The worst part is that this belief in poverty outcomes being affected by personal behaviour is that it actually compounds low socio-economic status. See for instance the work by the APA, starting I think in 2007 with the SES task force.

Dude. You're a joke. I only laugh at you so I'm certainly not offended by anything you say. I thought I was being helpful towards you to let you know you don't need to reply to me as I have no interest whatsoever to have a discussion with you on any topic.

You've already said that and it's logically wrong. I'm not conflating. If a certain action doesn't cause a certain consequence then my intent for the action doesn't include intent for the consequence. I already dealt with the "entail" argument. Water doesn't cause itself to be wet and all that.

In any case, I'm signing off on this discussion because my patience with anti-natalism apparently lasts for about half a day and I post here for fun.

My aim is not wasting my time on someone who keeps going out of his way to spread lies and disinformation, which is again the case with your qualification. It's telling you qualify it as propaganda. Projection much?

You must've not read the exchange. Necessary conditions. Or we can conclude "the big bang did it" and it will truly be meaningless.

I'm not playing. If I reply to you it's not to engage you, it's to make clear for others what I'm referring to and what's wrong with your reasoning or what information you forget or dismiss. Don't bother replying.

In the procreational decision, everything is in the abstract, including the fact that harm (whatever it is) will take place for someone else. — schopenhauer1

Who undertakes the action is totally irrelevant as to understanding the causality. And in the abstract it's even worse; if people walk on the streets, then they may get robbed. Walking on the streets therefore causes robberies. As if.

Even if for some reason I caused people to walk on the streets, there's still no moral dimension whatsoever because there's no causal link.

For example. Here an appropriate analogy : If I hadn't walked down the street, I wouldn't have been robbed. My walking down the street caused the robbery. That's basically the argument you are now forwarding.

a room, that is a necessary condition for something blowing up. Every instance of someone lighting a match would be the proximate cause. I allow people to enter this room knowingly..is that correct?

Now obviously the analogy isn't perfect. There are good experiences to be had in that natural gas room too in our case. Also, the proximal cause in the real world case is always varying, but we know they will be caused, which is my point. — schopenhauer1

Actual people and actual harm. It's not only not perfect it is a false analogy.

Notice the dodge?

when asking survivors how many of them survived the response rate was 100%. Have fun with yourself.

Anecdotal evidence isn't evidence though but obviously concentration of people raises the likelihood of crimes as well.

Your doing x is not a proximate cause to anyone's suffering so it's irrelevant. That you think it is relevant, is a self-imposed burden but it's not borne out by a logical argument.

This is just restating what was previously proved to be logically wrong. If the logical conclusion is that living does not cause suffering then causing life is not morally wrong because I didn't cause anyone to suffer through that action.

Not really. The real answer, as opposed to my flippant one which I had hoped conveyed the implication of the real answer: is that at this point it isn't a moral problem. I don't need a reason to bring more people "in it" on the basis of the discussion we've had so far. If living doesn't cause suffering, then obviously procreating and giving life has no moral implication whatsoever in the abstract.

I said "can" not "should". Their choice.

They can help.

Eradicate or mitigate the sufficient causes of suffering since suffering from a break up, or a car crash or a disease entails living.

You are not suffering right NOW. There almost certainly was and probably will be. That is the same for everyone. — schopenhauer1

Ok Good. So then we are in agreement that living doesn't cause suffering?

Yes, is it an issue? The conditions of suffering are necessary enough to contain the particular instances that cause suffering. Being that life usually has many of the instances, we don't need to talk about every single cause of an instance of suffering. — schopenhauer1

Yes. It is an issue. As I said before that every life has some suffering is no proof that it is a sufficient condition for particular suffering. I'm not even sure what to call this fallacy. For a sufficient condition "if P then Q" it means that the truth of P guarantees the truth of Q. Let's try that shall we?

Here's what it means to say life is a sufficient condition for suffering, or that being alive guarantees suffering.

If life causes suffering then living things should be suffering
I'm alive
therefore I'm suffering

Except I'm not. So the premisse is wrong. Why? Because living is only a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition.

Living does not cause a disease, it does not cause a car accident and it does not cause a break-up. Causality matters. The difference between necessary and sufficient conditions matters.

But I didn't handwave your arguments. I tried to answer them by questioning whether sufficiency matters when all lives have suffering (to some degree) that we have known of since the beginning of time. — schopenhauer1

If upon reading my arguments your first substantive sentence is "Living causes the conditions of suffering" then you're ignoring my arguments.

Upon pointing that out and your subsequent reaction is "I sufficiency even an ISSUE does it have to be if all lives have it?" then we're done.

Read up on sufficient and necessary conditions in a logical text book. For the love of God, please.

You can't handwave the whole post off with this cherry-picked quote. You have to read the part that it is an almost inevitability that suffering will occur..So I qualified it. I sufficiency even an ISSUE does it have to be if all lives have it?? I think this is using a non-essential, non-starter argument against the suffering we are discussing. — schopenhauer1

If you are going to handwave logical requirements for a valid argument because it's convenient for your preconceived conclusion, I'm fully in my right to handwave the entire post into the bin. Which I did.

So shall we both agree to get a copy of Benatar's book before we go further since this is deeply involving his arguments? — schopenhauer1

What? You've never read Benatar?

Living a life that suffers is not a possible state? It is pretty simple. Even if there is no one who exists, if there is a possibility that suffering can occur.. what then? — schopenhauer1

Not what I said.

Living causes the conditions of suffering. See my post above about its inevitability and thus why its a non-starter what you're saying. If it was a poor unfortunate handful of souls that suffered in some odd foible of the universe, and everyone else lived some Edenic lifestyle, then you might have something more than a semantic argument. But that is not the case. — schopenhauer1

I'm sorry but you don't understand what causality is when you say "living causes the conditions..." It doesn't.

This is again your not actually reading Benatar, so you get to debate a representative interpretation, as we aren't using the actual text. But, if I recall, he thought that it is absolutely good to not experience negative experiences/pain/suffering but relatively good to experience happiness. Then he gives some thought experiments. One if I recall was about how we wouldn't care if happy aliens don't exist on Mars. We would most likely feel sympathy if we found out aliens lived a tortuous painful life on Mars. Preventing pain is more important than generating good experiences in this conception because of these type of intuitions. — schopenhauer1

I'm reacting to what you wrote - not Benatar. And what you write is non-sensical. You're not preventing pain by not procreating because you're comparing a possible situation (people suffering) with nothing (nobody suffering), which is not a valid comparison. You're preventing suffering when you avoid the suffering of an actual person that would otherwise suffer. That's an actual comparison between possible states. It's that simple.

Benkei, you have some interesting ideas, but this is a semantic argument, not a deep philosophical one. One can just make the move in this tit-for-tat game to remake the terms and keep the same substance of the argument. The position is suffering is entailed in (most life that we've ever known).. That's good enough then if living doesn't entail suffering. But who knows, maybe living does entail suffering. That is an intriguing idea to pursue. Buddhists believe it to be some sort of necessity, for example. It may be considered an illusion ultimately in this conception, but it is part of the doctrine in a fundamental way. — schopenhauer1

No dude, this is most certainly not a semantic issue.

You underestimate the importance of delineation. If one thing is intrinsically part of something, that one thing is not caused by the something. Water does not, by its mere existence, cause itself to be wet. Does living cause breathing? Does living cause a heartbeat? If you want to make an argument, your use of language must be sensible. So it's fundamental to decide whether living causes suffering (however remotely) or whether suffering is intrinsic to living. If the latter, then there is no argument to be had from an ethical point of view.

Also, Benatar isn't strictly a consequentialist. I actually see him more as a Kantian if we are to use the most widely used ethical categories. That is to say, he doesn't want to see people (the child) being used as a means to the someone else's (the parents') ends when it comes to generating the conditions for suffering for others (that is to say the necessary condition of life). — schopenhauer1

This makes no sense. I'm using non-existent people (which is in itself a contradiction in terms and therefore not intelligible)? Fine, that means I'm using nothing because non-existent (not that that can be a quality but whatever!). It's not Kantian, it's Konfused.

This to me is really what you are trying to argue. For all intents and purposes, living is the cause of that which is inevitable- suffering. We have to define suffering of course. Certainly a life that has experienced an ounce of disease has some suffering. It is another argument, for example, as to how much disease, and how painful for this to be considered truly "suffering". But your argument is strictly about whether living is necessary and sufficient. The facts are that suffering is almost impossible to avoid while alive. The proof is simply seeing the suffering in almost everyone's life. No utopia exists, no paradise exists, etc. If Buddhism/Schopenhauer does have some truth to it, then perhaps there is a metaphysical aspect of animal striving that indeed would relate suffering with living itself. None of this needs to be consequentialism, in other words. Even if it was, the balance sheet is not on your side of the argument, if we are to use Benatar's argument. That is to say, if in the procreational decision, no actual person loses out on experiencing the good life that is not bad (as there is no actual person). However, not experiencing the bad of life is always good, even if there is no actual person to enjoy this good (see Benatar's asymmetry and formal argument written elsewhere to get full picture of his argument before you go by my rough outline of the argument). — schopenhauer1

The fact that all living things suffer at some point in time, is not a valid argument to conclude that living is a sufficient condition for suffering so this does not resolve the causal chain. Living is simply not, and never will be, a sufficient condition for suffering. The disease causes suffering, being run over by a car causes suffering, a break up causes suffering etc. etc. Suffering is unique and particular.

The whole anti-natalist approach also ignores the fact that suffering is subjective, that all the research on human well-being shows almost everyone across cultures is well above neutral on happiness. So Benatar (and you) are simply empirically wrong about the experience of suffering in the world. The argument "yeah, but you really suffer more and are just deluding yourself" does not resolve the issue because if it's true the delusion is the experience and it's all about the experience.

And "not experiencing the bad of life" by not existing isn't "good" is the usual metaphysical mumbo-jumbo: We cannot ascribe ethical states to nothing.

It's a bit coarse but still pretty funny. A bit of Dutch but mostly English.

Every newspaper in the Netherlands is basing themselves off the Chinese data, where the serious cases/active cases ratio is bloody high compared to every other region except for, maybe, Iran. Then they also confuse mortality rate and CFR all the time. Good way to induce panic!

Uh, 316 pages in and that's still a question?

Can't wait for the debate between two senile geriatrics.

Right you are. Well, it's all getting rather predictable isn't it?

Public option isn't medicare for all who want it because losses aren't mutualised across everyone. The whole reason why medicare for all would be the cheaper is then defeated and you just create a little bit of extra competitive pressure. So far that pressure is such that insurance companies get away with a lot of shit in the USA at the detriment of quality of healthcare and coverage.

God knows why people such as you have such an issue with government run healthcare when the outcomes in other countries are vastly superior to the crap you have in the USA. It's a silly ideological position and fails to take into account how the government runs a lot of things far more efficiently than markets could. But whatever. Here's the full market solution:

1. obligate insurance company to provide basic health insurance (contents of which are decided by law) for everyone with no right of refusal;
2. insurance companies set their own premiums for this care;
3. have insurance companies pool the premiums for basic care and pay out from the pool if someone draws care that falls under the basic health insurance;
4. give them rights to audit each other in the event that a company's customers draw more from the pool than premiums those customers provide to ensure pay-out standards are harmonised across the board;
5. insurance companies negotiate health care costs directly with hospitals and other care providers;
6. insurance companies offer additional health insurance packages, which is left entirely optional;
7. severely limit liability for professional neglicence for health care providers that provide basic health care and that have been contracted by insurance companies to provide such care. The costs of negligence will fall on the insurance company as they have to pay for additional care for their clients and this will put a lot of pressure on them to contract with health are providers that are actually good. In the medium-to-long-term this will mean quacks will go bankrupt and the money goes to better healthcare.

This way, insurance companies can compete on premiums and what they negotiatie with health care providers. You still have mutualisation of all basic healthcare costs this way and allow a lot of freedom for people to buy more insurance.

There must be jobs (economic circumstances). You have to know they exist (access to information). You have to be able to physically reach them (quality of infrastructure & costs). You have to qualify for them (access to education). You shouldn't be discriminated against (female, poor, weird accent or foreign). They have to pay enough (economic circumstances, political minimum wage, negotiation power). etc. etc.

The classical capitalist view that poverty is not a social problem but an individual one has been dead in the water for about three decades now but political ideology takes long to die. Obviously a lot of people benefit in the short term from not emancipating poor people. In the long run it doesn't make economic sense though.

You fail to address the fundamental first point.

An axiom of existence: the unpreventable cannot be prevented. — 180 Proof

Benatar's ethics is consequentialism. If living entails suffering then living doesn't cause suffering. Much in the same way that me killing a person doesn't cause his death, killing entails death. Or if I enter a room at noon, I don't cause someone to enter the room at noon.

So if the position is, suffering is intrinsic to life then it must necessarily fail as a consequentialist argument because living then does not cause suffering.

If the argument is that it is not intrinsic to life, then it becomes necessary to examine the causal chain. And then you run into problems because living is never a sufficient condition for suffering, merely a necessary condition.

Did I get the playbook right do you think?

Well, it's only one guy so we can discount his opinion.

Clinton stooge! Wait... No...

Judge Reggie B. Walton is an Obama stooge... Oh wait, he isn't.

There is a wealth of research how personal choices have very little to do with socio-economic (upward) mobility. The fact that we're still arguing this is either because of people not informing themselves or the ideological barriers that come with being born and raised in the US. Fuck, if it was all about personal choices, don't you think the majority of Sierra Leonians would've pulled themselves up by their own boot straps?

Some obvious differences between rich and poor people increasing inequality:

1. When borrowing money a rich person, all else being equal, has a higher credit rating and therefore pays less interest because the risk component of the spread is lower. They therefore save at a higher rate or if they invest the loan it will provide a better return. In other words, each loan can be better leveraged by a rich person than a poor person;
2. Rich people can afford better housing, which means they pay less in upkeep and heating;
3. Their houses are in better neighborhoods so there's less crime, resulting in less damage to our theft of property;
4. Houses in better neighbourhoods have better roads and public transport connections and are closer to work. Poor people pay more for commuting;
5. Poor people (in the USA) can't afford the same education or healthcare, which is obviously detrimental for the ability to (continue) to generate income.


Less obvious but very interesting: people have a maximum "bandwidth" of stuff they can think about. Once you're in poverty, it's incredibly hard to plan long term because you're too busy surviving. Choices that may seem irrational from the outside are in fact very rational as a poor person. One anecdote I remember is how in a poor family, someone made extra money and ended up spending everything on a new TV. That sounds stupid, until you realise everyone in the family is strapped for cash and likely to spend the money on other things. Buying the TV, "saves" the money for the person who bought the TV. That is all to say, when in poverty your thinking changes. Expecting the types of decisions that will get you out of poverty becomes totally unrealistic.

So if you know someone in poverty, the best way to help them is to relieve their need to think about their finances. Doing their shopping for them after working out a budget, means they get time to think about other things and can manage planning ahead again.

Now you're just playing semantics and pretend you don't know what it means when people refer to free universal health care. Taxes are not through the roof. I'm in the highest tax bracket and pay a premium for health care insurance.

Uhh... that's really misrepresenting it. Basically, the US has the same system as the majority of Africa and a couple of failed (middle) Eastern States.

overview universal healthcare in the world

The NHS is set up differently than other European countries. Part of the reason why it's struggling is because conservative governments keep reducing funding increases (it still increases but at a much lower rates) and lowering taxes, making it appear as if it becomes disproportionaly more expensive as part of the budget.

I must miss the finer points of the English language but that's what it sounded like to me.