the asymmetry. IE it’s good a bad thing didn’t happen or was prevented. Personally I don’t buy this

yes but I think it’s important to realize that most antinatalists aren’t trying to save the unborn, they’re just trying to prevent a future state of affairs they think will be bad.

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).

I agree with this, but 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?

I don’t see why there’s no such thing as a non existent future person. Sure they actually don’t exist, but we do stuff for people who don’t exist all the time. IE save the planet for future generations and all that. Not really sure what the issue here is

I have always found it fascinating how our intuitions for these exercises can change drastically even when hypothetical scenarios might seem analogous. For example, if 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. You and Khaled's idea of "Careful Natalism" sounds pretty appealing in my view, but Schop1 brought up some interesting intuition pumps I'd like to see it deal with.

Sorry I felt like your explanations in the intro were a bit confusing, so is your belief that suffering is not sufficiently caused by being alive? If so, it reminds me of some Stoic beliefs, IE we suffer more in our minds than we really do in our bodies.

@Isaac
@Benkei
@khaled
I haven't read the whole debate, but I think the fundamental disagreements here are over what choices would be unreasonable and what choices would be reasonable to decide on behalf of another. For the philosophical pessimist, they have good reasons to believe it will never be reasonable (Like Schop1s many posts on structural suffering etc). Like any argument I think thats perfectly fine, but if other people also have collectively good reasons to believe in optimism and that lives are worth starting and living, why is their decision on behalf of someone else unreasonable? It's true it seems wrong to force someone to be a lifeguard for the rest of their lives because of the greater good, but if we lived in a world where everyone would enjoy or wouldn't mind such an imposition, it wouldn't be an unreasonable decision. This is how I view birth. 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. If the world didn't have to deal with these things, I think it would be an extremely reasonable decision on behalf of another. The disagreement will then be that putting people into situations of challenge where they didn't need to is wrong , but I just can't intuitively accept this.

I actually agree with most of your points here against libertarian ethics, but now exactly is the way out (if someone TRULY hates life) a minor inconvenience? Last I heard suicide is incredibly difficult to do

yeah I actually recall (though I might be wrong) that Benatar himself admits his asymmetry ALONE doesn’t lead to antinatalism, that’s why he adds that most people have bad lives and have optimism biases and all that stuff to make the arguments stronger. Never bought any of that either. Hell, there’s even been academic work done that even if we do accept some kind of asymmetry having kids can still be permissible.

Now, when you talk about Impositions, isn’t having children a bad imposition because it’s too long? Some people can live to a 100 or more

perhaps another issue might be that the asymmetry seems (at least to me) to extend to infinity. As I’m sitting here typing, I can list off a million potential harmful states of affairs that aren’t happening, and saying “it’s a good thing I’m not being murdered, raped, or my house is currently on fire.” To me that sounds bizarre, and I don’t think any of that is “good.” However, I don’t think it’s totally ridiculous if someone accepted this. It does make sense, just doesn’t seem appealing

“If you start railing about the aggregate "good" for the "whole" had by having your kid (which is really presumptuous by the way), then that would indeed be violating the other rule about dignity as you are looking at outcomes other than the person the decision is being made for. That indeed is also like the kidnapping scenario. The lifeguard would be creating the greatest amounts of good, but you are overlooking the lifeguard himself (dignity violated) for your "cause" of the "greatest good".

I am quite interested in how you would respond to this. I think your system is appealing and close to how I think, but I wanted to wait and see what others thought of this

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aw yeah, then agreed. I remember reading that when polio was big and scary, they had to get Elvis on TV and take a vaccine to prove to everyone it was safe. Maybe if some high profile Hollywood types started telling everyone at the Academy Awards to be antinatalist it would gain considerable traction.

Got it, but some questions first: Do you think it's bad that we have this bias (if it's real) ? I personally don't see why it would be bad if someone who's been around the block for years says "this is how you do it" compared to someone who's been working for a month. Another thing, are you trying to say others perceive antinatalists as being lazy or lacking? I mean it's pretty darn hopeless that's for sure, but lazy? Nah, not necessarily

Sure, I think so. But maybe I might not be fully grasping what you're getting at...Are you asking that does this knowledge I have of everything onit's own make any position more credible, or is it only credible if one has all this knowledge of stuff and understands how to apply it? If you have experience with patents, consumer products, all of which have positively impacted industry, then maybe you could use that experience to make anti-natalism marketable or make it so that your knowledge with trades, computer coding, and electronic manufacturing can lead to the development of machines that can simply replace children so parents are satisfied and nobody has to be born (seems impossible to me, but you never know I guess)