The general argument for sentiocentric (all sentient life) antinatalism is that suffering is bad, by creating life we cause a certain amount of suffering in all cases, we may also cause pleasure/relief, but you will not miss any of that pleasure/relief if you are never created in the first place, there is no unborn purgatory where anyone is trapped, suffering from a lack of pleasure.
Is the absence of pleasure in and of itself a problem? Think of a planet like mars, there’s no pleasure whatsoever going on there, but there’s also absolutely no suffering from a lack of it going on there, so I fail to see how it could be a legitimate problem.
Or similarly, imagine we had two planets, one filled with tormented, dissatisfied aliens living a life of abject misery, but the other one empty of conscious life. You could either A. Choose to give the miserable ones the resources needed to become satisfied or B. Create a higher number of happy aliens and put them on the empty planet.
I think the absence of pleasure is only a problem in so far as it causes suffering, once you’re here, you have a constant deprivation/desire problem that needs to be mended, fire could be used as a metaphor. By procreating, we give someone the problem of now having to constantly chase pleasure in order to avoid being subjected to suffering (eat or get hungry, drink or thirst, shit or constipate), some desire fires are temporarily extinguished while others are not.
If you wouldn’t accept the idea that a fireman did good by setting people’s houses on fire and extinguishing only some of them, why would you think creating desire and fulfilling only some of it is good? All our lives, we’re trying to suffer as little as possible, when the only way to truly avoid suffering is to not come into life in the first place.
So a question that is common in discussions about this topic is:
- ”If life is so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself immediately?”
Often implying that there’s some kind of hypocrisy on part of the ones opposing life creation.
And the proper answer to that would be that if everyone who comes to these conclusions just commits suicide, there would be no one to talk about it, simple.
If you are thrown in a war and you are staunchly anti-war, it isn’t necessarily clear that the best move is to shoot yourself in the head, maybe you can convince other soldiers that the war is bad and minimize cruelty along the way, stop them from inflicting rape/torture here and there, maybe you can go home again and write a book about why you disagree with the war you were thrown in, maybe other soldiers can even do the same thing, so on and so forth.
It isn’t necessarily clear that if you disagree with x, you would necessarily free yourself from x immediately, because perhaps by staying in x you have a chance to reduce x, another example would be let’s say I wanted to convince everyone to live in a forest with me without technology.
Perhaps buying a computer and phone and using said technology to argue that point would ultimately further my goal of getting more people to give up technology and live in the forest with me, but then ultimately we’d abandon technology.
(Sentiocentric) antinatalism is against all life propagating, that problem is not stopped by just ending one life. It ends that particular suffering and all potential future suffering, yes, but not all the potential future suffering of all other organisms, so it’s not a solution.
- But there’s also another important aspect to this, which is that giving someone the option to kill themselves doesn’t justify imposing harm on them in the first place.
It’s often said with this implication that as long as we all have the option to opt out, that somehow makes life creation a fair game, because you can just opt out at any point.
- ”Doesn’t matter if some people have a torturous life, there are also many happy lives, and the ones that don’t like it can just kill themselves, fair deal, you can always opt out at any time, so don’t complain!”
The problem with this is that once somebody is planning to commit suicide, they have already been harmed, so unless you believe that it is justifiable to harm someone because they have the option to later on end that harm by committing suicide, you are being logically inconsistent in using this justification for breeding.
- I didn’t know I was going to put you in extreme debt by taking your money to the gambling house and losing everything. If you don’t like it, you can kill yourself.
- I didn’t know she didn’t want surprise anal sex, if this slut is now traumatized, she can just commit suicide, so what’s the big deal? Some like surprise anal sex.
- I drove over your legs when I was drunk and now you’re a cripple, but so what? If you really don’t like it, you can always end it, life is not supposed to be fair.
If it were only bad to harm someone if you deny them the option to commit suicide, then it should not be possible to prosecute a rapist who locked a girl into his basement and raped her every day, as long as he also threw her a rope to hang herself with.
”But your honor, my client gave the girl in his basement a rope to commit suicide with, she didn’t do it, so that proves that she secretly enjoyed getting raped, it was consensual for sure. What’s the objection here?’
”Forcing others to suck your dick at gunpoint is fine because they can just choose to die if they really don’t want to, free the offender!”
”It’s a fair deal, I lock you in my basement and rape you, and if you really don’t like it, you can kill yourself, I put a rope in your room.”
Here many procreation supporters will say that this is an unfair example because you know fully well that people don’t like being abducted into basements and raped, but with creating life it is not as clear that the person will have a horrible experience.
But that’s irrelevant if their excuse for it is that if severe harm takes place, the victim can commit suicide, if harm is justified on the basis that the victim can still commit suicide if they don’t like it, then this point applies.
Furthermore, it of course also exposes another of their double standards, ”you don’t know the outcome beforehand, so that justifies breeding” – so taking a risk like this at someone else’s expense is fine as long as you don’t know the outcome? Isn’t that exactly what we think makes it wrong in almost all other cases? I went to the casino with your money, but that is perfectly fine, because I didn’t know that I was about to lose all of it, it’s only wrong to gamble with someone else’s money if you know the outcome is that you’ll lose, if you don’t know the outcome, it’s fine.
- Another problem on top of this is that the ones who are making this brilliant ”you can always kill yourself after we already harmed you” point is that they are also frequently exactly the ones opposing the right to die.
Pro-life ideology/viviocentrism often times doesn’t stop at just being perfectly fine with the reckless creation of consciousness and suffering, many of these pro-lifers don’t want the victim to be able to leave life either after having been severely harmed already, which they base usually on entirely circular reasoning, as in ”you are irrational if you want to leave life, and you want to leave life because you are irrational” – A because B, B because A.
In many places althroughout history and to this day, you can be arrested if someone suspects you are about to commit suicide.
A suicidal person must always think that the game of working to fulfill your needs/wants/desires is worth it even when there are little to no prospects of doing so, you can’t just realize that your needs/wants/desires not being fulfilled wouldn’t be a problem anymore if you’re dead, because you won’t have them anymore so once the desire wound is gone the fulfillment bandaid loses its value, no, we have to re-addict you to life and force you to think that not fulfilling a non-existent need/want/desire is a big problem – stay addicted.
- So let’s go back to the rapist metaphor.
It’s not like this rapist locks you in his basement with a rope you could potentially use to kill yourself, you also have to do it when he’s not home, otherwise, he has a little door in his rape dungeon he’ll lock you behind, and then you won’t be released again until you admit how irrational you are for rejecting his cock, his gift to you.
You must admit you don’t want his cock because you’re irrational and you’re irrational because you don’t want his cock (A because B, B because A), but you promise to worship his cock from now on, you admit you are diseased.
And of course, you see that some of his victims also don’t have the same fair chance as others to kill themselves because he amputated them (an analogy to people who are in a position where they have a hard time killing themselves on their own and aren’t being granted the right to assisted suicide), so they can’t just pick up a rope.
They have to plead with him to help them commit suicide, but often he decides that they must still stay here to worship his cock (just like the absolute pro-life religious nutjobs will force someone to live until the end because anything else goes against their idiotic delusional religious beliefs), maybe they’ll get some better painkillers and that’s it.
So this whole argument that ”they can just kill themselves” has lots of problems as we can see.
- Antinatalists killing themselves doesn’t solve the overall problem of suffering, even here we can make an analogy to the rape dungeon. If one somehow manages to escape the rape dungeon but comes back to it in order to save the other victims from the rapist, would you say the rapist is right to conclude that this means you secretly want to live in his rape dungeon and are just denying it, otherwise you wouldn’t be coming back to it?
- Giving your victim the option to commit suicide doesn’t justify imposing the harm on them, otherwise I might as well also start drunk driving over people’s legs to gambling houses where I lose the money of people I stole from, and then when I lose I angrily rape a bitch, but that’s all good because if they don’t like it they can just jump off a building together.
- Some victims are not even in a position where they can easily kill themselves and the most insane pro-lifers still aren’t for allowing them to exit, they wouldn’t even allow a paralyzed patient to die so what’s their point anyway?
In conclusion, the best way to prevent a problem is still to not make it, it’s better if someone never ends up in a position where they have to kill themselves to escape suffering in the first place, and while you are also abstaining from creating happy future people, you have to keep in mind that they are not trapped in some kind of pre-birth deprivation chamber, unborn purgatory where they are horrifically tormented over not receiving life’s pleasures.
Counterintuitive conclusions 