There is a practical difference. I don't have to donate to charity if I don't want to for instance, whereas by your standards you have to. You would also have to volunteer, etc as long as you're capable. — khaled
No it wouldn't though. My personal assessment of whether life is worth living should be applied for myself, not for others. — khaled
Just because I find life worth living doesn't mean my child will, and so my assessments are unimportant. — khaled
Still wrong to force people to do it. Much less so than slave labor, but still bad. — khaled
There is a practical difference. I don't have to donate to charity if I don't want to for instance, whereas by your standards you have to. You would also have to volunteer, etc as long as you're capable. — khaled
Aren't you directly contradicting your earlier example about vaccinating children here? — Echarmion
And apart from that, how are you going to assess whether there is "more harm then good" in general if you're not allowed to generalise your own judgement? — Echarmion
What other assessment could possibly apply? — Echarmion
Which once again brings us back to the issue that your standards could only possibly be upheld by living as a hermit somewhere. — Echarmion
You don't somehow loose your ability to act differently if you recognise a moral obligation. — Echarmion
You know for a fact that a vaccine doesn't harm. That's non-negotiable. — khaled
You don't. Both are subjective. Some are having a blast with life, some hate it. — khaled
The child's assessment which is obviously not available. That would require a time machine. — khaled
Not really. If I count myself as part of the calculation then I don't have to live as a hermit somewhere. Could you give an example as to why it would lead to me living as a hermit? What harm am I inflicting by being in society that is so bad I must instead suffer myself so as not to cause it? — khaled
It is a fact of the matter that if you don't consider something a duty you will be less likely to do it (which is why I call doing it anyways virtue) — khaled
I think we might be getting bogged down by the word “obliged”. You may be regarding it being used in the same way as a “rule”. That it’s the rule in society that you must help the drowning man and that the only reason people help is because they are coerced by the rule. Hence the idea that there would be a law incarcerating people if they didn’t help. — Brett
But being obligated to has no practical consequences — Isaac
but you're certainly putting your own assessment in place of the child's. — Echarmion
So what you wrote earlier was just made up BS you don't actually apply in practice? I am confused as to what your actual position is. — Echarmion
So, again, you realise your standards cannot possibly work but you still insist they're correct? — Echarmion
For one, I don't see how you could possibly live together with anyone else if you find having to do additional chores as a result fundamentally immoral — Echarmion
I can see how this works if we're looking at someone else's decision from the outside. If they do something I consider a moral duty, but they don't, I could say they're being virtuous. — Echarmion
The entire point of figuring out what is and isn't right/virtuous/moral is to tell yourself what you have to do. — Echarmion
No it wouldn't though. My personal assessment of whether life is worth living should be applied for myself, not for others. Just because I find life worth living doesn't mean my child will, and so my assessments are unimportant. — khaled
Like which ones? — Echarmion
So, to leave the boundaries of accustomed debate a bit: Why does it matter whether it's self-imposed? If it's about avoiding suffering, it's not necessarily obvious why we care about concepts of choice or consent. Why aren't we paternalistic and just make sure no one suffers, regardless of choice? — Echarmion
So is having choices good or bad now? — Echarmion
Sounds pretty ridiculous. It would be a different world if there was a law that incarcerated people who do not donate to the poor. — khaled
Why does it matter whether it's self-imposed? If it's about avoiding suffering, it's not necessarily obvious why we care about concepts of choice or consent. Why aren't we paternalistic and just make sure no one suffers, regardless of choice? — Echarmion
Oh can we make no one suffer? Please tell me how? But since we obviously can't, simply not procreating is sufficient to prevent all harm to a future person, and it is sufficient to not impose unnecessarily challenges to be overcome on someone else's behalf. — schopenhauer1
It doesn't change the assessment that living is not a sufficient condition for such suffering. But maybe your should get specific. Name a suffering. — Benkei
Somehow this is seen as "justified" by the paternalistic types that think people should be born, to overcome challenges so they can experience the higher "meaning" in overcoming them. — schopenhauer1
Yes but this is not just a “consideration” it’s a logical argument. If you say that a person experiences X harm due to not having children then all having children does is pushes this X harm onto one or more people (depending on how many children they have) unless THEY (the children) also have children. — khaled
There is almost no case where procreation causes less harm than the harm due to not having children. — khaled
As I said: Children are a special case because it’s your job as a parent to make sure they don’t do something stupid. You don’t do that for adults or strangers’ children do you? — khaled
If you're in an abusive relationship, surely you should cause heartbreak. It'd be just as easy to come up with situations where you should cause pain. — Echarmion
When I talk of “harm” I mean causing more than you alleviate. So vaccinating a child isn’t harm, even though it hurts and is against their wishes. — khaled
Which part precisely? When did I ever say life had “more harm than good”? Please quote me this supposed BS. — khaled
First off, I don’t understand how they’re not working in this scenario. — khaled
My objection was against forcing people to do things. If I am choosing to live with someone else I’m not actually being forced to do anything am I? — khaled
Why are you conflating the 3 terms. I define each of them differently. — khaled
A state of E (existing itself) vs. N (not existing), rather than default already existing E (where x, y, z intra-worldly affairs happen within it). — schopenhauer1
Oh can we make no one suffer? Please tell me how? But since we obviously can't, simply not procreating is sufficient to prevent all harm to a future person, and it is sufficient to not impose unnecessarily challenges to be overcome on someone else's behalf. — schopenhauer1
No rather, the fact that the happy natalists/optimists cruel next move is to just say something like "Oh well you always have the choice to kill yourself or find a piece of wilderness to slowly die" or something like that. But what a shitty choice.. Either be imposed by the things that you need to live or kill yourself. But where did this choice come from? Being born in the first place. — schopenhauer1
This doesn't really relate to the question. I was wondering whether it's the suffering that matters or the lack of choice. — Echarmion
So can I take from this that bad choices are worse than not having a choice at all? — Echarmion
It's both. If you want to self-impose your own suffering, go ahead. Once you impose it for someone else, it's not good. Please don't make the move comparing E v. N vs. E only scenarios as I addressed that. Otherwise, we will keep talking in circles. — schopenhauer1
So, can I impose things that aren't suffering on others? — Echarmion
Since there is only a single "E v N scenario" no comparisons are possible at all, and hence the entire argument begins and ends with a claim. — Echarmion
ou're not even following this request yourself, since "self-imposed suffering" clearly is only possible once you already exist, so it ought to be entirely irrelevant. — Echarmion
1) Imposing suffering.. used in conjunction
2) Imposition in general.. as in for example, if I said you have this game where you make many choices, but you cannot escape except through death. That can be an imposition. It is de facto imposition as there is no escape without death or making the choices the game's conditions imposes. These more generally, are the challenges of life.
Certainly one should not unnecessarily impose suffering on others no matter what. But it also stands to reason, which I will just call Argument Against Paternalism, is to try to benefit someone else by imposing on them challenges to overcome which they could not consent. — schopenhauer1
Yeah, well it is a special scenario. What do you want me to say. That is the point. It is a special scenario that is hard to analogize without making a false analogy. — schopenhauer1
I'll answer in two ways:
1) Fine, ditch it. Self-imposed suffering is also not analogous. Doesn't hurt my argument, just shows how using analogies like these aren't great anyways in this very unique scenario, and hence my highlighting how unique it is.
2) It can be kept because, self-imposed suffering, or suffering on others who consent are examples of being able to consent. The only example where one would unnecessarily cause suffering (because it's not in order to prevent a greater harm as they don't exist obviously), and where there is no consent that can be obtained is the case of E v. N. — schopenhauer1
But this really just sounds like the suffering isn't actually what matters. The argument really only refers to suffering as something that exists. But what changes some behaviour from permissible to impermissible or vice versa isn't some quantification of suffering, but really only whether or not there is consent.
So, where does the consent get it's moral weight from? What is it that makes consent "good"? — Echarmion
But you also realize the problem with that is that this almost legitimizes special pleading? — Echarmion
But to me, the logical thing to do in a situation where the very concept of consent is unintelligible (because whatever could it possiblý mean for a nothing to consent?), is to drop consent from my test or system. It seems a bit like asking whether green is heavier than red, or whether nights are colder than forests. — Echarmion
So there is a contradiction in the very act of deliberating here admitting that this is the very thing, not quite "denied" the person that will be affected, but simply incapable of even doing so from the very nature of the non-existence. — schopenhauer1
The very fact that you think deliberating upon a moral framework right now, implies that people should be able to make decisions on what affects them. — schopenhauer1
Then how can you support denying people any decision whatsoever by denying them existence itself? — Echarmion
So if you cannot get consent, you should be able to impose suffering and impositions on someone unnecessarily? — schopenhauer1
However, if I was to indulge this as if it was a symmetry rather than an asymmetry, then I don't want to be around you at all because your default position is you are allowed to cause impositions if you cannot get consent. — schopenhauer1
Not necessarily. It depends on if they actually want to have children. If I don’t want to have kids, I don’t suffer by not having any. — Pinprick
If you look at couples who have fertility issues you will find that the inability to have children can cause serious emotional/psychological harm, and that harm can be spread out to include the couple, their parents, siblings, etc. — Pinprick
Not only this, but if the justification for not having children is that it causes harm, then it contradicts itself because not having children also causes harm. — Pinprick
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