Besides that, wouldn't it be better to actually work on the causes of pain disease and unhappiness, and mitigate, and arrest them where they are in excess, rather than forgetting and dooming them in favor of a future "intelligently designed" eugenics project? — Wosret

The cause of all these is birth.

You say that we can't have the meaning that makes life worth living without a real risk, and then say that it is precisely because there is a risk that life isn't worth living. A catch 22 indeed, the justifications for living, and not living being identical. I'ma arbitrarily side with the living. — Wosret

It's not arbitrary though, that's what you've been told so you believe it (and you tell it to yourself, obviously quite a lot).

I don't know if it is really necessary to be actively opposed to birth (or, really, any position for that matter), unless of course one has the passion and dedication to do so. — darthbarracuda

In terms of the relevance of this statement to my thread, I don't care about whether one is passionately opposed to birth but whether this entails that one is an anti-natalist. I think it does, and so because I am not opposed to birth qua birth (there's nothing immoral about an organism leaving a birth canal), I don't feel I can call myself an anti-natalist despite the fact that I know of no morally justifiable reasons for having children.

Life is hard, and often miserable, so why demonize one of its few pleasures? — Wosret

I wasn't demonizing sexual activity (though I have serious moral qualms about it just as I do with reproduction).

To practice contraception is to be practically 'anatalist' — John

I can admit that practicing contraception and being celibate are both sufficient but not necessary forms of practical anti-natalism, yes.

I was pointing out that Darth's reasoning implies that his position was entirely arbitrary. I don't think it's arbitrary, as much as misanthropic, and crazy. One doesn't get to invent their own private morality, particularly when it is in direct opposition to the morality of the whole rest of humanity... and even more obviously so when this private morality's highest good is anti-life, apocalyptic all humans should just die type deal... that's some super-villain shit.

I wasn't demonizing sexual activity (though I have serious moral qualms about it just as I do with reproduction). — Thorongil

I don't see a distinction.

You have said or implied that suffering makes life not worth living, so I was referring to a life without suffering. You might not think of that as a perfect life, but it must surely be your ideal, otherwise your argument would make even less sense. You set up an unachievable ideal, and conclude that life isn't worth living in light of the failure to achieve the unachievable ideal that you set.

You set a very low bar for what counts as suffering, and you place a huge load of weight on this suffering, such that it outweighs almost any benefit. So, as a result, the bar to live a life worth living must be set very high up. So high up, in fact, that no one can actually reach it.

Death it is then, I suppose. But no! You (and others, taking a leaf out of Schopenhauer's book) then offer up the contradiction that it's better to continue to live life, albeit "aesthetically", and something vague about art is usually mentioned - which is basically a concession that life is worth living after all.

The cause of all these is birth. — The Great Whatever

Birth does not cause suffering, it enables suffering. Building a house in Florida does not cause the house to be destroyed, the hurricane is what causes the destruction of the house.

To be sure, suffering would not exist without birth. But it would be equivocation to say that birth causes suffering when in fact it does not. These kinds of semantic word play arguments are meant to act like a "gotcha!" poke instead of actually proving anything.

Forced chemical happiness, bliss as the response to every foreseeable circumstance isn't hollow, and somehow promotes personal growth and deep insight? — Wosret

The feeling of hollowness is also grounded in a chemical process in your brain. Presumably, all negative feelings could be banished, and the value arithmetic would be radically changed so that conflict is not required for meaning. It seems to me that technology like this is the only way to transcend the barbarism of daily life.

Yes, the feeling is grounded in chemical processes in the brain, but that doesn't make it arbitrary, or random. Someone can feel genuine terror that a teddy bear may come to life at any moment, and rip their face right off! That feeling, and that notion would be inappropriate, and disproportional to the circumstance, grounded in a delusion rendering their response dysfunctional. They'd be a crazy person. Being all "duuuuddde, my hand is super significant!" is being in a stupor. No it isn't.

Chemically altering everyone so that you guarantee only inappropriate disproportional responses to the world is engineering insanity. Feelings aren't random occurrences, they're how all living things successfully navigate through the world. This transhumanist day dream is ridiculous nonsense.

In terms of the relevance of this statement to my thread, I don't care about whether one is passionately opposed to birth but whether this entails that one is an anti-natalist. I think it does, and so because I am not opposed to birth qua birth (there's nothing immoral about an organism leaving a birth canal), I don't feel I can call myself an anti-natalist despite the fact that I know of no morally justifiable reasons for having children. — Thorongil

That's just not following the logic where it leads, but rather stopping halfway. Not even halfway, actually. It's superficial to speak of birth qua birth. The consequences of birth are of the utmost importance. And not accepting any reason for having children as morally justifiable is tantamount to anti-natalism, just as not accepting any reason for the existence of Jews as morally justifiable is tantamount to anti-semitism.

But we've already been over this, and to little avail. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it overcome it's denial.

I never said only a perfect life was worth living. It's not that life isn't perfect, but that it's (unacceptably) awful, and so it's not the right thing to do to bring people into it to force them to live through it against their will.

It looks to me like you're the one playing word games -- your post all but admits that birth causes suffering and then special pleads to say it doesn't (i.e. the one who introduces a seeming non-distinction between 'causing' and 'enabling' is playing the word games). It's not relevant to the point, and drawing a terminological distinction, even if you could justify it (which I don't think you have) won't help.

Life is hard... often tremendously so. Most of us don't reach adulthood without being driven insane by it. Delusional beliefs are not a product of faulty reasoning, they're a product of attempting to manipulate, and generate particular feelings. Their hearts cannot bare the truth -- mass delusion sweeps the land. We're all a little crazy, but everything in moderation.

I already conceded the point about perfection. But you didn't explicitly address my explanation of what I was getting at: the unachievable ideal that your position implies. I'm going to assume that you agree.

And I doubt whether it even makes sense to speak of birth being against one's will. I doubt whether will enters the equation at that stage. If it doesn't, then it's not sensible to speak of will as if it retroactively applied.

Okay, I don't see the relevant difference between perfection and an ideal. The point is not that life fails to meet some ideal, but that it's palpably and obviously awful. If you're being tortured, and someone asks you, 'what, so you think it's not worth going through this just because it doesn't reach some sort of ideal of not being horrible? Isn't that an impossible ideal to meet? It's torture, after all!' that person would be talking crazy.

But living is a lot like being tortured: for example, it forces you to go through a series of complicated and painful tasks in order to secure food, or be subject to a horrible pain of starvation. If some agent were likewise forcing you to go through those tasks or some equivalent, but inflicted the pain in a different way, say by whipping you to death rather than starving you to death, this would obviously be a case of torture.

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Birth is against one's will because one cannot choose to be born. By the time one is born (not before), it is something that has happened without consent.

It looks to me like you're the one playing word games -- your post all but admits that birth causes suffering and then special pleads to say it doesn't (i.e. the one who introduces a seeming non-distinction between 'causing' and 'enabling' is playing the word games). It's not relevant to the point, and drawing a terminological distinction, even if you could justify it (which I don't think you have) won't help. — The Great Whatever

It's part of a chain of cause and effect, and @darthbarracuda's point emphasised its indirect and irrelevant nature within a certain context.

But living is a lot like being tortured: for example, it forces you to go through a series of complicated and painful tasks in order to secure food, or be subject to a horrible pain of starvation. If some agent were likewise forcing you to go through those tasks or some equivalent, but inflicted the pain in a different way, say by whipping you to death rather than starving you to death, this would obviously be a case of torture. — The Great Whatever

I don't think that's a far comparison. Tripping over a stick and scrapping one's knee isn't like being pushed maliciously to the ground by an asshole. We're social creatures, the emotion, and intention in their eyes, their cruel motivations are far more traumatic than the physical injury inflicted.

Also, it is much different to grow up under capricious, and cruel care than to be thrust under it recently. One becomes accustomed to it, does not expect anything different, and can even love, and hold little animosity or resentment towards their tormentors. That's just normal for them. An abrupt change, the expectation of respect and decency in the face of torture has a lot to do with its level of trauma.

I don't think that's a far comparison. Tripping over a stick and scrapping one's knee isn't like being pushed maliciously to the ground by an asshole. We're social creatures, the emotion, and intention in their eyes, their cruel motivations are far more traumatic than the physical injury inflicted. — Wosret

But we are deliberately brought into the world by people, and those people know full well that we will be in circumstances that make it unavoidable that we will experience tremendous suffering. No person may deliberately cause the impetus toward starvation itself; but what they do is implicitly approve of it by continuing to place people deliberately in its path knowing full well how it works.

If you tortured someone by throwing them in a room full of swinging blades, and protested, 'but I don't push the blades!' that is obviously not a good objection. You knew that some blade or other would hit them, and so shoving them into the room is an expression of torture. The situation is analogous with deciding to birth people.

The relevance of the ideal, or at least the better alternative, is that it plays an important role in determining whether or not your claims are sensible. The better alternative to torture is (arguably, although most would agree) the absence of torture, so it makes sense to question whether your better alternative to life, as you assess it to be, is not likewise a life without suffering: something which is not possible in practice, and which, like @Wosret said, would actually be severely lacking and nightmarish. But your comparison of life as we know it to torture is greatly exaggerated, and wilfully ignores or understates what makes life worth living.

Birth is against one's will because one cannot choose to be born. By the time one is born (not before), it is something that has happened without consent. — The Great Whatever

That's nonsense. As a necessary (though insufficient) precondition, there must be a will for it to be against. There were innumerable events which occurred without my consent and of which I could not have chosen, but it would be blatantly inappropriate to say that all of them happened against my will. You ought to take the connotations of that phrase into consideration. Consider, for example, "You cannot force me to come with you against my will!" and "Police searched my mother's bags against her will".

I really doubt that most children throughout human history, and even in modern times, were actually intentionally planned. Since the advent of contraception, the birthrate has fallen tremendously, and population is in decline everywhere that people do have that level of control. Realistically, the way to prevent birth, or reduce birthrate, is by establishing infrastructure and elevating the circumstances and quality of life in places where they don't have that control, and have the highest birthrates.

I suppose this is where it comes full circle! It is only in places that don't have reproductive control where one may wish to join the Christian missionaries in preaching abstinence.

It looks to me like you're the one playing word games -- your post all but admits that birth causes suffering and then special pleads to say it doesn't (i.e. the one who introduces a seeming non-distinction between 'causing' and 'enabling' is playing the word games). It's not relevant to the point, and drawing a terminological distinction, even if you could justify it (which I don't think you have) won't help. — The Great Whatever

You failed to consider my overall point, though. To say that birth causes suffering is misleading; it's catchy and easy to say that it does, but in fact it does not unless you are willing to equivocate and use the word "cause" outside of its usual definition.

Like I said, building a house in Florida does not cause the destruction of the house. The hurricane causes it. Can it be a bad idea to build a house in Florida right in the middle of a hurricane red zone? Yes. But that does not cause the destruction of the house, it only enables it.

Enabling can be just as bad, but it would be misleading to say that birth causes suffering because it conjures ideas that as soon as someone flies out of the womb, they begin suffering when it's nothing like that. External happenings cause someone to feel suffering, which is ultimately enabled by birth.

Like I said, building a house in Florida does not cause the destruction of the house. The hurricane causes it. Can it be a bad idea to build a house in Florida right in the middle of a hurricane red zone? Yes. But that does not cause the destruction of the house, it only enables it. — darthbarracuda

If you have alternatives as to where to build a house, and you intentionally build it somewhere where it is sure to be destroyed, I think it is perfectly appropriate to say of you, the person who made the stupid decision, that you (or your decision) is a cause of the house's destruction. Of course the hurricane is too.

Enabling can be just as bad, but it would be misleading to say that birth causes suffering because it conjures ideas that as soon as someone flies out of the womb, they being suffering when it's nothing like that. External happenings cause someone to feel suffering, which is ultimately enabled by birth. — darthbarracuda

One suffers just by virtue of being alive; there is no way to be alive without suffering or being threatened with suffering by that very fact. You would have to change very basic material circumstances, like ending the notion of hunger, to change this.

Not wanting to have children often accompanies being wealthy because there is no financial incentive to have them. To think that babies just pop mysteriously out of women, and that people don't understand that this is connected to the act of sex, and that knowing this they choose to have sex in order to produce children (for economic as well as for other reasons) is absurd. Additionally, even if a baby is conceived accidentally, one still has to deliberately forgo abortion where it is available in order for them to be born.

That's nonsense. As a necessary (though insufficient) precondition, there must be a will for it to be against. There were innumerable events which occurred without my consent and of which I could not have chosen, but it would be blatantly inappropriate to say that all of them happened against my will. You ought to take the connotations of that phrase into consideration. Consider, for example, "You cannot force me to come with you against my will!" and "Police searched my mother's bags against her will". — Sapientia

Not sure what your point is, there's nothing nonsense about what I said.

So poor people have more children because of child benefits allotted to them? Success seems most positively correlated with where one comes from in life, but I think secondly with their ability to put off present pleasures in favor of future ones. With their level of self control. People don't have sex primarily for the purposes of procreation, they have sex because it's fun. People that are taught good restrain, and future planning I think are more likely to be more caution than people that haven't. I don't want children (at least not right now), but in the heat of the moment, sometimes you just don't care enough to take proper precautions. I wasn't exactly raised in an environment of restraint.

Not planning to have children, and being willing to abort pregnancies are very different things. Not that I'm opposed to them, but I certainly recognize the latter as a much more difficult decision.

Of course the hurricane is too. — The Great Whatever

It's stupid because you enabled the hurricane to wreak havoc on the house.

According to your logic, parents must be murderers because they condemn their children to death since every life form dies. It's a nifty, catchy, angsty little aphorism that you might see in the works of Cioran or Ligotti and co., but outside of that it's really just desperate special pleading.

One suffers just by virtue of being alive; there is no way to be alive without suffering or being threatened with suffering by that very fact. You would have to change very basic material circumstances, like ending the notion of hunger, to change this. — The Great Whatever

Bleh, you're equating pain to suffering. A little bit of hunger, a little bit of discomfort, can be seen as a notification. Extreme hunger is suffering. It's a matter of degree and also of kind; if pain becomes too great that meaning or purpose cannot be derived from it, it becomes suffering.

In a magical time long past, and still in many places in the world today, having children is an economic investment: they provide labor, care for the elderly, the continuation of the family unit, and so on. When you're wealthy and don't need to have children to survive (and your culture does not value having them for any reason but personal choice/fulfillment, since the extended family is a weak institution), one of your major incentives goes away.

And the idea that sex is mostly a recreational activity for fun is hugely historically blind. Life was not always post-1965 America, and in many places it still is not.

I agree that when people have material circumstances that don't force them to have kids, they generally stop doing it: because having children is awful for everyone involved.

According to your logic, parents must be murderers because they condemn their children to death since every life form dies. It's a nifty, catchy, angsty little aphorism that you might see in the works of Cioran or Ligotti and co., but outside of that it's really just desperate special pleading. — darthbarracuda

Obviously one cause of death is being born -- though murder would probably not be an appropriate term, because it is a primarily moralistic or legalistic term that takes as a background assumption that someone is already alive. Though yes, deciding to have a child also means to make someone that you are forcing to confront death at some point, and they have no choice in the matter. I would question your sanity if you denied that.

In a magical time long past, and still in many places in the world today, having children is an economic investment: they provide labor, care for the elderly, the continuation of the family unit, and so on. When you're wealthy and don't need to have children to survive (and your culture does not value having them for any reason but personal choice/fulfillment, since the extended family is a weak institution), one of your major incentives goes away.

And the idea that sex is mostly a recreational activity for fun is hugely historically blind. Life was not always post-1965 America, and in many places it still is not.

I agree that when people have material circumstances that don't force them to have kids, they generally stop doing it: because having children is awful for everyone involved. — The Great Whatever

Oh, I misinterpreted you, yes that's definitely true.

I will also note that, at least for me, other people's suffering is many times more difficult to bare than my own. I do find the sentiment laudable, but the only one suffering when it comes to hypothetical people are we, among the living. Wishes to prevent their suffering is a veiled desire to mitigate our own. I find there to be many virtues to be had in having a family. I think that actually loving something more than yourself, and putting them and their well being ahead of your own offers a maturity, meaning and happiness that cannot otherwise be achieved. I have a special admiration for those that have done it.

Not sure why you're not sure what my point is. What you said is nonsense, and I explained why. There is no conflict of will either before, at, or for some time after birth. It's questionable whether there's a will at all at that period in time, which, as I said, is obviously a necessary precondition for anything at that period in time to be against one's will. Furthermore, you're using the phrase in an unusual way (by missing out the primary and essential part) and in an unsuitable context. Your claim suggests the absurdity that babies have a will to remain inside the womb, and that the baby ought to have been consulted for approval beforehand.