Category: Antinatalism

Giving your victim the option to commit suicide doesn’t justify their victimization.

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.

The benevolent world destroyer objection to suffering-focused ethics.

A common objection to the view that we should put the elimination of harm/suffering above everything else in ethics is that if that’s the only thing that matters, there would be no problem with someone pushing a button that would painlessly kill all life in an instant, thus also taking away all happiness and good moments in life we could experience.

I would argue against that and say that ultimately the view that such a button shouldn’t be pressed is far more absurd, it depends on why we think life or happiness are important priorities in the first place. Is happiness really important if the possibility of unhappiness does not exist?

I think that as soon as sentient organisms exist, they are trapped in a system of having to constantly chase the next pleasure rush in order to avoid suffering, kind of imagining it as a treadmill with suffering always behind you and pleasure/relief in front of you. You have to keep running or you will be pulled into suffering by the treadmill, and in case you reach pleasure, you’ll also either be pulled back into suffering soon enough or the treadmill extends and now there’s pleasure in front of you again, while the pleasure you just obtained will soon crumble and convert into suffering.

This is a metaphor for sentient life at its core being a game of having to fulfill your needs/wants/desires or being tormented. Your neediness is always guaranteed, the fulfillment of your needs is not. We try to fulfill our needs our entire lives, and when we fulfill them, either new sets of needs pop up (like appetite after hunger having been satiated) or the old needs simply come back if you wait long enough (you’re hungry again).

If hypothetically I could push this button that would immediately just make everyone fall asleep forever or evaporate them painlessly in one second, of course all fulfillment would be gone…but all unfulfilled need would also be gone. So is it a problem for there to be no fulfillment of need when there is no need to fulfill?

If we had two planets, one filled with a population of miserable aliens and the other one is just empty of conscious life, and I could push a button that would give the miserable aliens the resources needed to satisfy them or I could push a button that puts a satisfied population (of more aliens than on the other planet) on planet B but leave the aliens on the other planet miserable and tormented, would it really be an important priority to create a new population of satisfied aliens over eradicating the already existing dissatisfaction on the other planet?

That is what sounds absurd to me much more than world destruction, caring about need fulfillment when there are no unfulfilled needs, that’s like caring about receiving a bandaid when you don’t even have a wound, as in, you don’t have the problem (suffering) but for some reason you claim you need the solution to it (pleasure).

  • Let’s say there were a pill that could make you both immune to cancer and chemotherapy, wouldn’t you take it?

This is another example of problem (cancer) and solution (chemotherapy). If cancer exists, of course it can be important to have the option of chemotherapy. But if you could hypothetically take a pill that made you completely immune to ever getting cancer, but it also made you immune to cancer treatment, would you not take this pill because it makes you immune to cancer treatment?

I think that would be absurd, just like caring about the existence of happiness on planet earth even if suffering didn’t exist anymore. Of course, as a sentient organism already trapped in a system of having to chase pleasure in order to avoid being subjected to torture, I think it’s very important that I obtain my pleasures, but I don’t look at a different planet like mars and bemoan that there are no martians having an orgasm.

  • Death is not a harm, it is the end of harm.

I think society has a false idea here of what death entails, they see it as a harm, when in reality, it is ultimately just putting a stop to the ability to be harmed. Of course, in the process of being killed, you can lose pleasure and thereby be pushed into the suffering area, but when you don’t exist, there is no suffering as a result of there being no pleasure, you just no longer have the ability to be harmed or pleasured anymore.

Death can only be extrinsically harmful, intrinsically it is harmless.

The ”act” of being dead is essentially exactly the same thing you have done for a great period of time before you existed, do you think of that as a horrific tragedy? You didn’t feel hunger or appetite in the year 1200 because you didn’t exist, so the fact that you didn’t enjoy your favorite foods wasn’t a problem, and once you’re dead, you also won’t feel hunger or appetite, so the fact that you won’t enjoy your favorite foods won’t be a problem.

When someone is killed, family members and friends might grieve, if we legalized this act, people would be scared about being killed before it happens to them, perhaps you prevent a productive person from preventing more suffering in others (like a scientist who is working on the cure for cancer for example), you might cause pain to the person in the process of killing them.

But in and of itself there is no harm, particularly not in the unrealistic world exploder/destroyer example, where it is specified that no one would feel any pain, and clearly if no sentient life exists after that, then there would be no one to grieve that we all just died, and there are no more problems to solve, so great activists and scientists to cure us of our ills would no longer be needed, all ills are already cured because we’re all dead.

Taking all of that into account, I’d say it’d be absurd to not press such a button, it’d be the perfect way to solve all problems, including the problem of even needing/wanting life and happiness. Every want problem, including the want to see life flourish in the future is a problem that is solved by simply not existing. We might be inclined to think it is a big deal, but we won’t when we don’t exist.

Of course, once you’re already here, the deal is clear, you’ll have to fulfill your needs or you’ll be tormented, so we tend to think that fulfillment is really important, that’s all we intuitively know to be true – get more pleasure out of life or suffer. So if we’re only able to imagine this state of having a constant wound (suffering/desire) to fix, we think that the absence of bandaids (pleasure/desire fulfillment) would be a problem, when in reality this is about taking both the wound and the bandaid away, not only the bandaid, leaving the wound.

It could be analogized to an addict who doesn’t understand the idea of treating their addiction anymore, they can only think of it as ”they want to take away my drugs and leave me tormented”, but even treating a drug addict’s craving is not as harmless as pressing the world exploder button, it is in fact much more harmful, because the addict can still have remaining cravings for the pleasure given by the drug after being treated, it’s still possible for some feelings of deprivation to remain.

When you push the ”kill everything” button on the other hand, you have truly killed all craving, you have extinguished all addiction, to be scared of that scenario is literally to be scared of nothing.

The pin prick objection to suffering-focused ethics.

A common argument against negative utilitarianism/suffering-focused ethics/antifrustrationism, i.e the ethical theory that we should eradicate suffering/unfulfilled desire rather than to maximize pleasure/create as many fulfilled desires as possible, is that you would have to forego an extreme amount of pleasure, in case that that pleasure can only be created by also creating a rather small amount of suffering, like a little pin prick with a needle, just once.

You have the option to create a much better world, go from a state where everyone is only eating unseasoned potatoes and old hard bread, mediocre jerking off into a tissue to having a perfect virtual reality scenario where you can always have whatever appetite satisfaction and perfect orgasm that you want, but you have to give one person a little pin prick with a needle in their finger just once, otherwise you can’t push the button to create the virtual reality scenario.

  • So if you’re a true suffering-eliminationist, you shouldn’t give that one person the pin prick, right? It would cause suffering.

Wrong, this is either a really badly thought-through or dishonest point against the elimination of suffering. People fail to comprehend that increasing pleasure in an organism is the same thing as reducing suffering in an organism, and reducing suffering in an organism is the same as increasing pleasure in that organism. If you feel better, you feel less bad, if you feel worse, you feel less good.

If a suffering-eliminationist failed to give this one person a pin prick with a needle, they would cause much worse suffering to be generated by keeping us all trapped in a boring condition of life where we can only eat potatoes and jerk off into a tissue, so not giving this person a pin prick would be actually be the pro-suffering stance to take.

  • The point is that the need for the pleasure should not exist in the first place.

Of course, once a sentient organism is unfortunate enough to already exist, they will have to obtain pleasure/relief in order to avoid being subjected to suffering.

  • You must eat or you get hungry, so you eat.
  • You must drink or you get thirsty, so you drink.
  • You must defecate or you constipate, so you defecate.
  • You must jerk off or you get tense, so you jerk off.
  • You must socialize or you get lonely, so you socialize.

Use whatever example you want, you must obtain pleasure or you are subjected to suffering. Once you’re here (as a conscious organism), you are trapped on a treadmill with suffering on one side and relief on the other, and it works in such a way that suffering is always the direction that you’re being pulled into, so you always have to keep running towards pleasure in order to avoid the unpleasant fate of falling into the meatgrinder.

Once you are on this treadmill, i.e forced into existence by your procreators, of course any negative utilitarian/antifrustrationist/suffering-eliminationist would claim that it’s less bad for you to be as close to the relief area as possible, but that doesn’t mean that being in the relief area is less bad than not being trapped on the treadmill that constantly pulls you into the direction of suffering in the first place, having to chase pleasure in order to avoid suffering is quite a burden to impose on someone.

Of course, if I throw a child into the ocean, they might be less bad off keeping their head above water than to painfully drown, but that doesn’t mean they’re less bad off than not being thrown into the ocean in the first place. If I throw you into a hole filled with horse shit, you might be less bad off being able to climb to the surface of the hole to get a breath of fresh air than to sit in horse shit, but that doesn’t mean you’re less bad off than not being thrown into the hole in the first place.

  • Pleasure can still be instrumentally valuable under suffering-focused ethics, it’s just that non-existent people or animals don’t need it.

I reject all kinds of authoritarian ideas that prevent pleasure, because they thereby cause suffering, because again, taking away pleasure from a sentient organism means that they will suffer.

I don’t support cutting off children’s foreskins if the supposed problems that foreskin poses like a lack of hygiene or STDs can also be otherwise solved by other means like soap and contraception, because having a foreskin might give them increased ability to feel sexual pleasure (keeping the glans from keratinizing and less sensitive to touch), and not having more sexual pleasure in your life means being more sexually frustrated, which is suffering again.

I don’t think it’s fair to ban drugs and prostitution just because bad things sometimes come from it (or rather are associated with it), because denying someone those freedoms causes a great decrease pleasure, which means that it’ll cause a great increase in suffering again, not being allowed to take drugs to deal with reality or being forced into sexlessless can be quite tormenting.

What makes idea of creating a new child so that that child can experience life’s pleasures so ridiculous though is the fact that if someone who will experience pleasure is never created in the first place, they won’t be trapped in some other place where they are missing that pleasure, they don’t exist, so who cares? Why should any risk be taken if the absence of that pleasure is not currently bothering the non-exister? They don’t exist, so who cares.

  • So let’s pick a slightly different scenario.

Let’s say it’s not giving one person a pin prick in order to create a perfect world for people that already exist, let’s say I only have the perfect utopian equipment and technology at my disposal to cause pleasure on mars, but I still need to create an alien species to benefit from it.

In order to do that though, I’ll have to torture someone to death, then I can push the button to create the species that will then be put into the virtual reality scenario where they’ll be greatly pleasured.

At that point, I’d say it’s wrong, there’d be a disagreement between suffering minimizers and pleasure maximizers. In that scenario, there is no need for the pleasure, no one is suffering as a result of it not existing, because the creatures that will crave it don’t exist yet.

The aliens that currently don’t exist are not trapped in some kind of unborn purgatory, writhing in agony over not being put into meatsuits and then connected to the endless orgasm machine, so why torture someone, or even just give someone a pin prick with a needle to create those aliens in order to then connect them to the endless orgasm machine to give them pleasure they didn’t need?

They did not feel deprived of pleasure, so you’d be torturing someone to prevent no greater bad, all I’d be doing is torturing someone to create a problem, which is the need/want/desire for pleasure these aliens will be tormented by once they exist, it’s not like causing pain to heal an already existing problem like in the scenario where you have to give one person a pin prick to create a perfect utopian reality which will help already existing people escape boredom.

  • Or just take a scenario where it’s also possible to have a ”kill everyone in an instant painlessly” button.

Give one person a pin prick to create a utopia for everyone, or just push a button that immediately painlessly kills everyone, then I’d also say push the ”kill everyone” button and there’d be a disagreement between suffering minimizers and pleasure maximizers.

Of course, if I push the button, we avoid the uncomfortable pin prick, we also don’t get the perfect utopia land, but that’ll be irrelevant because no one will exist to lament that they feel bored without the perfect utopia land, so win win situation.

It would be like giving one person a stabwound to give 100 people with cancer chemotherapy vs. pushing a button that will make these people’s cancer go away and make them immune to ever getting it again at any point.

Once the cancer is gone, the reason why anyone pursued chemotherapy is gone, so why stab this unfortunate person to give 100 people chemotherapy when I could just make them all immune to cancer by pushing a button?

Why give one person a pin prick to create a utopia which they only chase after because the alternative is suffering, when I could just push a button to kill everything and thereby extinguish the chance of any suffering ever happening again?

So in conclusion, under suffering-focused ethics, pleasure can still play a role as an instrument to the underlying goal of eradicating suffering. Taking away pleasure when it will result in suffering can in fact be a great problem, but what I’m saying is that there are no unborn children in an unborn purgatory suffering as a result of not receiving pleasure, and that there are likewise no dead people invisibly floating around as ghosts, horribly distressed about not experiencing pleasure.

Why do humans fail to recognize wildlife suffering as a problem?

Suffering that goes on in nature amongst wild animals, such as:

  • Being subjected to illnesses, diseases, parasites you can’t fix.
  • Being threatened and attacked by other animals.
  • Being drowned.
  • Starving to death.
  • Breaking your bones and not being able to call an ambulance.
  • Being severely tortured, eaten alive by a hyena for example.

All count as a form of suffering, which should be enough for people to understand that it is indeed a bad thing, something ideally to be prevented.

Suffering is always a bad thing, make no mistake. Sometimes in life, we might be forced to endure one suffering to avoid even greater suffering, like the painful vaccination to avoid a more painful disease, or the painfully boring job to avoid the more painful homelessness, or the painful workout to avoid more pain associated with being weak and unhealthy in the future.

But in and of itself, suffering isn’t a good thing. If the doctor could give you immunity by snapping fingers, you would go for that instead of getting the needle rammed in your arm. If I just rammed the needle into your arm as hard as possible for no benefit in return, you would think I’m an asshole.

So suffering itself is a bad thing. Masochists are not a valid counterexample, because if you’re a masochist, you would get a benefit in return for me ramming the needle into your arm, which is the alleviation of sexual frustration, which is also a form of mental pain/suffering.

If the masochist doesn’t inflict some short-term pain onto themselves, they’ll experience more sexual pain/suffering in the long run.

  • But when it comes to suffering in nature, many are almost immune to even recognizing that the experiences these animals are going through are bad.

They don’t even feel the need to justify it beyond saying ”well, that’s just nature” – so because it is happening in a certain location, i.e nature, it is suddenly fine.

If you have a parasite in your anus, we can solve that problem for you by 1. removing it or 2. simply dropping you into the rainforest, because having a parasite up your ass is totally no longer a problem if you live in the rainforest, it’s just obvious.

So as long as you sit in that location, the itching parasite in your anus no longer makes you uncomfortable?
  • Why do humans fail to recognize wildlife suffering as a problem?

I would argue there are primarily three issues standing in the way:

  1. Ingroup bias.
  2. Intentional vs. unintentional harm.
  3. Viviocentrism, pro-life ideology.
  • 1: Ingroup bias.

This is the same problem that makes humans accepting of the systematic objectification of sentient organisms (factory farming for instance), they are biased towards their own kind, it’s the same psychology that motivates racism and sexism.

If you have metacognition, ability to think about your thoughts – evaluate them, and you reflect on why you really need to have rights, like a right to be free from torture, you’re likely going to come to the conclusion that it is because you can feel pain.

You want a right to not have a knife stuck in your eye because you are able to feel things, you don’t worry about whether or not someone is going to stick a knife in your eye once you’re braindead or a complete corpse – unless you’re actually insane enough to believe in life after death, which is like believing that data on my computer will invisibly float around in the air even if I managed to destroy the hard drive entirely.

The only reason why it could be bad to stick the knife in the braindead person’s eye is because it could in some way still affect other pain-capable organisms, like the mother of the dead person, but in and of itself, pulling the plug on a braindead person isn’t more harmful than pulling the plug on a computer, let’s be real.

White skin color has nothing to do with it, gender has nothing to do with it, species has nothing to do with it. Discriminating solely based on human DNA is just as dumb as me choosing to discriminate based on eye color. I have brown eyes, you don’t, so fuck you, you’re an outcast. Why should I care if someone tortures you to death slowly? You don’t have brown eyes like me, you don’t have human DNA like me, although you can feel just as much pain.

Wild animals don’t have the same human DNA, so just like farm animals, they’re fucked, bigoted humans fail to extend care to the outgroup. Neither are they cats or dogs, which are semi-protected by an ingroup bias called nepotism.

Nepotism is just favoring your family, not your species or race over others, it is making the value of a sentient being dependent on what third parties feel about them, i.e if a child gets brutally raped and murdered, it’s bad because it makes the parents feel bad, but if you’re an orphan, then who cares, it doesn’t make your owners sad.

Humans see cats and dogs as part of the family. Pigs, cows, chicken, fish – much less so. A wild octopus somewhere in the atlantic ocean being torn apart by a shark? Even much less so, it’s too far away, they fail to empathize with that octopus.

  • 2: Intentional vs. unintentional harm.

It is harder for people to see something as horrible if it is caused by unknowing, unintentional agents or even just inanimate, non-conscious phenomena.

If you got violently raped, what scenario would be more offensive?

1 – The rapist is a complete sadist and takes great joy in making you feel like shit.

2 – The rapist is severely mentally disabled and doesn’t know what harm is, he only knows hard peepee causes suffering, hard peepee problem must be solved.

Both is bad, but most people would be slightly more offended by the first scenario of someone taking pure joy in causing pain to others. And here we have the problem – nature is an unintentional force causing pain, the animals within it fail to comprehend what ”harming someone” even is, so it’s shrugged off as not that big of a deal, it’s not like the image of the evil sadistic psychopath brutally raping a child.

Some get angrier over a person like this sitting in a prison cell where they can no longer harm anyone anyway than about actual harm that is still going on around them as long as it’s not caused intentionally, like a parent abusing a child but thinking ”it’s for the best”.

But obviously unintentional harm is still harmful. You protect yourself against illnesses, cancers, viruses of all sorts, even though they have no intent to harm you. You protect yourself against objects that have no intent, like looking left and right before you cross the street to not get unintentionally hit by a car, you make sure you don’t accidentally fall into a meatgrinder.

Yes, the hyenas don’t know that they’re causing suffering to you, they have no real ability to understand why what they’re doing is bad, unlike Ted Bundy. But would you therefore no longer mind if they were to eat you alive? Would you voluntarily throw yourself at them and say ”eat me for you don’t know any better”? No.

We still arrest the mentally disabled rapist. Yes, the sadistic, fully competent rapist might be a little more offensive, but ultimately it’s the whole rape thing itself that is the problem, so it’s just hypocritical to say that getting your entrails ripped out of your anus is no longer a big deal just because the hyena is too dumb to understand that it’s painful.

  • 3: Viviocentrism, quasi-religious pro-life ideology.

If we were to completely interfere with nature, the ecosystem, it could also disrupt human life. If we were able to simply sterilize and euthanize all other animals to prevent their suffering forever, it would affect human life as well, and it’s assumed that human life must always exist.

Or they simply lament the idea of any life going extinct, not paying their attention to the welfare of that life, if it’s being tortured or not, similar to pro-lifers opposed to the right to die because they misguidedly cling to the notion that life is always good, no matter how much suffering is involved, there can be no excess of life.

And this is what they are not willing to accept, because they believe human life or just sentient life in general must exist. Why? Because in life, we can have pleasurable experiences they don’t want to give up, like eating chocolate and getting an orgasm.

But ultimately this is non-sensical, because if you’re never born, you won’t need to get an orgasm in order to avoid suffering. If you don’t have a wound, you don’t need a bandaid.

Prior to being born, there is no desire wound, so there’s no necessity for a bandaid either – all pleasures are unnecessary, they only serve to prevent suffering once you already exist, but fail to give a reason for why you should exist in the first place, just like you wouldn’t say that just because it’s good to put bandaids on wounds that already exists somehow justifies creating new wounds to put bandaids on.

Preventing someone’s pleasure is only a problem if they’re already in pain, the non-discomforted don’t need to be comforted, non-existence has no discomfort in it that needs to be fixed.

Only once you’re conscious, the alternative to pleasure becomes pain. You don’t eat, you hunger, you don’t drink, you thirst, you don’t shit, you constipate. You don’t reach good, you’re trapped in bad. That’s the nature of consciousness, and biased humans who already exist project that understanding onto non-existence, and then end up believing children must be brought to consciousness to be saved from the unborn purgatory.

So obviously, continued life is seen as a necessity, we can’t just put a stop to mother nature and life itself, that is what they end up thinking, that’s ”playing god” – but somehow creating feeling things is not playing god, somehow, letting a crude, dumb force like nature with no intelligence create feeling things is not playing god.

It’s pretty much like a religion for some, they think of nature almost as some kind of godlike entity that intentionally created life for some kind of divine purpose that must not be questioned, you can’t interfere with the god of nature.

The other animals have to exist to keep a healthy environment for humans to exist in, the torture is just seen and shrugged off as collateral damage, more important is that the ”circle of life” is upheld, we must have life at all costs, no matter how many organisms are being tortured to death.

On toughening up children.

I argue that the existence of conscious life itself in the universe leads to unnecessary suffering, it is an unprofitable game.

Some people dispute this and say suffering can be good too, because sometimes in life, you are forced to endure one suffering to avoid even more of it in the future, so you take a painful injection to avoid a worse illness, or tolerate a painfully boring school life to avoid even more painful homelessness, or endure a painfully draining traffic jam to avoid the more painful boredom of never arriving at the amusement park.

But in and of itself, suffering is bad, that’s the point here. If you had the opportunity to just snap your fingers and become immune to all illness, you’d do that.

If I only rammed a needle into your arm as hard as possible for no benefit in return, you would decline the offer.

Masochists are not a fair counterexamples, because they are getting a benefit in return for the pain they cause themselves, sexual frustration is a form of suffering, and if the masochist wouldn’t already experience such tension, they wouldn’t inflict the pain on themselves to relieve that possibly more torturous long term frustration.

It is fair to say that before consciousness ever existed, there was never any suffering going on in the world that needed consciousness to exist in order to alleviate it, so it is irrational to argue that it’s good that consciousness started to exist.

The sea was not crying over not having a conscious fish swim in it, consciousness solved no problem, it is the problem.

Before an organism is conscious, it doesn’t need to feel good to avoid feeling bad, but once it’s conscious, it needs to constantly chase good to avoid feeling bad. So all pleasures of existence are unnecessary to avoid suffering, suffering is avoided just perfectly by not existing, by obtaining any pleasure once you’re alive you’re only preventing a state that would otherwise be suffering, compensating for a deficit.

You don’t eat, you hunger. You don’t drink, you thirst. You don’t defecate, you constipate. At best you get back to a more neutral, un-harmed state of not experiencing unfulfilled need, want, desire, in the worst case scenario, your needs, wants, desires remain unfulfilled for life. A starving third world person and a first world person are both tormented by hunger, it’s just that one always gets a painkiller just in time before it becomes too bad.

  • Suffering apologists who defend the continued production of suffering-capable life will sometimes also argue that deliberately inflicting suffering onto children, beyond just producing them to begin with, is necessary and good to do.

They need to be ”toughened up”, they’ll say things like my parents beat me when I was a kid and it made me a better person, I was an entitled brat who had to learn I don’t always get what I want, I got bullied in school and it made me stronger.

And this, in their delusional state of mind (where they already unfairly presupposed that the existence of consciousness is absolutely necessary and vital) may seem sensible to them, but if you take into account what I just explained this starts to seem more absurd.

It is true that once a child exists, the child will need to learn how to be disciplined and stronger in order to avoid suffering, unmet needs, wants, desires associated with being lazy and weak in the future. As in, little billy needs to learn how to deal with bullying at school, so then he knows how to handle adversity later on and get a good job to avoid being a loser in the life game, and be able to meet his needs, wants, desires.

Though questionable if beating up children and bullying them will achieve that, you can argue that once kids exist they need to learn to be disciplined to avoid certain forms of even worse discomfort and suffering in their future lives. Little billy needs to learn he can’t get any toy he wants at the store, or later on he’s going to rape a bitch – whatever example you want to use.

  • But the problem with all of this is that the need itself did not need to exist.

As a non-conscious fetus, little billy did not feel the need, want, desire to become conscious in the future. His parents created the need, want, desire to do certain things in him when they didn’t abort him before the brain started to fire up consciousness.

Now that the organism is conscious, it will have to learn how to struggle and fight, be toughened up in order to deal with even worse adversity later on in life, not be totally crushed by it and then become one of the loser organisms who’ll fail to fulfill their needs, wants, desires.

  • So the parents really created that problem in the first place.

Let’s say I abduct you into my basement, and then I initiate some sort of sadistic game, let’s call it torture and the carrot. The rule is that in order to obtain food for further survival, the carrot, you have to saw your entire left hand off.

Once I have put you into this situation, I argue that I can totally justify cutting your little finger off first. Why? Well, because it will get you used to pain, and later on you will have get used to pain, because you’ll have to saw your entire left hand off in order to obtain the carrot.

So see, I’m actually doing you a favor by sawing only your little finger off first, because that’ll get you used to pain, which is a necessity (that I have created) for obtaining the carrot later on, I’m just toughening you up to achieve the task I imposed on you.

  • See how this would be completely unfair?

It would be completely unfair because I’m the one at fault for you being in need of the carrot in the first place. I was the one who abducted you into his basement to play this sadistic torture and carrot game, before I made your survival forcibly dependent on that carrot, you did not need to saw your left hand off in order to survive.

  • And this is the problem with toughening up children in general as well.

In life there’s need, but prior to the needer existing, there is no need. So little billy is faced with this unfairness of not getting a new toy at the store, but this is necessary in order for him to learn that sometimes, you cannot get whatever you want, we don’t want him to become a rapist in the future who’ll throw a tantrum when a girl refuses to have sex with him.

But why will little billy develop the desire to have sex? Obviously only because his parents initiated his consciousness, if they simply aborted him before the brain started create needs, wants, desires, he would not be in this situation right now where he has to endure one discomfort in the present to avoid even worse discomfort in the future, just like in my torture and carrot example, you wouldn’t need the carrot if I didn’t abduct you into my basement.

Enduring the discomfort only became a necessity when I created the chance of even worse future discomfort. If little billy isn’t created in the first place, he won’t be dependent on money in the future, so he won’t need to learn how to deal with hardship earlier on to learn how to deal with it later on in order to not become unsuccesful, by aborting the child before it becomes conscious, you eradicate all its potential needs, wants, desires for future success.

  • So when parents make this point that children need to be toughened up, they are missing the real point.

They created the necessity to avoid harm, i.e create need, want, desire by creating a conscious organism, and now that organism needs to learn to become strong to avoid harm that is associated with being weak in the future.

If you’re halfway reasonable, you would think of me as an asshole for doing this in any other context, creating a dependency like that.

Like me abducting someone, locking them in a basement and making their survival dependent on cutting their left hand off – now they need to be toughened up by having their little finger cut off, so that then they can later on more easily chop the entire hand off or they won’t survive under the conditions which I have set.

You’d think I’m an asshole if I were a violent pimp who made someone addicted to heroin and crack in their sleep, then forced them to work for me as a whore, if I then made the argument that me treating them roughly is really ok, because later on all the customers will be even rougher, so they need to get used to it in order to obtain their new heroin fix after I made them dependent on the heroin in the first place, so I’m actually being completely benevolent here.

You’d think I’m asshole if I threw a child in the water again and again and make it fear it might drown, just because later on I wanted them to become a professional swimmer, so they need to be toughened up and get really passionate about trying to swim, instill some torturous fears into them to be a winner in the future.

  • Once threat of worse future discomfort is created, it can be necessary to endure a certain amount of discomfort to avoid even worse future discomfort, but this does not give a justification for why the threat of worse future discomfort has to be created in the first place.

Sometimes in life, we have to endure one suffering to get a pleasure, relief of suffering later on, the painful experiences that make us strong, immune to suffering associated with weakness in the future.

But that pleasure is only a necessity if the threat of suffering from not having it is created, and parents create that threat of suffering whenever they don’t abort a child before it becomes conscious in the first place, they instilled the threat of desire and deprivation by creating a new consciousness.

You might say it was good that your father beat you up as a kid because that made you tougher, so later on you succeeded in life and got more money and pussy, but the only reason why you needed to succeed in life in order to avoid suffering from being a loser is because your father created you in the first place, thus creating the opportunity for loss, if he just punched your mom in the stomach instead, you wouldn’t have been trapped in some kind of pre-birth torture chamber where you prayed to be released onto the earth so you can finally get some money and pussy.

If little billy is never created, he won’t be trapped in the unborn purgatory, feeling the desire to obtain desires to fulfill in order to avoid being tormented by them, thinking ”I wish I would be exposed to negative future consequences, so that then I can be toughened up in order to deal with them accordingly and lead a succesful life”.

Non-existers have no need to be succesful, so in the grand scheme of things, all child up-toughening is unfair abuse, it happens for an illegitimate, unnecessary purpose of giving the child some form of pleasurable future experience that they didn’t need before you created the need for it by creating the child in the first place.

Life is an unhealthy addiction.

In life, there’s suffering, and that’s not good. Some will say this isn’t always bad, because sometimes in life you’re forced to endure one suffering to avoid an even greater one, i.e painful injection to avoid a worse disease.

But in and of itself, suffering is bad. If you could magically give yourself immunity to cancer by snapping your fingers, you’d do that. If I only rammed a cactus in your ass for no benefit in return, you’d decline the offer.

An absolute fact is that prior to the existence of conscious lifeforms, there was obviously absolutely zero suffering going on in the universe that needed us to exist in order to prevent it, so the suffering that was caused by the first conscious lifeform ever existing was unnecessary suffering, not instrumental to avoiding even greater suffering, the existence of the first organism that suffered cannot be compared to the perhaps painful, but useful vaccination, it served no pre-existing need.

  • So we can see that a good way to end all pain, suffering, negative sensation is to put a stop to all conscious life in the universe.

What do we lose? All pleasures, joys, happy moments. Some people think this is a big deal, but it’s not, because the fact of the matter is that non-existers don’t need to achieve happy moments of relief in order to avoid miserable moments of suffering. Only utterly disadvantaged existers need to achieve happy moments of relief in order to avoid miserable moments of suffering.

I need to eat, or I suffer hunger. I need to drink water, or I suffer thirst. I need to shit, or I suffer constipation. I need cum, or I suffer tension. Non-existers do not eat delicious food, they do not drink refreshing water, they don’t get a feeling of relief from pressing a big turd out of their asses, they don’t ever get an orgasm – but – they do not suffer hunger, thirst, constipation or tension as a result of that – so it’s no problem.

Here you can think of many metaphors, let’s use heroin. If you are addicted to heroin, then the heroin gains value, now it can serve a need. But if you’re not addicted to heroin, then it loses all its value.

If I stick a knife in your chest, then the bandaid gains value, now it can serve a need. But if I don’t put a hole in your chest, then the bandaid loses all its value.

If I don’t make you addicted to heroin, you avoid all future problems associated with heroin addiction, and losing out on the pleasure of satisfying an addiction you don’t even have isn’t going to be a problem either, because you currently don’t have that addiction.

If I don’t stab you in the chest, you avoid all future problems associated with having been stabbed in the chest, and losing out on the pleasure of receiving a bandaid won’t be a problem either, because you don’t even have a wound.

  • I don’t think pleasure, relief of suffering is as important as simply avoiding suffering altogether, there is an endless number of potential people that could experience pleasure that are not being born, I don’t see this as a tragedy because they never suffer from not having pleasure.

By stopping the production of all sentient life, all negatives are avoided, and the positives too, but I think that’s irrelevant because no non-exister misses them, again, no negatives. No problem, no fun either…but it won’t be a problem either.

I’d say it’s a win win situation, the sadness of the starving third world person is solved, and the non-existent first world person that can’t eat any more chocolate cake isn’t sad about not eating more chocolate cake either in some kind of unborn purgatory – win win situation that everyone should be content with.

So it brings up the question:

  • If stopping the production of consciousness solves all problems that could ever exist, why are people so opposed to the idea of all conscious life extinction?

It’s simple and in what I just described – because it is an addiction, they have an addict’s mindset.

As disadvantaged existers, we are in a position where we have to chase the happy relief moment in order to avoid suffering, fulfill your need or be tormented by it. So unless you’re constantly intellectually contemplating and analyzing it, perhaps you’re going to end up subconsciously thinking no pleasure=suffering.

Many people seem to be irrationally scared of death as if death is actually some kind of second life where you are simply deprived of all pleasure, which would mean suffering again of course, so it seems to me as if they’re in reality scared of suffering and just falsely think that non-existence somehow involves suffering.

”No more x (whatever it may be) that makes my life great, how horrible!”…but you also have to take into account that your need/want/desire for x will not exist anymore, so is it really that big of a deal? I don’t think so.

If someone is not contemplating their existence too deeply, it could be that they’re just not really taking that into account and their immediate gut reaction is ”oh no, no more pleasure, not having pleasure results in suffering! I don’t eat so I get hungry! So I have to make a child so that then that child can eat in order to avoid being hungry!”.

It’s just like a heroin addict might in their addiction not grasp the idea of ”taking away the addiction”, all he hears is ”we want to take away your heroin” and even that is still not a fitting comparison, because with someone who already exists, we could at least argue that they might already have problems in their life that have been temporarily alleviated by becoming addicted to heroin, we could at least argue that treating the heroin addiction might very well be difficult and they’re going to feel like shit afterwards – make a fair cost-benefit analysis.

But not creating a new addiction to pleasure, relief of suffering by simply not creating a new conscious lifeform has absolutely no downside for that would-be person that will now never come to exist, at least with the already existent person we could argue that becoming addicted to heroin might give them some relief from a bad day they were already having, the non-exister on the other hand never had a bad day on which they really needed you to make them existent.

So an honest cost-benefit analysis is always going to reveal that it’s a stupid idea to make them existent, being upset about humans or other animals on this planet not being born to experience relief of suffering they didn’t need before they existed is just as idiotic as being upset about non-existent martians or plutonians not experiencing pleasure on mars and pluto, or being upset that objects around me like chairs, tables, rocks aren’t sentient so that then they could experience the heavenly pleasures offered by consciousness.

Of course, I could see how from that perspective you could justify almost all suffering that happens to you, if you think that if they didn’t get whatever little pleasure moment they got in their lives, they would have suffered even worse from not obtaining that pleasure moment, if that is an intuition one has (i.e ”I somehow existed before I existed and then I would have been hurt by not receiving my great life”).

So if someone who is dying of cancer thinks that if they got aborted and didn’t get their first orgasm, they would have really missed out on that first orgasm from the depths of the unborn purgatory, they might conclude that dying of cancer is now totally worth it for that first orgasm.

But if they actually understood the full context, that absence of pleasure does not inherently equal presence of suffering, that absence of pleasure only means presence of suffering as long as you exist, but not when you do not exist, then why would you think that a little pin prick of suffering would be worth tolerating, since prior to existing, the non-exister had absolutely zero need, want, desire to be served whatsoever by coming into existence? Why tolerate any risk?

  • Similarly, humans project value onto objects that don’t have any real value, e.g. you think the goal is getting money, you think the goal is buying resources with money, but the real underlying goal is always avoiding pain and suffering, that’s the only reason why you chase the money to get resources, to ultimately alleviate some form of suffering in you.

We all have slightly different needs, wants, desires, but the function is the same – we experience suffering if we don’t do a given activity, that is what defines a need, want, desire, do x or suffer. So existers notice that some objects bring them alleviation – you suffer and you ate a chocolate cake, now the suffering went away.

Because it creates more exhaustion to constantly analyze what is going to most efficiently prevent suffering, they then make a rather sloppy evaluation, as in: chocolate cake=good, no chocolate cake=bad. It’s a projection, they don’t recognize their underlying motivations, the real good is just the elevation of their state from a worse to a better one.

But in their addiction they end up thinking that whatever object that helped them prevent suffering is now the real good, and fail to understand that if no sentient life existed, then there would be no one to miss the chocolate cake and suffer from not having it anymore, it’s simple.

Another explanation could be the stockholm syndrome angle, life as the tormentor.

Stockholm syndrome has been defined as a condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity.[1] Emotional bonds may be formed between captor and captives, during intimate time together, but these are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome#Sexual_abuse_victims

The slave grows up getting whipped, so at some point the slave starts to defend the slave owners. If I didn’t get whipped – then I wouldn’t be able to appreciate how good it feels to not get whipped for a few minutes, get a small moment of relief.

True story, but if you wouldn’t get whipped, then you wouldn’t need to feel relief from not getting whipped anymore either, because you wouldn’t get whipped anymore.

But the slave is so deep into their rationalization of slavery that they lose their ability to see that, so not only do they support their own enslavement, they actually want everyone to be enslaved and get whipped as much as possible, so that then these people that had absolutely no use for the pleasure of not getting whipped anymore can appreciate what it’s like to not get whipped anymore, after they got whipped as much as possible.

At first the victim is usually still struggling and doesn’t appreciate it, you can see that children for instance are much more likely to scream and throw a tantrum in the middle of a supermarket when they don’t get something they want, they’re still not used to the whip of deprivation, they still feel raped by desire, as they grow older they start to delusionally appreciate getting whipped by deprivation, because sometimes the whipping isn’t as intense, and then they can appreciate getting whipped less intensely for a while, develop stockholm syndrome just like their parents.

Perhaps even taking some kind of solace in the fact that other victims of desire are getting whipped harder than you. ”At least I have something to eat to alleviate hunger, the people in Africa don’t” without ever recognizing that hunger itself is a deficit to begin with, what is good about even needing to eat food to avoid suffering?

You’re tormented by your need, want, desire, and sometimes you feel relief from them, so you mistakenly end up believing it’s necessary to create more conscious life whipped by need, want, desire, for the relief of sometimes fulfilling a need, want, desire that they didn’t have before you created them in the first place.

I think the psychology that keeps this game going is one of addiction and stockholm syndrome, humans instinctively imagine the addiction to somehow exist independently of them. Somehow, the universe must need us inside it.

Somehow, there must be an unborn purgatory, just like many of them also believe in some kind of non-sensical afterlife notion because they simply fail to imagine what it would be like if we didn’t exist anymore.

So life is seen as a necessity, when it in fact satisfies no pre-existing need whatsoever, only a need in greedy animals that can’t possibly imagine that the need could also just not exist anymore.

Can it be good to create desire?

Can it be a good, productive idea to create desire?

Need, want, desire all roughly mean the same thing. You simply have to do certain things, or you will be forced to experience a certain amount of pain, suffering, discomfort. I suffer if I don’t eat an apple, I am in a state of deprivation, if I ate an apple, this suffering would go away, so it is correct to say that I desire an apple.

If I could theoretically inject desire into someone, e.g. I had desire serum, and if I gave it to someone in their sleep, the next day they will wake up and no longer be able to fall asleep again, unless they stare at a red-painted wall at least once a day and cum inside a purple cupboard, would that be a good idea to inject them with the desire serum?

Or just plain old heroin. Let’s say I just inject someone with heroin in their sleep, make them addicted to it. Is that a good idea, why or why not?

I would argue creating desires is not good. Fulfilling an unfulfilled desire that already exists can be good, similar to how it can be good to put a bandaid on a wound that already exists. If someone rings on your door with a stabwound in their chest, you’re doing good by putting a bandaid on it and giving them a painkiller.

But, you wouldn’t say I’m doing you a favor by deliberately stabbing you, just to afterwards give you a bandaid for the wound that I deliberately created, and similarly I think it is bad to create unfulfilled desires for the good of fulfilling them again.

You desire x, so I prevent your suffering by giving you x. But I can’t do you any good by creating your desire to obtain x, especially if I have no guarantee that you’ll even be able to always obtain x, creating a desire without guarantee of fulfillment would in the analogy then be like giving someone a stabwound without guaranteeing a bandaid.

  • This is why reproduction of (sentient) life is a problem, because it involves the creation of desires that constantly have to be fulfilled to avoid further suffering.

You cannot reproduce without breaking the do-no-harm principle, and you cannot cite any of the fulfilled desires in life as an upside or advantage for the person that is being born, because they obviously didn’t have any desire for it before you created the desire by creating them. That’s like citing that I’ll put a bandaid on your stabwound as a benefit to justify giving you a stabwound.

So reproduction creates their desire, it doesn’t fulfill a desire the fetus already had before it became conscious. It creates the wound, it is not like putting a bandaid on a wound that already existed.

And even all these metaphors like creating wounds or injecting heroin don’t touch how bad reproduction truly is, because you could at least argue that people that already exist have a desire to have these things done to them in some cases.

For heroin, I could at least argue I could do someone who is already in a state of suffering a favor by making them addicted to heroin, now they get some relief from suffering that they already experienced in their lives, perhaps they were already depressed.

At least I did them a favor much more than I can do someone a favor by reproducing them, because unborn children have absolutely no pre-existing desires whatsoever, they aren’t trapped in some kind of pre-birth deprivation chamber where they desire to come into existence on planet earth, depressed about currently not existing.

Reproduction also involves gambling with more than just one desire, like getting a new heroin fix.

By engaging in reproduction, parents are rolling dice which exact desire will be injected into their future victim via the creation of consciousness, it could be everyday needs, like:

  • Food, nourishment.
  • Taste satisfaction.
  • Shelter.
  • Resources you’ll to do possibly dissatisfying work for.
  • Constant entertainment.
  • Acceptance, reassurance.
  • Affection.
  • Sex.

It could be desires that are hard or impossible to fulfill, like:

  • Staying healthy and simultaneously living an unhealthy lifestyle.
  • Have more sex than you are able to find partners.
  • Go back into the past you feel more attached to than the present.
  • Not decompose and die, although you will inevitably.
  • Be someone else you are not.

It could be desires that directly necessitate harming someone else, like:

  • All kinds of sexual problems where you have to hurt others to get off.
  • Subjugating others to gain a sense of security.

Everyone, including serial rapists and murderers should have our empathy as victims of reckless procreation. How bad would it be if I deliberately injected a serum into someone that made it so that they can never have a fulfilling orgasm again unless they burn a little kitten alive?

Pretty bad, but so is rolling the desire imposition dice by engaging in the reckless production of conscious lifeforms which will all end up suffering from different needs and desires, inevitably leading to the creation of someone like that.

So the procreators of the world create all these desire wounds, and the best thing that could happen is that desire fulfillment bandaids are put on all of them in some kind of weird technological endless orgasm utopia scenario – in which case the victim still isn’t better off than before the wound has been created, they just suffered in between and then the suffering has been alleviated again.

Even if we had the cure for cancer, it would still be stupid to first intentionally give yourself cancer in order to then cure said cancer directly afterwards, it’s still more harm than zero. Similar to how even if had a utopian scenario in which we can fulfill all desires, that still wouldn’t mean it’s a good idea to create desires just to fulfill them directly afterwards, it’s still more harm than zero.

And the pleasure won’t be missed if no one exists, just like the cure for cancer won’t be missed if no cancer exists. So the same question remains, what’s the inherent benefit to creating a problem just for the sake of fixing that problem again?

So even if you just imagined some kind of simplistic organism, let’s say I created some sentient alien slime glob in a laboratory that only had one desire – ingest water, and I always gave it a glass of water just in time before it gets too thirsty, I still can’t do that organism a favor by producing it. It suffered a desire to drink water, and I always gave it a glass of water just in time, so then the suffering went away again.

Is it really doing them a favor if I make it so that they will suffer if they don’t obtain x and then I give them x which they need to avoid the chance of suffering that I created?

And in the worst case, the victim of procreation will fail to fulfill their desires again and suffers a lot more. So the best case scenario is always fulfill your needs/desires just in time…which most of the organisms don’t even do efficiently, tons of unfulfilled needs/desires in the world.

  • This is also why the idea that children ought to be grateful to their parents for taking care of them is idiotic.

Entitled parents think they are owed some kind of gratitude for first creating a problem by making a conscious organism and then trying to prevent its suffering.

  • ”I fed you and put a roof over your head!”.

Yes, after you created their desire to ingest the food and not freeze to death on the streets. You created their needs, wants, desires, and then you tried to fulfill them again. Seems like a fair deal, not doing so would just be like injecting someone with heroin and then depriving them of it, which would seem like a rather shitty deal.

If I set your house on fire deliberately for the good of trying to extinguish it again, do you have to suck my dick for extinguishing it again? If I deliberately give you a stabwound to do you the great favor of putting a bandaid on it afterwards, do I deserve the nobel prize for altruism for putting a bandaid on the wound I created? If I deliberately shit all over your floor to do you the favor of cleaning it up again, do you have to kiss my ass for cleaning up the mess I made?

No – that is just the minimum requirement. If I create a problem for you, I have to solve it again, and if I didn’t, you would call the police. That’s the only condition under which I may be able to prevent having charges pressed against me – I perfectly extinguish the fire, I perfectly treat the wound, I perfectly wipe my shit off again.

But entitled parents, imposers of desire pride themselves in incompletely fulfilling some of the desires they create and say ”but some parents do nothing for their kids so you owe me gratitude!”, which isn’t much better than saying ”but some people who shit on your floor don’t clean it up again, so therefore, because I cleaned it up again, you should really kiss my ass now!”.

In conclusion, no, I don’t think we can argue creating desires can be in and of itself good. You may argue it fulfills some of the parents desires to create new desires, but ultimately they are always creating new problems, which doesn’t effectively solve the desire problem in the long run.

You could ask ”what if someone has a desire to have a desire, i.e someone wants to be injected with heroin?” – then we might do them a favor temporarily, but the desire we give them is still just an instrument to then alleviating their desire for that desire, and they still weren’t benefitted by having that desire to have that desire.

Conscious lifeforms can do absolutely nothing except to eliminate problems caused by them being conscious. At best they minimize all harms just in time before they get too bad, which they didn’t need to before they were forced into that position, at worst they won’t.

What if someone is too incompetent to be granted the right to life, not the right to die?

A frequent concern in the right to die debate is whether or not people who choose death are mentally competent enough to make that choice, perhaps they are mentally ill, irrational.

What if the patient only wants to die because he believes he’s trapped in hell, awaiting to be raped by a demon? Then that person is delusional they’d say, and we should get rid of that delusion before we euthanize that person.

Chances are, even if that person had a rational, clear-headed moment and reflectively said:

  • ”Ok, I know that hell and demons aren’t real, but to be honest, I still don’t like living like this and having to deal with psychosis, I still want to be euthanized to no longer have to struggle. Yes, I won’t experience any happy future either, but that’s irrelevant, because I know that once I’m dead I’ll no longer feel the need to have a happy future either. See it as similar to an addiction, if you’re not addicted to heroin, not getting any new heroin isn’t a problem. If I experience no discomfort that is caused by my life, I don’t need to be comforted, I want to permanently end all discomfort by terminating my life and that’s it.”

The strongest proponents of the anti-right to die crowd would still deny that person the right to die because they think that any person that wants to die is irrational.

And what do they base this idea on you may ask, this idea that everyone who wants to die is irrational? Well, based on the fact that they want to die. If you want to die, you’re irrational, and you’re irrational, because you want to die.

It’s circular logic entirely basically.

Circular reasoning is also known as circular questioning or circular hypothesis. It can be easy to spot because both sides of the argument are essentially making the same point. For example:

Everyone loves Rebecca, because she is so popular.

You must obey the law, because it’s illegal to break the law.

Harold’s new book is well written, because Harold is a wonderful writer.

America is the best place to live, because it’s better than any other country.

Violent video games cause teens to be violent, because violent teens play violent video games.

All of these statements cause the listener to ask, “But how can you be so sure?” They offer no valid evidence besides the assertion that A proves B.

https://examples.yourdictionary.com/circular-reasoning-fallacy-examples.html

So here is a challenging question I have for these people in particular, just a thought experiment that might even happen in real life in some cases:

  • What if someone is too incompetent to be granted a right to life, not the right to die?

They wouldn’t let a person who has an acute psychotic episode make the decision to die, not even when they are no longer having the episode but simply say ”ok, but I don’t want to deal with psychosis and have to take medication forever, just let me die” – so what if someone actually only wants to continue living because they are psychotic and delusional?

Let’s say an old person with both brain and some other problem – dementia and terminal cancer. They have been indoctrinated by religion their entire life, so they have an intense fear of going to afterlife hell for all eternity at any moment if they make the wrong choice in God’s eyes.

They tell you they don’t want to be euthanized, but that’s only because they believe that if they get euthanized, they’ll get raped by a demon in hell, not here on earth like the delusional person that they wouldn’t let make the decision to die based on their delusion.

Let’s make this even worse, we could provide them palliative care and make their dying process less painful, but they say no, no medication against the pain, I believe medication is unnatural man-made garbage, there is no pain medication in mother nature, in the jungle either. You ever seen wild boar taking painkillers when it gets eaten by parasites?

But you see this person lived in a house, in a civilization, had a tv, a shower, telephone, etc, all things that don’t occur in mother nature, in the jungle either, so this is completely contradictory.

So this person will subject themselves to an extremely agonizing dying process by cancer, so this kind of brings up the question:

  • Shouldn’t you euthanize this person painlessly in their sleep when you get the chance?

Yes, they have given reasons why they don’t want euthanasia, but you see that these reasons are completely incoherent. They give no evidence for the existence of heaven and hell, and neither is the ”I only do natural things” narrative being applied by them with logical consistency.

They have just as much evidence for their ”I’m going to hell” narrative as the schizophrenic who believes a demon is standing next to him has evidence for there being a demon standing next to him, waiting to eat him alive at any moment.

They wouldn’t let that schizophrenic person die because they are considered delusional, so why would they not euthanize this old, indoctrinated person who actually sincerely wishes to escape the pain they will experience, but only abstains from doing so because they are suffering from a delusion that they will go to hell for it, for which exists just as much evidence as for one individual demon standing next to you?

Possible answers and my responses:

1 – We should do what reduces suffering the most, so euthanize.

This is the most rational, reasonable answer I think. I would argue that there is much more reason to be concerned with people who want to die choosing to continue living based on false beliefs, rather than people choosing to die based on false beliefs.

I could in theory argue I’m doing anyone a favor by painlessly euthanizing them. I terminated the possibility of any future pain for them, and that I terminated the possibility for all future pleasure, relief of pain as well is irrelevant, because they are dead, so they no longer long for any pleasure, for any relief either.

If you’re not addicted to heroin, heroin has no value and power over your life. Get it? If you’re not in discomfort, you won’t chase comfort. Non-existers experience no comfort, but they also experience no discomfort as a result of not having comfort – only the utterly disadvantaged existers are experiencing discomfort as a result of not having comfort.

But it’s hard for people to comprehend that they really didn’t exist in an unborn purgatory prior to being born, aching to be released, they think ”a happy future” is an absolute necessity to avoid suffering. Little do these delusional people know that experiencing a happy future is only a necessity as long as you’re actually alive and conscious.

There’s much more reason to be concerned with people going through more pain than they would actually be willing to take if they simply got rid of their delusion that future happiness is somehow a necessity (to avoid suffering) for dead people. At least if a person chooses to die as a result of delusional beliefs, they’re not going to experience any painful regrets afterwards, but the person who chooses to continue living for a delusional belief is tormented.

2 – We should give them the freedom to choose whatever, so it’s wrong to euthanize them.

The libertarian approach, I would argue that if we care about any action that is not called ”avoiding suffering”, we only care about that action because it is conducive to avoiding suffering in some way, shape or form, so we actually only care about avoiding suffering, not that other action, so utilitarianism is more rational than libertarianism.

Let’s say I lock an eggplant in a cage. Does the eggplant protest? Does it try to escape? No. And why? Because the eggplant is not conscious, it cannot experience pain and suffering.

Being able to suffer is what makes us strive for literally everything we strive for, a conscious human or other animal would try to escape the cage, because being locked in a cage causes suffering, so it’s bound to chase the concept of freedom, i.e more place to walk on.

But if no conscious life existed, there could be as much place to walk on as possible, and it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone. Avoiding suffering is the only goal that exists, anything else is either conducive or not conducive.

But if someone takes this position and we just grant it has some merit, then they also ought accept people that make the decision to get euthanized.

3 – I’m a pro-life fascist, if life is chosen as a result of delusion, it’s fine.

Irrational for aforementioned reasons. If it’s wrong to euthanize a delusional person who wants to die because they have a false belief that a demon is going to torture them otherwise, you also ought to care about actually euthanizing someone when they only abstain from doing it because they have a false belief that they’ll be tortured by a demon after death.

If you only proclaim to care about life existing, that is likely based on a delusion again, going against the fundamental motivations of a sentient organism, i.e you believe that human or other animal life must exist in the universe to prevent harm, when in reality there would be absolutely no harm left if sentient life did not exist anymore, no one there to miss it.

Life is and of itself is not an absolute necessity to avoiding pain. We care about life because we care about the joyful experiences we may have in it, and we care about having joyful experiences in life because if we didn’t achieve them we would feel bad. So by trying to achieve life to achieve joy you are trying to avoid suffering.

In this case, more suffering is caused by the person not being euthanized, so it’s better to euthanize them, but pro-lifers just lack the metacognitive insight into their own motivations to see this, so they would support torturing such a person for the greater ”good” of more life existing in the universe, when in reality life itself has no value whatsoever, and they only think it’s important because they subconsciously associate life with certain happy experiences they had, that many people they are denying the right to die simply are not having.

Pro-life ideology frequently motivates speciesist behavior.

Some vegans make the point that a lot of other injustices that exist, such as racism and sexism are often motivated by speciesism, and if we taught children how to respect animals, it would be much harder for them to be racist and sexist later on, discriminate and objectify other humans.

This is all fine, but I think it’s not the root cause, I’m going to argue it goes even deeper. The real problem is pro-life, pro-natalist, viviocentrist (life-centered) ideology, the idea that life can be a net positive is used to justify speciesism.

Species survival is assumed to be a noble goal overriding suffering:

  • ”But if we didn’t eat the cow, then the cow wouldn’t even be alive right now, they’d all go extinct! You want to murder the cows???”.

It’s true that if we didn’t want to eat pigs, cows, chicken anymore – pigs, cows, chicken as they are would go extinct, we wouldn’t deliberately breed them into existence anymore and it’s unlikely that such animals could survive in the wild.

However, it would be completely irrelevant, because before cows existed, cows were not trapped in an unborn cow purgatory from which they desperately waited to be released. All their pain would have been prevented, and no pleasure, relief of pain they could have experienced in their lives, like eating grass, could have been missed by them either.

You only get hungry from not eating if you exist. If you don’t exist, you don’t eat, but you also don’t get hungry as a result of that, because you don’t exist.

Pleasure is not intrinsically valuable, it only becomes valuable when you make someone dependent on it by reproducing them. If you’re never reproduced, you don’t miss pleasure from the unborn purgatory, by being reproduced on the other hand, you’re being put into the position of having to chase comfort to avoid being in discomfort.

So really, the cow is not benefitted by being made dependent on comfort that farmers give the cow in return for the milk they give, because the cow did not feel a need to exist before it existed, so arguing you’re doing it a favor by giving it comfort in return for milk would be like arguing I’m doing you a favor by injecting you with heroin in your sleep, making you addicted to it, and then making you suck my dick for more heroin. See, it’s a symbiotic relationship, if I didn’t make you addicted to heroin, you would have never enjoyed satisfying your heroin addiction.

Circle of life, the cow gets comfort and shelter from wild predators that it didn’t need before you forced the genetically modified, retarded cow to exist in the first place, and you get to fondle the cow’s tits. You get new heroin that you didn’t need before I forced you to become addicted to it, and I get my dick sucked.

  • ”Are you going to stop all the carnivores from eating meat, silly vegans? No? Then veganism is wrong! Just admit it vegans, you want to murder lions, just admit it!”.

A great amount of speciesists spend their time pestering vegans with questions about how we ought to deal with cats that need meat to survive, and then all the wild animals that need meat to survive if we want a vegan world.

In all of this, they don’t even question whether life itself is an absolute necessity. Fine, let’s say the animal needs meat to live – does the animal need to live in the first place?

Let’s say some mad scientist bred a new alien species in his laboratory. They will be carnivorous, and they will thrive primarily eating the intestines of human children.

Meat eaters think that it’s justified for cats and other carnivores to hunt for flesh based on the justification that they are carnivorous, and frequently they want to pretend that they themselves are also carnivorous.

So if ”I’m carnivorous” is a justification for harming someone else, then these meat eaters would have to offer their children to the carnivorous alien species in order to not be total hypocrites.

Would they do that? Why or why not? I thought that ”I need meat to live” is an adequate justification for eating someone? Are you saying that the suffering experienced by your child being gutted by my alien breed justifies sterilizing and/or straight up euthanizing my alien breed?

So you SUPPORT GENOCIDE? You don’t think these aliens need to exist?

Suddenly, I think most of these meat eaters would be able to give a clear answer. No, these aliens did not really need to exist to be honest. Before they existed, no one ever needed them to exist. But guess what, that’s the same for all life – before conscious life existed in the universe, the universe never said ”but I really need conscious life to exist! :(”.

If humans, cats, lions and my hypothetical alien breed didn’t exist anymore, they would never miss out and lament not existing, so why is the harm caused by their existence justifiable? It is not.

  • ”What about animal experimentation, you want humans to get sick and die? Ha! Veganism disproven, harming animals is necessary to preserve human life!”

Same, just use alien hypotheticals. We do it for factory farming, we can do it for the animal experimentation problem too. Let’s say there are aliens that will have to perform medical experiments on human children in order to save themselves from a few illnesses that their existence presents them with.

It’s true that these aliens might have to experiment on us once they exist and are prone to suffering, but it still does not explain why they need to exist and be prone to suffering in the first place.

If I know that if I create an alien species, I will have to perform a thousand horrific vivisections on human children in order to figure out what the right medication is for my alien breed when they get a migraine headache, you’d look at me the same way we look at someone like Josef Mengele, what gives me the right to do all that, just because I have a giant boner for aliens existing on planet earth?

Nothing. And similarly there is no justification for the harm caused by human existence or non-human animal existence, speciesists just have a hard-on for humans existing ad infinitum, we can torture as many organisms as possible to preserve human life, life itself is more important than suffering.

  • Nepotism, another form of ingroup bias: why is it wrong to value the dog over the pig? I also value my child over any other child!

Nepotism is the favoring of your family over others, many vegans while they try to reject speciesism don’t fully reject nepotism. Nepotism is making the value of an organism dependent of what a third party feels about them, i.e it is bad if my child is raped and killed, because that then makes me feel bad because it’s my child.

But obviously, you know that if the parent that valued the child did not exist, you still wouldn’t want to be in the position of the child getting tortured, you recognize the suffering itself as a problem as soon as it happens to you, and don’t want your right to be free from torture based on how your family would be affected by you being tortured.

What about orphan children whose parents don’t feel bad about them being abducted, raped and killed? So nepotism is a bigoted non-sense philosophy, just like speciesism, just like racism, caring about a child only because it popped out of your vagina is bigotry.

An equal consideration of interests as true anti-speciesist philosophers like Peter Singer promote also goes against nepotism, you want exception from torture based on the fact that you are able to be tortured, so can other animals be tortured, so they have to consistently go into the category of organisms that have a right to be free from torture. The same principle rejects nepotism, your child is torturable, but it is not torturable just because it is your child.

Some vegans argue that humans learn racist behavior from being speciesists who ignore the suffering of other animals first, and then they internalize that behavior and have a higher chance of becoming nazis.

  • ”Jews are just subhuman animals” – the nazis said.

But I think the truth is that nazi ingroup favoritist behavior is learned much earlier when the child internalizes that their parents and siblings are somehow more important than everyone else’s parents and siblings.

Right there, they learn to ignore the capacity to suffer in organisms of equal suffering capacity to their own, because other parents and siblings are able to suffer just as much as their own parents and siblings, but somehow the child is more attached to their family than anyone else’s.

So it’s more likely that nepotism comes first, then comes speciesism, then comes racism, that is where the first ”somehow my ingroup is more important” feelings are created, and the creation of families is again promoted by pro-lifers, pro-natalists, viviocentrists who think that life is an absolute necessity, because if there’s no life, there’s no happy happy joy moments, and the reason why we chase happy happy joy moments is to avoid miserable miserable pain moment, and they’re just too dumb to figure out that if life didn’t exist, miserable miserable pain moment would no longer exist, so it wouldn’t need to be escaped.

The assumption that life must exist can be found in a lot of anti-vegan arguments, showing confusion about the implications of what would happen if we were to reject speciesism:

  • ”But then these farm animals would go extinct!”
  • ”But then what about wildlife suffering, euthanize carnivores???”
  • ”But that’s the circle of life, big fish eat small fish!”

There is no need for life to exist, it is not an absolute necessity to avoiding suffering, it only becomes one when you create the life, so why create it?

Right to die.

Simply put, I support the right to make the decision to die based on the same reasons why I think it is wrong to create sentient life in the first place.

  • When you don’t exist, you can’t be harmed, existence on the other hand presents you with constant harms in need of being resolved.

If someone makes the decision to be euthanized, they will avoid whatever suffering that they currently experience, or future suffering that they will experience.

Pro-lifers and pro-natalists object to this that this also robs the future person of future joy, happiness and pleasure, but I’d argue that anyone rational would reject this as a stupid concern, because obviously dead people don’t miss joy, happiness and pleasure.

They clearly don’t care, because they’re dead, you don’t see too many dead people upset about not receiving any more pleasure, show me one dead person that wants to come back to life.

Once you exist as a conscious being, you will have to chase pleasure, relief of suffering, or otherwise you will clearly be subjected to suffering, this is quite a burden to impose on someone, that is what you do when you bring someone into existence.

  • You don’t eat, you get hungry.
  • You don’t drink, you get thirsty.
  • You don’t defecate, you constipate.
  • You don’t orgasm, you get tense.
  • You don’t sleep, you fatigue.
  • You don’t socially interact, you get lonely – use whatever example you like.

So by obtaining any good, happy moment in life, you are always compensating for a state that would otherwise be defined by some form of suffering/dissatisfaction, and you have no absolute guarantee of fairness that you will always get what you need to stop horrific suffering.

Not coming into existence in the first place solves the problem of pain/suffering for the individual, and the absence of future pleasure will not be a problem for the non-exister. Being euthanized solves the problem of pain for the individual, and the absence of future pleasure will likewise not be a problem for the non-exister.

To use an analogy – it’s just like not getting cancer (unfulfilled desire) in the first place solves the problem of cancer (unfulfilled desire) for the individual, and the absence of future chemotherapy treatment (desire fulfillment) will not be a problem for the non-exister.

Having the cancer tumor (unfulfilled desire) excised (receiving assisted suicide) once it exists also solves the problem of cancer (unfulfilled desire) for the individual, and the absence of future chemotherapy treatment (fulfilled desire) will likewise not be a problem for the person that no longer has cancer (unfulfilled desire).

You could also use the example of having a knife stuck in you, the knife=unfulfilled desire, painkiller=desire fulfillment, pulling the knife out=death.

Unfulfilled desire is a constant problem, and there is really no rational reason why someone shouldn’t be allowed to rid themselves of it permanently – it would only start to make sense to me if you could prove that dead people can actually be negatively affected by being dead, still in a state of unfulfilled desire.

If you actually showed me an example of a dead person who regrets having died and desperately wants to come back, then you could argue death is a harm, but the reality is that death is prevention of all future harm, conscious life on the other hand entails constant trivial harms with the possibility of falling victim to greater harms at any moment.

Why exactly is everyone expected to keep living? Society allows people to make decisions that they can regret, but not a decision that can never be regretted, which is being dead.

Possible life apologist objections and points:

  • If you wanna kill yourself, you’re by default irrational.

This one is usually just circular. No one is saying that you can’t believe you want to die because you have another delusional belief prompting you to do so, i.e I believe a demon is threatening to rape me, so all I can do is kill myself before it happens.

But viviocentrist fascists are circularly arguing that one is always irrational for wanting to end your life, because you want to end your life, so you’re irrational.

And why are you irrational? Because you want to end your life. And why do you want to end your life? Because you’re irrational.

It’s like saying your tastebuds are obviously deficient for not liking chocolate ice cream, and the reason why you don’t like chocolate ice cream is obviously because your tastebuds are deficient, so we need to force feed you chocolate ice cream in order to make you healthy again.

  • ”But you hurt your family and loved ones by killing yourself!”

But you could similarly hurt them by making any other decision in your life that they disagree with, for example leaving the country permanently and never coming back.

The family will miss the person just like they could miss them if they knew this person left the country forever and is never going to return or call them again, and for the dead person, we can agree that being dead is not going to be a problem.

Also, they are of course also causing immense suffering by enslaving someone to their desire to see them continue living, if they really respected them, they should be glad that this person was freed from suffering. Similarly, not all people have friends or family either.

You could make this argument in specific cases where someone is directly dependent on the suicider, i.e child and a parent, but if the child is able to live independently there’d be little to no reason to deny the parent the right to die, it would be the same as saying ”I’m offended” by any other choice someone could make in their life.

  • ”But someone could be talked into dying when they don’t want to!”

Same issue, someone could really be talked into anything, but we don’t just outright ban an option to do something simply because some people are easily manipulated.

I could be manipulated into doing x – playing lottery, joining a football team, going to church, etc. So ban everything because sometimes it is the result of coercion and force? No, that just means we should ban coercion and force, not the activity itself.

There’s also more reason to worry more about literally any other subject where someone is being manipulated into doing something they don’t want to do, because at least dead people never regret not being alive anymore. It’s still an issue, but no more of an argument for banning the right to die than to ban other rights to do things that one could, but doesn’t have to be manipulated into, the list of said things is pretty much endless.

  • ”But if you really want to die, you can just kill yourself on your own!”

But if you really want a certain cosmetic surgery, you could theoretically learn how to perform it on your own. If you really want to get gay married, you can just have a homosexual ceremony in the comfort of your own home and call it marriage on your own.

Of course you could theoretically do many things on your own, but why deny someone the right to do them in a safe and consensual manner when there are more than enough people who would offer the service? Why is the fact that they could do it on their own a justification for criminalization? Should people who want to get cosmetic surgeries be criminalized because if they really wanted to, they could just learn to do it on their own somehow?

  • ”Well, whatever, but I’m never going to support right to die for perfectly healthy people that should be glad to be alive, I might support right to die for terminally ill and chronic pain, but that’s it!”

All pain is the same in a sense – it’s all created by the brain, this mental and physical distinction is ultimately non-sensical. Pain is not caused by cancer itself, obviously a braindead body could have a cancer tumor and it would not cause any pain, the pain is still created by the central nervous system, by a conscious brain.

Similarly feelings of aversion, pain are created when it comes to someone feeling traumatized, depressed, tortured by something other than a cancer tumor, something directly observable. There is no ”false pain”, if you feel it then you feel it, doesn’t matter if it’s caused by something that would not cause someone else the same amount of pain.

  • ”But maybe we could still improve their life, we can get them treatment and all that and palliative care, why throw it all away?”

Being dead terminates the need for improvement, no dead person craves to improve anything. If you have a cancer tumor we can still cut out, we can give you chemotherapy and let it in, or we can cut it out. If you have a knife stuck in you, we can keep feeding you painkillers, or we can pull the knife out. If you have unfulfilled desires, you can work on (maybe) fulfilling those desires in the future, or you can terminate the desires permanently by getting euthanized.

Why insist on suffering existing just for the chance of in the future converting some of that dissatisfaction into satisfaction, when you could just take away the need for any and all satisfaction by killing yourself as painlessly as possible?

And it is inconsistent to only show this attitude in this one context. When someone has an old shitty car they want to throw away, yes, we could still fix some parts on that old shitty car, maybe we can fix the tires and it’ll still drive.

But it is questionable, why should someone be so focused and forced to repair their old car? What if they simply don’t want it anymore? What if they will be better off throwing it away? Why does some third party have the right to tell me when I’m allowed to throw my car away, especially if someone else bought it for me (just like life) and I never had any say in it?

In conclusion, I think dying can be a perfectly reasonable decision. It prevents all future pain, and the missing pleasure won’t be a problem for the dead person who won’t miss anything that could have happened in the future because they’ll be dead anyway.

I could even argue anyone is done a favor by being painlessly euthanized in their sleep in that sense, and giving people the right choose euthanasia on demand is simply a bare minimum requirement the pro-lifers are failing to meet.

No one consented to receiving the life gift, so if a gift is really making you miserable, you should be allowed to give it up again. Buying something random for someone when you have no idea if they’re going to like is already a dumb idea, forcing them to keep it even worse.