From conversations with you previously, you count frustrated/unmet desires, especially where that causes emotional distress, as suffering, right?
Otherwise a lot of what you're classifying as suffering for offspring wouldn't count as suffering. — Terrapin Station
I think you truly have a misconception about what suicidal people go through. Suicide is nothing like "Damn life sucks lemme just go jump off a bridge real quick". I think you are severely underestimating the resolve required to actually commit suicide — khaled
"It is not ok to create a being that will be in a constant state of suffering" well no shit sherlock, I never thought someone would consider to set the bar THAT low. And then you say "One baby out of a million is born like that". WHY IS THIS BAR SET SO LOW? So as long as I commit an action that causes less suffering than a genetically engineered baby's suffering it's ok? What would you think if someone forced you to, say, cut a finger off and then said "Oh I'm not doing anything wrong here, at least I'm not forcing him to live with 8 broken limbs, this is totally negligable" — khaled
And this: "but then by the same token we should stop doing anything because there is a risk of causing suffering in anything"
sounds bonkers to me. Doing something that risks harming someone else is shunned upon agreed? Yet we do it to survive OURSELVES. The case with antinatalism is extremely different. You can always adopt, so the suffering due to not having a child is just an excuse and instead you spare someone a LIFETIME of suffering. — khaled
No because I have to do that to survive. Antinatalism doesn't say "don't do anything that risks harming someone else". It says "Ok guys, I know life sometimes sucks and you have to hurt others to avoid getting hurt yourself but can someone please explain to me what's going on with having kids? You are literally dooming someone to a lifetime they didn't ask for that may or may not be terrible for no good reason whatsoever when you can adopt." Antinatalism is simply the view that the risks of harm associated with coming into existence are astronomically high in comparison to the rewards, which I'm sure everyone would agree with — khaled
I didn't say live your life or kill yourself. I just note, again, that people want to continue living, including anti-natalists.Never existing and suicide are not the same. In fact, that is another pro-antinatalist argument. Either live out life, or kill yourself is pretty damn callous. — schopenhauer1
That's not how I react to people, professionally or regular every day interpersonally. I don't tell pregant women coming to term that they are being immoral. I presume you don't either..If you don't like life, figure out how to cope — schopenhauer1
I don't think that sentence make much sense, but I think that is a line of not reasoning well that Terrapin is handling well. In any case I am not an advocate that the not born need anything or that parents should have goals for them.Also, it makes no logical sense to CREATE people from NOTHING just so they can HAVE goals that they DIDN'T NEED in the first place — schopenhauer1
I didn't put it on them. I see that others who are alive will suffer their lives and now seemingly pointless if you win, so to speak. You think they shouldn't look the future and bring anyone new into it. So you think their feelings are part so wrong view. However they will suffer and it will be experiened by them as harm. And this would be, if antinatalists were successful, an effect of your polemic, and one which might be, since you are fallible humans, based on values that are not prioritized correctly or the wrong ones, or based on some incorrect reasonsing, or based on false metaphysics.Putting an agenda like "long term goals and achievement" above considerations of preventing ALL harm (with no cost to the future child), makes no sense is using the child for an agenda. They have to have XYZ experiences because someone else projected this to be what has to happen for them. — schopenhauer1
Frustrated because you aren't doing something that causes a life that contains harm for another person? I am okay, letting that person stay frustrated by not putting another person into that. — schopenhauer1
As for (b): I would say modifying sperm/egg -> human is a problematic unusual modification. — khaled
Yes, suffering by not using ANOTHER person's life that will cause all other instances of harm for that person, is irrelevant as it is suffering had from not playing with someone else's life. — schopenhauer1
So suffering is not qualified by "suffering that comes from.creating all harmful experiences for someone else?" — schopenhauer1
Causes are the forces that necessarily result in property F (of some entity x) obtaining versus some other property. If c is the cause of F, then c can't occur without F occurring.
You can travel to South Africa without breaking your leg. So traveling to South Africa doesn't cause you to break your leg. — Terrapin Station
You can do absolutely anything without breaking your leg...except breaking your leg; so according to your argument breaking your leg is the cause of breaking your leg. That's real intelligent! — Janus
Yes, if you impact you leg with sufficient force to break your leg you will break your leg. Again, that's real intelligent, genius! — Janus
One thing you seem to be not recognizing is the fact that people make free will decisions to do things. — Terrapin Station
So first, again, If c is the cause of F, then c can't occur without F occurring.
You can travel to South Africa without breaking your leg, so traveling to South Africa is not the cause of breaking your leg.
One thing you seem to be not recognizing is the fact that people make free-will decisions to do things. — Terrapin Station
I'm not an antinatalist, but I'm criticising your argument against it, which seems to rely on the reductive idea that there is one isolated cause, or perhaps at most a few causes, of any instance of suffering or misfortune, and that we cannot count being born as a cause of suffering. — Janus
You can come off a motorbike without breaking your leg — Janus
The thing is that usually it is the people who go through extreme suffering who want to leave, — leo
I have a hard time uncovering your argument through all these appeals to emotion. Do you see appeals to emotion as a valid form of argumentation? Some straw men in there too, bundled with begging the question as you're basically assuming in the first place that having babies is wrong. Why is your bar set so low? — leo
If living means that you risk harming others, why don't you kill yourself? Because that would risk harming others too? Then whatever you do you risk harming others. So risking harming others is not a valid argument for antinatalism. — leo
You're assuming that an individual experiences a lifetime of suffering — leo
If you assume that it's ok to risk harming others as long as we do it to survive, many people would claim that they can't live if they don't have a child, so then it's ok for them to have a child right? — leo
Also, if existence is a lifetime of suffering according to you, why don't you go around and kill babies? — leo
If life is as horrible as you say it is — leo
You don't have to drive a car or talk to others to survive, you could live in complete isolation to risk harming others as little as possible, only eating plants. — leo
Your view that "the risks of harm associated with coming into existence are astronomically high in comparison to the rewards" is your view, many people do not agree with it, that's why many people are not antinatalists. — leo
Then you don't understand what "unusual" is referring to. — Terrapin Station
I. Keep in mind that no actual person is deprived if not born. However, some actual person will always experience harm if born (the Benatar asymmetry argument). — schopenhauer1
II. Being born means moving into a constantly deprived state. In other words, prior to birth, there is no actual need for anything, after birth, needs and wants are a constant (Schopenhauer's deprivational theory of suffering). — schopenhauer1
III. Life presents challenges to overcome and burdens to deal with. When putting a new person into the world, you are creating a situation where they now HAVE TO deal with the challenges and burdens. It does not matter the extent or kind of adversity, the fact that a parent forced a new person to deal with challenges and burdens of life in the first place, is not good. Forcing something to play a game that cannot be escaped, or to burden someone with tasks that cannot be escaped, including enduring one's daily life challenges, is not right, no matter how much people later "accept" or "identify with" the game they were forced into (i.e. the "common man's view" used so much to counter the antinatalists "extremism"). — schopenhauer1
IV. Contingent harm is harm that is situational. You simply do not know how much harms there are in life for a certain person. This creates huge collateral damage that was not meant for the child to endure, but he/she must do it nonetheless. Some people will find the "love of their life" others will be loveless for life. Some will struggle to keep food on the table for themselves, others will become highly successful in a career. Having the capacity for achieving one's happiness, does not mean this will occur for any particular person. In fact, if we are to be really real here, the ones that will be successful with much of what most consider "happiness" are using the ones that will fail at this. Why? One cannot know who will be successful or not prior to birth, so you must take chances with peoples' lives to see the actual outcomes. — schopenhauer1
V. We are used as "technology/progress" advancers by a circular-production system. We rely on the productive forces to make stuff, and are forced into a system where we are constantly producing and forcing others to produce with our consumption. Once this system subsumes everything, there is no escaping being a part of its productive forces. We try to "self-help" people into accepting a "job that you like!!" so that this seems less painful, but we are just extensions of the machines we create. Plastics, chemicals, metals, materials of all kinds, mining, transportation, engine-building, building-building, any damn product in the world, manufacturing, utilities, engineering, etc. etc. — schopenhauer1
Please tell me what unusual was referring to. — khaled
Outside of human behavioral norms (where those are culturally relative). — Terrapin Station
Also please actually respond to my points not literally a single line. — khaled
Ohhhhhh. So your argument against antinatalism i — khaled
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