The counterexample refuting your assertion is that of a person who has had an accident leaving them unconscious and requiring urgent surgery in order to stay alive, with the alternative of doing nothing almost certainly resulting in death, and the decision being in the hands of the person's next of kin. Now, according to your warped way of thinking, death would be the least risky option, because that would avoid all of the risks accompanied with continued living, whereas the surgery would be considerably more risky, because then, if successful, they'd run the risk of stubbing their toe, or breaking up with their girlfriend, or whatever. You know, all of the things that you think can make life not worth living. — S
Wow, you completely miss the point of separating STARTING a life and CONTINUING a life. — schopenhauer1
Continuing the life already born, is different scenario. Someone can have interests of staying alive once born- that is reasonable and does not justify having them, because humans naturally gravitate to interests (like accomplishing goals, keep on living). This situation in no way refutes khaled's argument. — schopenhauer1
The reasoning for not starting a life is based on a number of bad experiences you get in life. Continuing life is open to that same reasoning. You can't consistently close it off from that just because it's convenient for your stance. That's the fallacy of special pleading.
Either these bad experiences count against life or they don't. Make your mind up, because you can't have it both ways.
Anyway, if the person who had the accident would lose all their memory, then it would be starting a life. So there you have it. Objection overcome on your own terms. — S
You're not dealing with my objection. Are there bad experiences which count against life to the extent that life isn't worth it, or aren't there? — S
And arguably, if you are justified in doing it then you have a right to do it. — Echarmion
I think this is a false equivalence. Creating something is not the same as owning something. — Echarmion
only things that exist can have rights. — Echarmion
If you deny that a cause is responsible for its effect because the effect doesn't yet exist, you end up denying all forms of responsibility. — petrichor
If you mean, are there bad experiences which count against life to the extent of not starting a life, then yes. — schopenhauer1
That seems possibly tautological. Justification and entitlement. Are they separate? If so, does one depend on the other? And if one is prior to the other, does the one always entail the other? I am not sure.
If a person normally is considered to have a right to privacy, I suppose you could argue that violating someone's privacy is justified if that person is seriously violating the rights of others, as for example in the case of a child pornographer. But here it is the rights of the other party that justify the violation or reduction of this person's rights. But to say that others are justified in invading this person's privacy might just be another way of saying that they have a right in this case to invade. — petrichor
I agree that creating something is not the same as owning. But that doesn't quite capture what I was saying.
Rights exist where something is thought to be properly owned. I suggest that the reason people feel that they have a right to have children is that they have a sense that their children are theirs, that they belong to them and not to the larger community, and so it is theirs to decide the fate of these children. But, this is in conflict with the idea that the child is another agent with interests, one with rights, that the children in some sense belong to themselves. Children are not things. This isn't a matter of property rights. — petrichor
I'd say that the old idea that children are property is in conflict with the new idea that children have full status as people. In the old way of thinking, there was no real concept of child abuse. This has changed. "Your" children are not yours to do with as you please. The community will intervene and we mostly all agree that this is sometimes justified. — petrichor
I see this argument made often and I find it questionable. The children you create do end up existing. And once they exist, they have rights and interests. Take a step back and look at it more objectively in spacetime. There is simply a relation here between two existing beings, regardless of the fact that they are temporally separated. What makes that temporal separation such that it eliminates responsibility and consideration of rights? — petrichor
Something you do has a causal relationship to their condition and impacts on their interests. Sure, the child doesn't exist at the time of your conceiving them, but your action does ultimately have an impact on an existing being. Once the child exists, it can easily be said that you are responsible for their existence. When you release the string on a bow, aren't you responsible for the eventual arrival of the arrow at its target? You are responsible for the child's eventual existence even at the time of the conceiving act. — petrichor
After all, aren't all consequences separated in time from their causes? If you deny that a cause is responsible for its effect because the effect doesn't yet exist, you end up denying all forms of responsibility. — petrichor
We could get into all sorts of interesting territory here by arguing that I am not the same person now that I was in the past and that my responsibility to my future self involves a relation to a person with rights who does not yet exist. All future states of any sentient being could be said to involve consideration of someone not yet existing. — petrichor
This idea that not-yet-existing beings have no rights would seem to prevent us from considering the state of the planet as we are leaving it for future generations. Are we wrong to give their interests some consideration by not ruining everything for them? — petrichor
If life is worth living, because of interests and committments and whatnot, then it is worth starting. — S
No, then this is ignoring my argument, which was that interests and commitments are the default of being born- we cannot avoid them as they are what we naturally incline towards. — schopenhauer1
That once again doesn't address the point. None of that tells me whether you think that life is worth living. — S
So your question is, once born, is life worth living for some people? I would say yes. — schopenhauer1
Except that "some" really doesn't convey that we're talking about most people on the planet, several billions of people. But good. If that is so, then life is worth starting. It wouldn't be worth starting if it wasn't worth living. But it is. So there you have it. — S
life with children is so fundamentally different from life without children that no-one should decide for them whether to do one or the other. — Echarmion
Right, but notably the intervention is for the benefit of the child. Anti-natalism cannot go that route because it wants to eliminate children, not improve the lives of children. — Echarmion
Temporal separation is special because when we engage in moral considerations, we have to treat the universe as non-deterministic with regard to our actions. There is no other way to make decisions. So, in moral terms, the future is not determined, but consists of an arbitrary number of parallel timelines. A single causal chain exists only for past events. That's also the reason that responsibility only travels backwards. — Echarmion
Responsibility is only ever ascertained after the fact though. There is no need to establish responsibility for effects that don't yet exist because they might ultimately not come to pass. If you attempt to kill someone, but your victim is still alive at the time of the trial, no matter how tenously, you will not be tried for murder, but attempted murder. — Echarmion
This is an interesting question, and one which makes me dislike the implications of my own position. But, for the record, I find it difficult to establish, without doubt, that we have a responsibility towards future generations living on this planet. I would like to have an ironclad argument to that extent, but I am not currently able to think of one. — Echarmion
So I had a post once about if it was good to put a slave in slavery if they identified with the very slavery that was enslaving them. — schopenhauer1
Yeah, that'd be a great analogy, if slavery and the average life were even remotely alike. — S
I don't see how deep differences in the life of the parent in one case versus the other justifies dismissing all concern about the interests of the child. Your life would be fundamentally different if you were to choose to do any number of things, say become a serial killer. That isn't what gives you a right. — petrichor
I take your point. This highlights an important difference I think. Let's be careful though. To phrase it as "eliminate children" sounds as if we are destroying an already existing child, when we are simply talking about not having one. Let's instead call it "preventing human experience." So we'd be preventing human experience rather than improving it. And let's not forget that by not reproducing, we aren't concerned only with a child, but a human at all stages of life, cradle to grave, as well as all the impacts they'll have on others. — petrichor
One might respond to your point though by saying that we might indeed be improving the overall experience of the universe as a whole, as we might be reducing its overall suffering. If we don't reproduce, there isn't a person whose experience can be said to be better by virtue of their non-existence. But I'd argue that a human experience is just part of the overall experiential condition of the world at large. One could say that there is less suffering in the world, so we are improving the experiential condition of the world by reducing the total suffering that happens in it. — petrichor
Interesting. Do we really need to treat it as non-deterministic? Or do we just need to treat it as probabilistic from a merely epistemic standpoint, where we are simply dealing with our knowledge uncertainty? I am not sure this would make a difference though. — petrichor
But you'll still be held responsible for trying to kill the person, for intending their death, even if the death doesn't come to pass. It isn't as if there is no responsibility. It isn't purely consequentialist. It is a bit of both. Consider the case of a person who pours what they think is sugar into someone's coffee, and that person ends up dead, the "sugar" having actually been poison. Do we hold them responsible? We don't because we know they didn't have any malicious intent. We treat it as a pure accident. If, on the other hand, we can prove that someone put something in someone's coffee that they expected to kill them, when it was just sugar after all, we'll charge them with attempted murder. If there is a case where there was some uncertainty as to contents, and someone poured it into the coffee anyway, risking poisoning them, we'd hold them accountable for that too. — petrichor
Are you saying that pointing a gun at a person and pulling the trigger in itself is not wrong until harm has actually resulted? There is no responsibility in the very moment of deciding to kill someone? There is no wrong in the intent? — petrichor
I applaud you! It is so rare for anyone in discussions like these to make such acknowledgements! Refreshing! We should all take it as an example to emulate. I believe, as Socrates suggested, that we should see dialogue as a way for us to both move closer to truth, not as a contest with a winner and loser. If both parties grow in understanding, we both win. If you help me see a fault in my thinking, I should thank you. You haven't injured me. Quite the reverse! — petrichor
So, contrary to what you've claimed it IS wrong, other things being equal, to impose something significant on someone else without their prior consent (and especially wrong when it involves risks of significant harms). — Bartricks
It was claimed that it cannot be wrong to impose life here on someone without their prior consent due to the impossibility of getting it. — Bartricks
I was pointing out that there are lots of acts of where the nature of the act in qustion is such as to make consent impossible. Such acts are still clearly default wrong and default wrong due to the fact the other person does not consent. — Bartricks
Thus the idea that the impossibility of getting consent somehow makes it okay to go ahead is patently false. — Bartricks
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