My view on procreation:
I think procreation is a harmful act, it forces an individual into a position of having to chase relief in order to avoid harm 24/7. You must eat to avoid the suffering of hunger, you must drink to avoid the suffering of thirst, you must shit to avoid the suffering of constipation, so on and so forth.
Put simply – you must chase relief or you are subjected to harm/suffering, you work to fulfill your desires or you end up unfulfilled.
Prior to procreating, the procreators have no guarantee that the sentient organism they create will be capable of obtaining relief, which desires it will have and if those will be fulfilled, so it is irresponsible, similar to making someone addicted to drugs, you must the pleasure/relief addict may not find pleasure/relief and ends up suffering horribly as a result of it.
Addicted to the pleasure/relief of movement/athletic performance, accidentally hit by a bus, crippled and suffering as a result of no longer achieving the same pleasure/relief. Addicted to pleasure/relief, not geting whatever they desire, ending up smoking to fill the void, getting lung cancer and failing to satisfy your addiction to air. Just some examples.
Picture this hypothetical scenario: I have a fountain spewing a liquid that contains any possible, imaginable desire. From simplistic desires like eating a certain meal to things that are hard to achieve (e.g. I want to have a completely different/modified body or turn into a different species of animal) to harmful things (e.g. wanting to torture/rape others).
I put that liquid in a syringe and inject people with it in their sleep, tomorrow the cripple wakes up and strongly desires to be a runner/athlete. If this is unethical, why is it not unethical to procreate in general? Similarly it is the creation of desire without guarantee of fulfillment, your child could very well be the cripple that wants to be the runner.
Even if one of the desire monsters created actually perfectly always fulfilled all its desires just in time – they still would not miss their fulfillment in life if they never came into life in the first place, which in my view makes potentially creating unhappiness not worthwhile.
As in – child A and child B both desire celebrating christmas and seeing santa and receiving lots of gifts. Child A manages to do so, child B dies of cancer. Considering that if we never gambled with the opportunity of creating either of them, child A would not be trapped in an unborn purgatory and miss their happy christmas adventure to any degree whatsoever, therefore I do not child B’s suffering can be justified, it is creating torture for someone to obtain pleasure that they would never be able to miss anyway.
How this also affects other views of mine as compared to the mainstream views:
The idea of gratitude towards parents for taking care of children:
Society generally takes the misguided view that somehow children are supposed to be grateful towards their parents for taking care of them, but obviously the parents are responsible for the existence of every need/want/desire the child is ever going to experience.
”But I fed you!”
Yes, after creating the child’s hunger. Had you aborted the child instead, the child would have never experienced hunger.
”But I put a roof over your head!”
After creating the child’s need to avoid freezing to death on the streets. Had you aborted the child instead, the child would have never experienced said need.
Let’s say I set your house on fire and extinguish (some of) it again, do you owe me gratitude?
And I’m not talking about accidentally setting it on fire, I’m talking about intentionally setting it on fire because I get off on coming to the rescue and playing fireman for everyone to see, I’m such a hero.
Is that a noble action? Incompletely fixing a problem you intentionally created? It’s better than not doing so for sure, but it seems like a reasonable expectation if you agree that you want to partake in creating a problem for someone.
That is what breeders are guilty of, they create needs in a non-sentient flesh pile when they could have aborted it, and then expect that the kid is grateful they incompletely managed to fulfill some of their needs. They pay off the debt they made, and now expect to be paid in return.
Suicide:
Mainstream society essentially uses circular reasoning to label anyone who wants to make use of the right to die as delusional and irrational.
You’re irrational because you want to end life, and you want to end life because you are irrational, this is about as idiotic as saying your tastebuds are deficient because you don’t enjoy x food, and the reason why you don’t enjoy x food is because your tastebuds are deficient, so you need to be fed that food to become healthy again – it’s just circular.
Even before knowing about antinatalism/promortalism, the common points made against suicide never made much sense to me, such as: ”but then you’re going to miss out on potential future happiness! What if something good happens???”
Who cares? You’re not going to be around to miss it.
If you think that the lack of future pleasure is problematic, even despite there being no one to miss or lament the absence of said pleasure because they’re dead, do you also think that inanimate objects like chairs not experiencing pleasure is a big problem? Do we need to come up with a solution to this, invent some kind of serum we can inject into inanimate objects to make them become conscious and experience pleasure?
The ”state” a dead person is in is the same ”state” a chair is in – it is utterly benign.
Do we need to create as many humans or animals as possible, as the planet allows, because otherwise there will be a lack of pleasure? Isn’t it enough to just prevent the suffering?
I want to point out that of course there are some delusional people who are misinformed about their circumstances (maybe they have a schizophrenic delusion, maybe they aren’t aware of things they could do for their health, etc) and that is why they would go for death, however, I don’t accept the idea that just choosing death itself is irrationality, I think this is a coping mechanism people employ to feel better about life – they convince themselves that life is fundamentally fair and good, so if someone kills themselves, they must convince themselves that that person is deluded, otherwise they have to admit life’s imperfection.
Also interesting question just on the side: if you are against euthanizing someone who is delusional and only wants to die because they think staying alive will result in them getting raped by a demon, would you also be for euthanizing someone who only wants to stay alive because they are delusional and think that refusing to continue living will result in them being raped by a demon in afterlife hell?
Killing and death in general, is death even a harm?:
I think even arguing that death is a harm is technically wrong, even if you are killed without agreeing to it, it is not the actual ”state” of being dead that is the problem.
The ”state” you are in when you are dead is the same you ”experienced” before you were born, so unless not being born is something we should think of as horribly harmful, I don’t see why being dead would be harmful to someone.
You could say ”they wish to be alive, that’s the difference”, but they don’t wish for that when they are dead. Wishing if anything is a harm, it implies frustration with a circumstance, you’re experiencing urges, being dead means being free from that.
You could argue there are practical factors that may make killing unethical in practice, but ultimately I fail to see why it would be unethical in principle.
- You may traumatize family members and friends.
- By legalizing murder, people would be scared before it even happens.
- Perhaps you stop a productive person (like a scientist working on the cure for some disease) from reducing harm in the world.
- Pain caused in the dying process.
So consider the red button thought experiment: you hit the red button and everyone immediately dies painlessly somehow under one second.
- No families and friends traumatized.
- No fears because no one will exist.
- No need for the cure for any disease because diseases no longer have the ability to cause suffering.
So why not push it? In that case, you just solved all problems. Pleasure won’t exist anymore either, but again, is this problematic? Then why isn’t never being born a problem? Why isn’t my chair or a potato not experiencing an orgasm also a problem?
Animal experiments:
Without commenting on how necessary or unnecessary certain experiments for medical research are (I’m not an expert on that), even if you were to argue that it is absolutely necessary to perform an animal experiment to save lots of humans, it is only necessary because these humans exist in the first place, had they not been born there would be no problem.
If a mad scientist produced a new alien species in his laboratory and it turned out that it is quite beneficial to test on humans to predict how the aliens will be effected by the medicine/vaccines they need, the immediate question everyone would probably jump to would be ”why do these aliens have to exist in the first place?”.
I would argue (just as with any other species though whether it is humans or hyenas or aliens) that if this species never comes into existence, it would not miss life’s great pleasures, so it’s irrelevant, they don’t have to exist. So especially if their existence will necessitate so much suffering, it would be wise for the mad scientist not to breed these aliens.
The incel/male sexlessness problem:
When it comes to any man ever complaining about lack of sexual success, perhaps pointing out socially inappropriate truths like ”I’m rejected by shallow sluts because I’m a balding 5’4 midget” they often get shut down by feminists/female supremacists who immediately accuse them of supporting rape.
”YOU’RE NOT ENTITLED TO SEX!” the immediate instinctive response females have to seeing someone experience sexual frustration and loneliness, experiencing lots of suffering, negative sensation.
My take on this problem is that while we can say that you’re not entitled to rape anyone, I think you are entitled to use other outlets like prostitution and porn (that these puritan feminists who act this way are usually opposed to) and you are entitled not to crave sex/companionship in the first place.
Romantic/sexual desire, like any desire, is also just another effect of creating a desire machine. It is one of those desires where you may get lucky and always stave off suffering just in time, or you experience long bouts of suffering, the only responsible thing to do, again, is to just abort everything before it starts desiring, creating desires is irresponsible if you know that they can go unfulfilled.
You may not be entitled to rape anyone, but you certainly are entitled not to be subjected to this piss poor tormenting state of desperately craving companionship/sexual expression but not being able to experience it.
And here I differ from the feminists/female supremacists – we agree that rape is bad, but they don’t agree that sexlessness and loneliness can be torturous, and that it would be the responsible thing to do to stop breeding to prevent the chance of unfulfilled need/want/desire, they mostly think male loneliness is a joke and women have the right to play a gambling game with someone else’s welfare (i.e pro-choice).
Look at it this way: it’s one thing to say ”you’re not entitled to me funding your heroin addiction”, but if you’re some asshole who deliberately straps people to a table and injects them with heroin periodically until they become addicted to it, you’re a piece of shit.
If you are a breeder or you are ok with breeding (like feminists/female supremacists are, they think gambling with someone else’s life is a personal choice, they are pro-choice) and tell people ”you’re not entitled to have your desires fulfilled”, you ARE that asshole that injects people with heroin and then tells them they aren’t entitled to heroin, breeding is what resulted in the creation of the various desires that may torment someone, whether that is sexual, romantic or whatever other desire.
Crime and violence:
I apply the same prior reasoning in the case of crimes. Are some crimes pretty bad? Yes, but what is also bad is if the criminal didn’t commit the crime, they would be experiencing suffering, some kind of pleasure deficiency.
Had the desire machine never been created in the first place, it would not need to commit any crimes to feel better, the breeders gambled with that opportunity.
Serial killings are bad, but it would also be bad to be in the skin of someone who needs to commit rape and murder people in order to be able to bust a nut, and I think the best way to avoid someone ending up in a spot where they have a desire that torments them (but fulfilling it would include severely harming others) is to not bring anyone into existence, so in a sense I’m still pointing the finger at the breeders even when it comes to extreme crimes.