Nature is a shithole, but that’s not an excuse.

A frequent excuse that speciesists use to mistreat non-human animals is that animals in the wild, e.g. lions, hyenas, tigers, etc are doing the same thing in nature. In nature, all kinds of bad things happen, animals are worse off than on farms, so that justifies the way they treat animals.

Why is it acceptable for a lion to harm a zebra for its flesh, but not for us to harm a pig for its flesh?

And I think if anyone really questions it, there is no good excuse for that either, which many vegans like to gloss over, the most common excuses you’ll hear for wildlife suffering are that:

1 – Other animals don’t have moral agency, i.e they cannot think about their actions philosophically and recognize they are harming others, these animals, or nature itself lack the intent to do bad things, unlike humans who intentionally do bad, which is evil.

While this is true, this ultimately doesn’t make the suffering caused by a given object or subject any better. A mentally retarded rapist might have little to no ability to contemplate the consequences of his actions, but this still doesn’t make the end result of the rape, harm, any better, the harm is still just as harmful.

If the harm was no longer bad just because it was caused by someone who had no ability to understand that he’s causing it, we wouldn’t prevent severely retarded rapists from raping.

Of course, the same applies to other animals too in that sense, if you really thought that the pain caused by a hyena ripping the entrails out of a wildebeasts anus was somehow not bad, just because the hyena lacks the ability to contemplate how it’s harming others, you shouldn’t at all mind if we fed you to the hyena instead, pain is only bad if its caused intentionally after all.

We can even apply this to completely non-sentient phenomena.

Viruses, cancers and meatgrinders certainly have no intent to cause anyone harm, a meatgrinder cannot contemplate that its harming others by grinding them up, but you still wouldn’t therefore intentionally throw yourself into a meatgrinder because you figured that if something has no intent to harm you, the harm caused by it is somehow no longer bad.

You would remove cancer from your body, even though the cancer didn’t mean to harm you, plain and simple. Similarly you could name situations where intent to harm exists, but it doesn’t result in any harm, so it’s not something to be distressed about anymore.

If a serial child rapist and murderer in a high security prison cell is intending to rape and kill children, it’s not a problem just because he’s intending to do so, because his intending to do so is not resulting in any actual harm to anyone anymore.

It’s the pain itself that is the problem, not the intent to cause it, if the intent to cause pain never actually resulted in it for some reason, we wouldn’t care about it, we only care about the intent to cause pain because it frequently results in pain being caused, but it’s certainly still just as painful of a pain, even if it is caused by something that did not intend to cause said pain.

2 – Other animals are doing it for a necessity, they need the (nutrients in) flesh of other animals in order to survive, humans don’t.

The same problem applies, if the fact that the carnivorous animal is deriving nutrients from their victim somehow makes the suffering being caused no longer a problem, then nature apologists shouldn’t mind being fed to the hyena either. The hyena needs (nutrients in) meat to survive, and these nutrients can also be derived from humans.

So why do they wish to interfere whenever there is a human being attacked by a bear or lion, but when it’s happening to another animal, it’s somehow justified? The characteristic that makes harm to both bad and even possible in the first place, which is sentience/consciousness, is present in both humans and other animals, it’s just speciesism.

One could also use alien hypotheticals to demonstrate this point. Let’s say there were carnivorous aliens, much stronger than us, impossible to be reasoned with, just violent killing machines that rip our entrails out of our anuses. Would any of the nature apologists accept being brutalized by such an alien, just because the alien is also deriving some nutrients from our flesh? I don’t think so.

If these aliens could only survive on human flesh for some reason, we’d still have a problem with it, at that point we would just ask the question whether or not these creatures have a right to reproduce more aliens in the first place.

Pain is pain, no matter by what it’s caused.

I think ultimately all animals should go extinct to be saved from suffering.

Pain exists, that’s a bad thing in and of itself, sometimes in life we may tolerate one pain to avoid a greater one, like a painful vaccination to avoid a disease, but in and of itself, pain is bad, if you could snap a disease away with your fingers you’d do that.

So all else held constant, it is good to prevent it from happening. You prevented a broken leg before it happened? Good. We can ultimately prevent pain, by simply stopping the production of pain machines, which is any conscious being – humans, other mammals, insects.

All we lose is all pleasures, which bothers many, but in reality isn’t a big deal, because if you don’t exist, you don’t even need pleasure. Not hungry? You don’t need to eat. No broken leg? You don’t need a painkiller. Problem solved, I don’t remember ever having a desire to exist before I existed because I simply didn’t exist, and I think it’s the same for everyone else ultimately.

The absence of pleasure is not the presence of pain. When you exist, the absence of pleasure is the presence of pain. You don’t eat, you hunger. You don’t drink, you dehydrate. You don’t defecate, you constipate. So when you exist, you need good to avoid bad. But when you don’t exist, pleasure is also absent, but it does not result in any pain. So why create the need for pleasure?

Let’s say I put you in control of Pluto or some other planet, you could press the button to create alien evolution, slimy tentacle monsters cannibalizing each other. You know they currently don’t exist, so they’re not missing out on pleasure. You know if you push the ”create” button, torture will be thrown into the ingredient list. So why create unnecessary torture for unnecessary pleasure?

Sentient existence itself is unnecessary.

All conscious beings do is to try to avoid bad/suffering, by obtaining good/pleasure, relief of bad/suffering, which we didn’t need before we existed and didn’t experience any suffering, so to argue that you could change any organism for the better by making it conscious is ridiculous on the same level as arguing I can do you a favor by stabbing you in the chest for the good of then pulling the knife out of your chest again and putting a bandaid on it.

Yes, the lion might need to eat a zebra to sustain their existence in the wild. But the lion didn’t need to exist in the first place, there’s no unborn lion purgatory from which the lion cubs felt horribly deprived of zebra flesh. So if you just don’t make a new lion, it won’t need to consume any zebras, it’s delusional that nature apologists think there is some kind of great loss for the collective species in simply not existing anymore. If there’s such a high price to pay for this unnecessary cycle of sentient organisms being created, why endorse the game?

Species don’t have interests, individual animals have interest in avoiding suffering, humans are projecting their delusions of ethnonationalism + the silly idea that there is a pre-birth deprivation chamber onto these animals. Ultimately, the responsibility can only be on us to stop harm to these animals, they are too incompetent to do it, but instead idiotic humans are using it as an excuse for inflicting harm because nature does it, and that’s the point here.

Nature is a shithole, but that is not an excuse.

Yes, in nature, bad things happen – at the hands of animals that have a comparable intelligence to severely mentally retarded humans. If a meat eater justifies their mistreatment of animals just because animals in the wild do it, that is ultimately no better than me looking at a violent mentally retarded person and saying they acted badly, so that’s now an excuse for me to do the same, although I’m more intelligent to potentially know better.

Vegans who are in denial or support of wildlife suffering are certainly delusional for clinging to their pro-life bias, thinking the good in life justifies all the bad, but this doesn’t ultimately absolve the carnists of their crimes against other animals.

Carnists frequently make up the narrative that they’re doing these animals a favor by still abusing them, because they would be abused worse in the wild, completely ignoring that they could also just not breed them into existence in the first place.

It’s not as though we just have the options 1. let the cow live on your farm or 2. release the cow into the wild, another option is also 3. don’t breed more cows.

And they could also keep the animals without exploiting them, they just wouldn’t profit from it, and that’s what they don’t like. It’s as though you’re presenting us only with two options of 1. I can adopt a child from Africa and rape it or 2. I let the child starve to death in Africa. Why not leave out the rape part? You don’t have to release a cow into the wild, still doesn’t mean you need to force her through pregnancy again and again.

They use the other animal’s lack of intelligence resulting in harmful behavior as an excuse to engage in harmful behavior towards animals as well.

It would be like I work in a home for said severely disabled people, and I see that one of them is sexually assaulting and beating a girl. But instead of intervening, I figure I might as well just join in. I mean, the retards did it, so why shouldn’t I rape a disabled girl too? Survival of the fittest, top of the food chain bro, big fish eat smaller fish.

Why not? Severely mentally disabled people who don’t understand that they’re causing harm are doing it too, so I should not have to take any responsibility for my behavior either, although I’m more intelligent to know better.

This retarded rapist (nature) brutalizes his victim much worse, I brutalize my victims less (animal agriculture), therefore, rape isn’t really a big deal now, because the mentally retarded rapist rapes worse than I do.

Often in discussions about what is done to non-humans by humans, hypothetical scenarios involving the severely intellectually disabled are used, since speciesists will often excuse the harm they cause by saying that animals are lesser than us in terms of their intelligence.

But obviously there are humans that are stupider than pigs, so if you wouldn’t sign me a contract that said I can cut your nuts off with no anesthesia if you were to get into a car accident tomorrow, leaving you permanently disabled on the same intelligence level of a pig, why would you think that this type of treatment is acceptable for a pig? It’s hypocritical.

Other animals can suffer just like us, all they lack is intelligence, similar to how small children or severely mentally disabled humans lack intelligence, but that wouldn’t lead you to conclude that now their pain is no longer bad. Small children and disabled people are human, pigs aren’t, but that is irrelevant, because braindead humans are human but can’t feel pain, you wouldn’t mind having a knife shoved in your throat if you were braindead.

A good way to demonstrate the horrors of the dairy industry would be to just imagine I’m doing what they are doing with a mentally retarded human female on the same intelligence level of a cow, which is to forcibly impregnate her, rape, but if it’s not rape when it’s happening to cows because cows aren’t smart enough to spell the word rape and explain the concept of rape in proper english, then neither should the rape of said similarly intelligent human female be considered a real rape.

Then, I take her children, which are all due to their young age not much more intellient than a cow anyway and tie them up in some kind of BDSM type manner, so their flesh stays soft and tender, and then after a while I slaughter them all and make steak out of them. I do this to said retarded girl again and again so that I can get the milk, and then when her tits become non-functional, I slit her throat or throw her in a meatgrinder.

And we can do a similar thought experiment for wildlife suffering.

Let’s say we isolate all the severely intellectually disabled, but mostly physically strong into an abandoned forest somewhere, cut off by a wall or some such object from our general public.

They search for berries in the forest, they might resort to cannibalism if they can’t find anything to eat, they beat each other up and rape each other, fall into all kinds of traps and accidents, die of infectious diseases in said forest that they don’t know how to prevent.

There you have basically recreated the wild – mother nature, creatures as sentient as human children being tormented and not knowing how to prevent it from happening.

If we would see the abandoned forest experiment as a problem to be solved because we recognize that although they are less intelligent, but they can still feel pain, then so should we see wildlife suffering as a problem to be solved because we can recognize that although they are less intelligent, but they can still feel pain, there’s no reason why our feeling of responsibility should be any different towards wild animals than towards children or severely mentally retarded humans – we are the only ones that can potentially put them out of harm’s way.

But here the nature apologists want to believe that nature somehow magically knows what it’s doing, many of them don’t feel the need to justify it beyond saying that it exists, so therefore it’s perfectly fine. ”That’s just nature, that’s just life” – it is, so therefore it should keep existing. Is-ought fallacy, nothing more, nothing less.

That’s like discovering the torture chamber of a serial killer somewhere, and then not calling the police, because you see that the torture chamber indeed does exist, so therefore, what’s going on inside it must be good, it should keep existing, otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

They even glorify it, sometimes tourists like to watch these animals fight and don’t feel the responsibility to interfere and shoot a tortured animal to end its misery, leaving their fate in nature’s hands is assumed to be the right course action to take, just because it exists, so it must be good, ultimately this is just as bad as cheering on a retard gladiator war, starved mentally retarded humans trying to eat each other.

They even wish to replicate it, breed more tigers. Why is that? Why is it good to create more creatures that will rely on violence towards other animals to get their food, when you would look at anyone who thinks we should try to breed as many mentally retarded humans that violently assault and rape others as insane?

What’s to take away from this is that yes, nature is bad, many bad things happen in nature. But nature has no intent or plan, and the animals residing in the wild are not particularly intelligent enough to understand the implications of their actions, so to look at such a retarded process and say that it is a great guide for you on how to live your life and justify abusing animals is absurd, similar to pointing to the behavior of a severely retarded rapist and arguing that because he did it too, you should be allowed to rape.

Instead of recognizing nature to be the unfair shithole that it is, they are using it as an excuse for the pain that they cause by this unintelligent, primitive force, saying animals in nature have it far worse, so therefore, animal farming is just fine. That’s just like the retarded rapist raped more brutally, so therefore, you should be allowed to rape as long as it’s a little less brutally.

Why use an unintelligent, crude, dumb force as an example of how to behave?

Lack of consent and procreation.

You could argue that by procreating, you’re always harming someone, it’s impossible to procreate without breaking the do-no-harm principle/idea, you put someone into a state of need/want/desire.

Once you are here, as a conscious organism, you’ll be constantly motivated by suffering. You must eat or you get hungry. You must drink or you get thirsty. You must shit or you constipate. You must breathe or you suffocate. You must socialize or you get lonely.

Whatever example you want to use, you must chase pleasure/relief, or you will continue to suffer. If you don’t get the pleasure/relief, then you will suffer more, similar to how if it’s not brighter, then it is darker, or if it is not drier, then it is wetter. Less pleasure/relief, more suffering.

So procreating equals irresponsibly creating an addiction with no guarantee of fulfillment.

There is also a secondary argument against procreation, which is that you cannot get consent from an unborn child to create it.

When is it important to ask for consent?

I think the best answer is whenever you are exposing someone to some kind of risk of future harm, unless of course you are by doing so preventing a greater harm, easy example: shooting Hitler although he didn’t explicitly consent to it.

It is important for me to ask for consent, whenever I have doubts about what I’m going to do for someone else. So for example, if I want to steal your money and go to a gambling house, the only condition under which this could be made acceptable again is if I can 100% guarantee that I’m going to win the gamble or somehow I’m preventing more harm by stealing your money and taking it to the gambling house.

If I already knew you liked money, I can win the billion dollars, you’re not going to object to the end result, then I may proceed without asking you first, I already know the end result is going to be a win.

If I want to give someone surprise anal sex, the condition under which this could be made acceptable is if I can 100% guarantee they’re going to be into it later on. If I definitely knew they would appreciate it, they’re not going to object to the end result – then I may proceed without asking them first, but if there is any shadow of a doubt, I need to ask if it is being consented to first, I must not assume implicit consent without great evidence.

So I wouldn’t say that asking for consent is in itself always important as some kind of sacred rule, ultimately it is still the harm/suffering that matters,but here we have the problem procreation.

When procreators are about to procreate, it is fair to say that they cannot 100% guarantee a win.

The child could get a disease.
The child could be lonely.
The child could become addicted to drugs.
The child could randomly get struck by lightning or hit by a bus, be crippled for life.
The child could die in some unpleasant way one day.
The child could at all be dissatisfied, like I already pointed out at the beginning.

So to procreation, there is risk, that is undeniable, and on top of that, you also couldn’t argue that we’d be worse off if we stopped procreation, I don’t see how greater harm would befall anyone unless you could somehow argue that there’s some kind of unborn purgatory where people are suffering from not existing.

So we need to ask the unborn child for consent first. How do we do that? The answer is, we cannot do that, so what do we do when there is risk of colossal failure and no ability to get consent? We do not proceed, I cannot break into a random girl’s house while she’s asleep and stick my dick in her ass in hopes that she’ll appreciate the surprise anal sex afterwards.

Here reckless procreators frequently have a different idea all of the sudden:

”I can’t ask for consent, so I don’t need to! How am I supposed to get consent from an unborn child you fucking idiot???”.

So that means they don’t get it, the point isn’t that there is an unborn antechamber where you could have contacted the child and asked for consent, the point is that explicitly stated consent becomes an important priority whenever we are exposing someone to a colossal risk of harm to prevent no greater harm, this applies in the case of procreation, so procreation cannot be justified unless you could ask for consent.

When you procreate, you:

Create harm/suffering, i.e someone will now have basic needs that constantly have to be fulfilled, it makes them suffer whereas if we didn’t create someones anymore, there would be no harm/suffering.
Risk that they won’t be able to fulfill their needs, thus suffer even more intensely.
Don’t have a guarantee that they will be alright with the ticket they pull (consent).

Consent isn’t the only factor here, but I could argue that you not even knowing whether or not the person is going to like their circumstances is even worse, factor 3 here just makes it even worse in a sense.

Again, we can also find scenarios where it is possible to ask for consent, but I would think you wouldn’t need to, if you know you can double my life savings in a gamble, you no longer need to ask me for consent because you’re sure about the end result being a win so I’m going to be alright with it, if I know you always want a dick up your ass, I don’t need to ask anymore, I know you’ll be alright with it.

Similarly, we can give examples of everything that will have a negative effect on a child once it’s born, where we cannot adequately obtain consent beforehand either, because the child hasn’t been born yet.

For example, if I’m about to bring a child that’ll be severely disabled and suffer chronic pain every single day into existence, I also cannot ask the child for consent to be born before it is born, so does that make it alright to not abort that child just because I could have not gotten the consent to put it into a condition of chronic excruciating pain?

What if I want to give a fetus cancer?

Let’s say that’s just my fetish, I inject cancer into fetuses and that child will grow up to deal with cancer, I jerk off to that kid dying of cancer. I cannot ask the unborn child for consent to do so, so does that make it alright to proceed and give the child cancer, even though I don’t know whether or not the child will be fine with that later on?

If we go with the standard of reckless procreators in this scenario, i.e ”I don’t need consent if I’m unable to get it” – then it would be perfectly acceptable to birth a child that’ll do nothing but be severely disabled and in chronic pain every day, by this standard, it would be perfectly acceptable to fulfill my fetish of injecting cancer into fetuses, creating cancer cripple kids.

By this standard, we could justify giving a fetus any sort of disease that we want.

Chronic pain, AIDS, cancer, deformities, etc, doesn’t matter. If I could deliberately make a deformed, chronically pained child with cancer, would that be justifiable simply because I was unable to ask the fetus for consent beforehand?

I couldn’t have possibly asked them whether or not they will be fine with this later on, so I did it anyway, because I don’t need to ask for consent if I am unable to do so, that is the standard natalists are putting on the table.

But if they don’t like it, they can just kill themselves! So they have a choice, take it or leave it!

Often the last retort when you point out that creating a child carries a risk of the child being dissatisfied with life. And it’s true, if the child doesn’t like life, they can still kill themselves later on, just like in any other given scenario where I failed to ask for consent though.

If you really don’t like that I lost all your money in a gamble, you can still commit suicide. If you really don’t like that I broke into your home at night to give you surprise anal sex in your sleep, you can still commit suicide. Don’t like that I drunk drove over your legs? Kill yourself faggot, I’ll never stop selfishly taking risks at someone else’s expense.

When someone wants to kill themselves, it’s already too late, you already harmed them, so excusing the imposition based on the fact that the victim can still commit suicide later on isn’t an argument.

Not to mention, many procreating life supporters do not truly support the right to die for everyone including children, although it would, unlike their selfish behavior, not carry risk of future harm to the child, if you’re put to sleep you’re never going to regret it later on after all, you’re dead.

But they don’t like that, they want to force any child that doesn’t agree with life being a gift to pretend that life is a gift, otherwise they will deny the reproduced victims their freedom required to exit from life, it’s a circularly justified conclusion – the person is assumed to be mentally ill because they want to end their life, and it is assumed that they want to end their life because they are mentally ill, it’s circular logic.

So it’s not like these imposers even give their victim the freedom to exit, this is more like I break into this girl’s home and give her surprise anal sex, and if she doesn’t like it, she technically has the right to commit suicide.

Sentient life is useless.

Antifrustrationism is an axiological position proposed by German philosopher Christoph Fehige,^[1] which states that “we don’t do any good by creating satisfied extra preferences. What matters about preferences is not that they have a satisfied existence, but that they don’t have a frustrated existence.”^[2] According to Fehige, “maximizers of preference satisfaction should instead call themselves minimizers of preference frustration.”^[2]
What makes the world better is “not its amount of preference satisfaction, but the avoided preference frustration.”^[3] In the words of Fehige, “we have obligations to make preferrers satisfied, but no obligations to make satisfied preferrers.”^[2]
The position stands in contrast to classical utilitarianism, among other ethical theories, which holds that creating “satisfied preferrers” is, or can be, a good in itself.
The moral philosopher Peter Singer has in the past endorsed a position similar to antifrustrationism (negative preference utilitarianism), writing:
The creation of preferences which we then satisfy gains us nothing. We can think of the creation of the unsatisfied preferences as putting a debit in the moral ledger which satisfying them merely cancels out… Preference Utilitarians have grounds for seeking to satisfy their wishes, but they cannot say that the universe would have been a worse place if we had never come into existence at all.^[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifrustrationism

I think that the strongest argument against the perpetuation of conscious life is that all we’re trying to do all our lives is trying to reduce suffering, but the only way to truly achieve zero suffering is by not existing, so it can never be a good idea to create it.

By which I mean that ultimately, by achieving any good, pleasure, happy moment in life, you are compensating for a mental state that would otherwise be suffering, all your life you’re trying to reduce your levels of suffering to zero, when the only way to truly reach the zero is to not come into existence in the first place.

Before we exist, we are not suffering in a pre-birth deprivation chamber, hoping to exist, feeling pain as a result of not enjoying chocolate cake, but once you exist, you’ll have to chase what we call good, pleasure, happy in order to avoid pain, suffering, misery.

If I don’t eat, I suffer hunger and/or appetite.
If I don’t drink, I suffer thirst and dehydration.
If I don’t defecate, I suffer constipation.
If I don’t ejaculate, I suffer tension, stress, pressure.
If I don’t sleep, I suffer fatigue.
If I don’t breathe, I suffer suffocation.

There is never a neutral point in between, I think most wrongly imagine pain and pleasure as pain, neutral, and then there is some kind of profit beyond that, when in reality you are just suffering, and then trying to go back to neutral, and in that process, we have what we call pleasure.

I imagine it as being trapped on a treadmill with suffering on one side and pleasure on the other, the treadmill always pulls you into suffering, you have to keep running to achieve pleasure/relief.

Once you achieved pleasure, you’ll either be pulled back into suffering or the treadmill extends and now there’s pleasure in front of you again, and the pleasure you just obtained will soon crumble and turn into suffering again. This happens your entire life, until at the end you’re usually more intensely pulled into suffering and then you die.

All our lives as sentient organisms, we’re experiencing desire, deprivation, craving, suffering (whatever you want to call it) and try to reduce it to zero again. If you somehow to fulfill all your desires and keep them permanently fulfilled, you’re just back to the same level of deficit as before you were born – a total sum of zero.

I chase satisfaction, relief, because if I fail to obtain it, I will start to feel dissatisfied. You could also imagine it as always sinking into a hole, and then you have to struggle to climb up to the surface to get a fresh breath of satisfaction, relief again, if you fail to do it, you’ll be punished, so you keep doing it.

Once every urge that could push me to eat it, be it hunger, if not, then to avoid appetite which is also a form of suffering, since some will say this is too reductive, we don’t just try to avoid suffering, we eat when we’re not starving too, but appetite is still suffering.

A prisoner can suffer from not being able to eat their favorite dessert anymore, that is the appetite left unattended for a while, when they’re unable to get partial relief from simply fantasizing about grabbing their favorite dessert from the fridge, because they know it’s unrealistic, they’re sitting in prison.

If you eat and you’re not getting rid of hunger, neither of appetite, then it might just be boredom, another form of suffering we seek constant distraction from, even if the food doesn’t even satisfy hunger or appetite anymore.

I desire, I fulfill desire – now I’m just back to as neutral as possible, the same as before, I don’t suffer anymore – for a moment until it comes back, either a new one will pop up, or the old one returns.

And this is what we’re doing our entire lives – a function of punishment is installed and we’re trying to avoid it as much as possible.

Upon birth of consciousness, you’re thrown into the deprivation hole. Now suffering always comes on its own, you have to work to climb up to the surface of the hole to get a fresh breath of pleasure, but you’ll inevitably fall down again because it’s a wet slimy hole. The only way to not be in the hole is to never be born or die.

You’re getting whipped (desire), and sometimes you’re getting whipped less intensely in between (fulfilled desire), but the only way to fully escape the whip is to never be born or die as soon as possible. This will rid you of the pleasure you gain from sometimes avoiding the whip, but is ultimately irrelevant, because you’re not getting whipped anymore.

You’re burdened with a vulnerable welfare that now constantly needs to be maintained in order to not crumble and degrade. The closest metaphor I could think of would be kind of like having to work to obtain money, and then it automatically starts being taken away from you again without you having spent anything on anything. You work to fulfill your desires, and then they empty again or new ones will inevitably pop up.

Even if you fulfill all your desires perfectly, you still suffered in between the moment of them being unfulfilled and fulfilled, and you would have still avoided suffering more efficiently by being aborted before you became conscious. Breathing air to avoid suffocating is less bad than suffocating, but not needing to breathe air to avoid suffocating in the first place is still less bad.

Of course, you would no longer get the pleasure/relief from the fresh breath of air either, but can you really see that as such a big tragedy if you know fully well that you wouldn’t experience suffocation as a result of that either? That is what I’m doubting.

Not existing solves every problem, including our need for any degree of pleasure. Even if you make a child that will grow up to be the scientist that cures cancer (which is unlikely), the cure for cancer is only valuable if suffering organisms that have cancer exist, but if we stopped production of sentient organisms that can get cancer, this would no longer be a problem.

The good doesn’t justify the bad, because the good is just the getting rid of the bad again until it comes back anyway and you have to avoid it again, which you don’t need to, if you don’t create the bad in the first place.

This is what makes the idea of the good things in life justifying the bad absurd, which is a favorite go-to argument life apologists bring up when it is pointed out to them that causing life to exist causes unnecessary torture.

Since the good is just compensating for a bad, to say that it’s good to create the bad for the good of then compensating for it would be like saying that I could do you a favor by:

Setting your house on fire for the good of extinguishing it again.
Throwing children into the sea for the good of saving them from drowning.
Breaking your legs for the good of giving you a painkiller.
Give you AIDS for the good of giving you treatment for AIDS.
Stabbing you in the chest for the good of putting a bandaid on it.
Shitting on your floor for the good of wiping it off again.
Throwing you in a hole for the good of you climbing out of it again.

The good is just making it the same as before. I desire to eat an apple – I’m now in a state of suffering. I temporarily neutralize and avoid that suffering by eating the apple, now it’s the same as before, which means I don’t suffer as a result of not having an apple anymore, until the urge to obtain an apple comes back.

So while it may be good to fulfill unfulfilled needs and desires that already exist, it can’t be good to create unfulfilled needs and desires just for the good of then trying to fulfill them with no guarantee of being able to, just like it can be good to save an already drowning child from drowning, but it’s not good to throw the child into sea in the first place, just for the good of then trying to save the child from drowning with no guarantee of being able to.

A non-conscious fetus is not hungry for anything, so it cannot be upgraded by having hunger, desire, suffering injected into it, it can only be degraded, made into a pleasure addict, and then hopefully get its new pleasure fix always just in time before the suffering of not having that pleasure gets out of hand, which not all of them will, there are many unfulfilled desires in the life game, which then makes it even more absurd.

To say that the fulfilled desires, pleasures of some subset of sentient organisms justify all the unfulfilled desires, suffering of other sentient organisms, would in the metaphor be like saying that it is a perfectly good idea to walk around and set people’s houses on fire for the good of extinguishing them again, even if many of those houses burn down with children inside, because that is perfectly compensated for by extinguishing other houses.

It’s good to throw children into the atlantic ocean for the good of saving them from drowning, even if 50 have to drown and die painfully here and there, because that is perfectly compensated for by the pleasure that the children you actually manage to save from drowning feel when you save them from drowning, we need to keep throwing children into the ocean because otherwise we would lose the pleasure of saving them from drowning, they’ll lose the pleasure of being saved from drowning.

Make children addicted to heroin for the good of then satisfying their addiction, their suffering for heroin, a completely inefficient and unproductive idea to begin with, and then you don’t even give of all them the heroin, some are just left in their state of deprivation to be tormented.

As in the life game, you don’t really manage to fulfill desires permanently, to make the metaphors even more accurate, we could practically say the good is more like pulling the child’s head out of the water in between, not saving it from drowning.

But even if we perfected the game and had some kind of technological endless orgasm utopia scenario, then we’d still just be perfectly fixing pre-existing damage, which is still not better than not creating it in the first place, you still cannot benefit the organism by putting it into the utopia, creating its desire to be endlessly jerked off, and then endlessly jerking it off.

Installing the threat of a negative and then perfectly avoiding it is better than failing to perfectly avoid the negative, but not having it installed into you is still the greatest win.

It would be like having the cure for AIDS. Yes, it’s good to perfectly cure AIDS, but I still cannot be benefitted by being given AIDS, and then being given the perfect pill to cure AIDS afterwards, I just got back to the state of not having AIDS, which I didn’t have before it was given to me, so I didn’t really win anything.

In conclusion, sentient organisms can do nothing except trying to solve problems created by them being sentient – need, want, desire, and then erase that deficit again, fulfill the need, want, desire.

Then they avoid that suffering for a moment, but they still didn’t avoid it more efficiently than by never being born, they just got back to a non-bothered state and felt bothered in between, which isn’t superior to never feeling bothered by anything at all.

Life is useless, at best you’re always just getting back to a more neutral before the pain becomes unbearable, that’s a so called good life, which is rare.

Life apologists believe that this then somehow justifies all the organisms that fail to avoid the pain before it becomes too bad, which is about as absurd as to justify stabbing 50 people in the chest to do them the favor of pulling the knife out of only 10 of them.

It’s good to make 50 people addicted to heroin and then deprive 40 of it, because you gave 10 of them all the heroin in the world, that they now need after you deliberately made them addicted to it.

All we try to do is prevent harm, and we can prevent all harm most efficiently and permanently by simply not making conscious organisms.

All we lose is all pleasure, which is irrelevant, because non-existent children don’t feel pain as a result of not having pleasure like actually existent sentient organisms feel pain as a result of not feeling pleasure, the rush of satisfying an addiction becomes irrelevant once you don’t have the addiction.

The universe is not a sentient entity that suffers if we don’t put sentient life in it, there is to my knowledge no ineliminable pre-birth deprivation chamber or unborn purgatory in which non-existers are writhing in agony over not being put into flesh suits on earth, so the existence of any suffering is unnecessary in the grand scheme of things.

Even if the universe were sentient of course, then its suffering would also be unnecessary, futile, better off not existing as well. But then we could at least argue that there’s a practical reason why we need to keep existing to alleviate the suffering of the universe, which we don’t have to though.

Fetuses and future value.

In abortion discussions, pro-lifers obviously frequently make the argument that a fetus is a human, and a life, so it’s bad to kill it. So the fair question comes up, what about sperm? It contains human DNA, and it is also alive. Life starts in the testicles, sperm lives and sperm can die, it can live up to 3-5 days in a moist and warm environment.

Some then reject this argument, because the sperm could not on its own (i.e by leeching off of a female’s reproductive system for 9 months, so not really on its own) grow into a child later on, by which logic they’d only have to be against the morning after pill, because it prevents an already ejaculated sperm from fertilizing an egg on its own.

Even if the egg is not fertilized yet, which some pro-lifers will point out to make it seem like abortion is worse than taking the morning after pill, the morning after pill still prevents the sperm from fertilizing that egg by their definition of ”on its own”, without our help. Once the sperm is ejaculated into the vagina, it will fertilize the egg on its own, unless you stop it from happening.

But the implication is always kind of obvious in these arguments, they appeal to the great possibilities for the future of that fertilized egg, and think that it is a horrible loss to not transform a non-conscious organism into a conscious organism. The fertilized egg has a great future ahead of itself they’ll say, but the sperm does not, it would not grow into a conscious child on its own, some have written books about the subject, such as a future like our’s by Don Marquis.

This argument that the fetus will have a future is still pretty bad though, because obviously it doesn’t care about its future any more than a sperm, so that point still stands, here I think it’s best to bring up Benatar’s asymmetry again to make that point.

Preventing a suffering from happening is arguably always a good thing to do, I would think it’s important that you prevent a child that will suffer chronic pain everyday, even if that child has not been born yet and will not appreciate that its horrible disease has been prevented.

But I’d see it as absurd to whine about the fact that now that child will not experience any pleasure either, because there is no one in pain who needs pleasure to begin with before they come into existence, if I’m not hungry, I don’t need to eat, if I’m not aroused, I don’t need to cum.

Preventing a pleasure is only problematic conditionally, if someone feels deprived of it, you likely wouldn’t say that making new children that will eat ice cream and be happy about it one day is as important as preventing a severely disabled child that’ll be in chronic pain every single day from being born.

Sentient organisms experience needs, and they have to fulfill them to avoid suffering, non-sentient organisms don’t have needs, so they don’t have to fulfill them to avoid suffering.

Lamenting that the fetus never became sentient, experienced deprivation, so that then they can alleviate that deprivation again is about as non-sensical as lamenting that you never got cancer, so you never experienced the pleasure of treating it with chemotherapy. If the fetus doesn’t have desires because it isn’t sentient, they don’t need to be fulfilled, because they don’t exist, just like you only crave the chemotherapy if you already have cancer.

You cannot possibly deprive a purely asexual person of sex, because they are obviously not interested in having sex, so the absence of sex in their life never manifests as a problem, as a harm, lacking sex can only be an issue if you desire to engage in it. If you don’t like chocolate because you find it to taste like dog shit, I can’t hurt you by taking it away from you.

Fertilized eggs and sperm feel the exact same way about being killed – nothing.

A fertilized egg or non-sentient fetus obviously has absolutely zero desire to become a sentient child in the future, it doesn’t care about its future any more than the sperm did before it fertilized the egg, so the fact that it will become sentient in the future is completely irrelevant, it’s no more affected by its abortion than a tomato being turned into ketchup.

The effect here is in essence the same as never being born. If you are ejaculated into a tissue and flushed down the toilet, you never suffered a loss. If you are being aborted before you become conscious, you never suffered a loss either, it caused the exact same effect – no harm, no pain, no suffering whatsoever, except in delusional individuals who project their desire to cling to life onto the non-sentient fetus.

If you have the potential to become a professional athlete, plus a wish to do so, I can hurt you by cutting your legs off. A fertilized egg has the potential to become sentient, but no wish to do so, so you can’t hurt it by aborting it, just like the purely asexual person can’t be deprived of sex because they are not interested in it to any degree.

Here pro-lifers will then often times use unfair examples to try to demonstrate that the absence of pleasure can be a problem, even if no one feels deprived of it, the deprivation still somehow manifested itself.

One example would include someone wins the lottery, but you don’t tell them that they won the lottery, they don’t miss the money, but you still deprived them of it.

This isn’t a fair comparison, because the person still had a desire to do something for which the money would have been required, the person was already sentient, thus had an already existent quality of life, and this quality of life is impaired by not obtaining the money, they want to do things to which this money will be an instrument.

So yes, in that scenario, you are holding them back by not giving them the money. Already sentient person already has a desire to buy a new car, so you are hurting them by refusing to give them the money. The fetus on the other hand, again, has absolutely no desire to buy a new car, so you are not hurting it by refusing to turn it into a sentient child that will be able to buy a new car one day.

What if someone drops a gift in front of your door while you’re on vacation and I take it away? You didn’t know I took it away, but you were still deprived.

But that is again because you’re an already sentient organism whose already existent quality of life would be improved by receiving the gift, you would feel worse without the gift than if you were to receive the gift, and I’d be at fault for keeping you in this more negative state by taking away the gift, it can’t be applied to the fetus because the fetus has no quality of life at all.

Same would apply to a school education, they may say a child does not initially feel deprived of its school education, but obviously the implication they’d be making would still be that the child still needs it in order to do things in life later on for which said school education would be a prerequirement, again, the non-sentient fetus on the other hand wants no future, so you are not hurting it by refusing to instill consciousness into it.

Pro-lifers might bring up suicidal individuals, i.e John doesn’t want a future anymore, so why not just stab him in the throat right there on the spot?

Chances are, John still has an interest in avoiding pain just like any other sentient organism though, so obviously just brutally murdering someone can still be argued to be a bad thing, if it were indeed a consensual euthanasia, there would be absolutely no rational reason to oppose that, why torture someone by entrapping them in a circumstance they don’t wish to be in?

It’s a not well thought through point, similar to how some pro-lifers bring up people with CIP syndrome to defeat the sentience argument.

Obviously someone with CIP syndrome can still feel fear, depression, existential dread, they are just less sensitive to certain types of pain, so it’s not as if a person with a congenital insensitivity has as little of an existent welfare as a living, but non-sentient fetus that is pretty much on the same mental level of a living, but non-sentient tomato, carrot, eggplant, they just can’t help but to ascribe feelings to non-feeling things.

This is just a typical outdated, primitive understanding of pain, ultimately pain and suffering are the same thing, they are both generated by the brain, pain in your arm isn’t really only in your arm, the effect is still created by the brain, just like ”emotional pain” (which is all pain, obviously, all pain is emotional, i.e a sensation).

What about coma patients though?

They equally bring up this future value argument when it comes to coma patients, indicating that they think it’s wrong to kill the unconscious because they’re going to have a future, not taking into account that this could be based on the past, rather than the future.

The reason why we can realistically say that chances are, it’s worse to kill an unconscious coma patient than to kill an unconscious fetus has more to do with the past rather than the future. If we legalized just pulling the plug on someone once they fall into a coma, they would be upset about that before they were to fall into that coma, because they were already conscious.

The thing is, the fetus was never conscious beforehand, so in that case, we don’t have that problem, when the fetus was a sperm, it was never bothered by the legal status of abortion, thinking to itself:

”So if I were to fertilize an egg one day, some asshole could just abort me? This hurts my feelings PROFOUNDLY, I always wanted to turn from a completely non-conscious sperm into a conscious child. So my life has no value just because I’m not sentient??? You think you can decide over life and death you monsters??? SPERM LIVES MATTER!”.

Which would be the emotional effect that it might have on people if we were to legalize just pulling the plug on them if they drop unconscious one day. Frankly, I think we can say that this often times delusional as well, there is really no rational reason to just be scared of non-existence per se, obviously it’s going to be no different from before you were born – you won’t miss out on fulfilling your needs, wants, desires because you’ll no longer have any needs, wants, desires.

If you lead a productive life and try to reduce suffering in other organisms, perhaps have some sort of obligation, like taking care of someone else, we could argue it’s good to wake you up again, but just the loss of life itself I don’t think could rationally be argued to be a tragedy if it causes no pain, because again, the non-sentient do not feel deprived of anything, if we just made your sleep permanent, you wouldn’t mind.

But that is a slight distinction and practical complication to this issue with coma patients, if anything, I don’t think you should wake up the coma patient because he has a future, more because not doing so might scare others before they fall into a coma.

A last retort you’ll sometimes hear in response to this is ”what if the person has no memory of their past?”, which I fail to see how that is meant to disprove anything, if they wouldn’t have any memory of their past after waking up again, they still experienced the past when it was the present, and in that present moment, they perhaps felt bad about it being legal for someone to pull the plug on them if they were to fall into a coma, so this would be an irrelevant question.

In conclusion, I think it ultimately all deals back to the first fundamental issue of them projecting certain emotions onto the fetus, I won’t call it anthropomorphism because the fetus obviously contains human DNA, so it is human.

They’re not pretending it’s human, they are basically pretending it is equivalent to a conscious organism who worries about their fate, and even if it never was conscious before, it will somehow experience harm as a result of not being made into a conscious being.

They imagine ”not having been born” from the perspective of ”I’m here right now, and then I would be really upset if no one brought me here, lamenting my non-existence from the depths of the unborn purgatory, for which I have absolutely no evidence that it actually exists”, often revealed by them also asking the question ”how would you feel if you were aborted?” as if you could actually feel anything about that.

Even if the thought made me feel uneasy in this moment, I can still rationally comprehend that it would have never harmed me if I were never born, so there would be no reason to be upset about it. If you don’t exist, you don’t need to exist.

Prevention of future suffering and pleasure.

A somewhat common objection to Benatar’s asymmetry in particular is the non-identity problem, basically stating that because a child is not born yet, it cannot appreciate that its future suffering has been prevented, so the prevention of future suffering for a would-be person is not good, it’s nothing, it’s just neutral, morals/ethics cannot be applied to the unborn.

How can it be good to prevent a pain from happening, if the person hasn’t been born yet to appreciate the prevention of said pain? One of the clearest examples that is often used would be the one of a severely disabled child that will be in chronic pain every single day once it’s born, the child can’t appreciate the fact that it hasn’t been forced into a life of chronic pain after being aborted, but that doesn’t mean that shitting it out would be a good idea.

Another example would be that there have been serial rapists and killers before that got off on the idea of keeping a girl in their basement, then producing a child for the sole purpose of raping that child. If some Josef Fritzl type of guy is overtly and clearly saying that that is his plan for the future, is anyone really going to argue that you shouldn’t call the police, because after all, he hasn’t done it yet, so therefore, what will happen when the child is born is also completely irrelevant?

I don’t think so. Is it a good idea to pollute the environment as much as possible, dump toxic waste into the oceans because the future generation that will experience complete environmental degradation is not here yet, so it’s not that big of a deal anyway?

Why do we euthanize dogs and cats in their sleep when they have terminal cancer and are in chronic pain, when they aren’t even around afterwards anymore to appreciate that their cancer and chronic pain have been prevented? Why not let the cat die as miserably as possible? It won’t appreciate that its more miserable death has been prevented once it is dead, so you might as well slowly torture the cat to death.

With some of these examples, of course the natalist will try to get around the idea that creating future harm is bad because in the scenario of the rapist breeding a child into existence to rape it or experience environmental degradation, the child already existed before it got raped or experienced environmental catastrophes, so they’ll say but the harm happened to someone who already existed, it’s different.

But then I can obviously just as easily say that every single harm in existence that definitely will and could potentially befall the child will befall them when they will already exist in the future, and you are at fault for that by bringing them into existence in the first place, same difference in the grand scheme of things, any harm befalling the already existent child is a byproduct of them having been brought into existence.

The idea here is that it is a good idea to prevent a state of deprivation, suffering from happening before it happens, in principle, but it’s only bad to prevent a pleasure, its relief from happening if the alternative to it is feeling pain, which the unborn do not, but you’re always doing once you are alive, chasing pleasure to avoid feeling pain.

As long as you exist, suffering is the alternative to pleasure.

You don’t eat, you suffer hunger.
You don’t drink, you suffer thirst.
You don’t shit, you suffer constipation.
You don’t cum, you suffer sexual tension.
You don’t socialize, you suffer loneliness.

So on and so forth, use whatever example you want. Once you’re here, you’re trapped in a system of having to chase relief or being subjected to more suffering.

So to use a metaphor for the asymmetry, you could say I need to take into account the future consequences of injecting you with heroine in your sleep before I inject you with heroine, how it might negatively affect you in the future, but it would be silly to lament that I need to take into the account the loss of pleasure of not injecting you with heroine, I deprived you of satisfying an addiction that you don’t have.

Though admittedly, even that is not a perfect example, it is hard to find a perfect example because someone who doesn’t exist can never feel deprived of anything, at least a person that already exists could miss the fun that heroin might bring them, whereas a non-existent person can miss absolutely nothing.

If the reason why we chase pleasure in the first place is to avoid the pain/discomfort/suffering of not having it, then that explains some of people’s common intuitions that Benatar often points to – preventing the severely disabled, chronically pained child from being born is good, but preventing the happy child from being born is not bad, because the reason why they’d chase pleasure anyway is to avoid being in pain, and by not existing, they already perfectly avoided all pain, you don’t need a fire extinguisher if you’re not in a burning building.

If I abort the child that’ll be in chronic pain every single day for the rest of their life, it’s good that I’ve done this, similar to how it would be good to euthanize a cat with cancer, even though the cat obviously doesn’t wake up afterwards to appreciate that now they won’t have to die of cancer.

You also prevent their pleasure, but they won’t miss it, it won’t harm them.

A ton of semen is ejaculated, never implanted into a vagina to grow into a sentient child later on, I don’t really know anyone who laments semen being flushed down the toilet just because it depletes the potential for future sentience, I would argue because we ultimately recognize deep down that the soul of the potential child in that sperm is not writhing in agony in the unborn purgatory, distressed over missing out on the pleasures of life.

Even pro-lifers don’t go that far, they think once sperm and egg is merged, there is an obligation to give it a right to life, or that it has some kind of natural right to life, but I don’t see them getting upset over wasted sperm, so the pro-life version for this ethical questions would be: ”If you knew the sperm contained an extremely unhappy person, would it be ok to use it to make a child?” and ”If you knew the sperm contained an extremely happy person, would it be ok to flush it down the toilet nonetheless?”

The ”most are happy to have been born” argument.

A somewhat common objection to antinatalism/the idea that it is better not to be born is that most people are happy to have been born, and if you surveyed them anywhere, they’d say they’re happy to be alive, so how can one say that it’s good to stop the production of sentient life when most are happy with it?

I think the first and rather fundamental issue is that they would still not have missed being happy if they never came into existence in the first place, so there wouldn’t have been any harm to them in not bringing them here.

I would agree with Benatar’s asymmetry that preventing a bad is always good to do, but preventing a good is not always bad to do, only if the alternative to it is feeling bad, if you’re not hungry, it doesn’t matter if I throw the food in the trash, the absence of pleasure is only an ethical problem if it presents a deprivation for someone who is chasing after said pleasure.

Many other examples you could use to demonstrate that point – if you’re in a burning building, the absence of a fire extinguisher is a problem, if you’re not, then it’s not. If you have cancer, the absence of chemotherapy is a problem, but if you’re not, then it’s not. If suffering is no longer the alternative to the pleasure, its relief, then its absence cannot possibly be a problem either.

I don’t think not giving someone something that they don’t need/want/desire is an issue, and the non-existent don’t need/want/desire anything, because they simply don’t exist.

Of course you are happy that if you feel hunger, you relieve that hunger by eating, but that doesn’t mean that you would have been harmed by never being made into a hungry organism in the first place.

So I still don’t think that the fact alone that they are happy means there is a benefit that justifies all the bad unhappy experiences. It’s like saying a crack addict is happy when they get some new crack to smoke, that doesn’t answer the question of ”was it good for them to become addicted to crack in the first place?”.

People that exist right now are obviously already suffering from severe addictions, so unless they put some deeper thought into it, they can’t really grasp what it would be like if they weren’t here anymore.

”I’m glad to have been born!” (as if something bad would have happened to them if they didn’t) isn’t really much of a rational utterance.

It’s an irrational reaction of them not being able to grasp that their absence could not be a problem. You wouldn’t complain about not having food in the next 5 hours if you knew you weren’t going to be hungry for it, so the way they talk about non-existence actually indicates they think that they would still experience a deprivation of their happiness.

This similarly applies to pro-lifers that argue for the rights of non-sentient fetuses to have a future, obviously the fetus is not sentient right now, so it can’t possibly be concerned with its future either, it doesn’t care whether or not it’s going to be sentient in the future, so you can’t possibly hurt that fetus by aborting it, but they still can’t get over their deeply engrained gut instinct that it somehow does and ask stupid questions like:

”Well what if YOU got aborted, think you’d still be saying this shit???”

And this is the problem and where we get more into the psychology, do most people really grasp that not existing isn’t harmful, or do they imagine it as some kind of second life where they are missing out on all the fun things they like doing? I think it’s questionable.

Of course, if they imagine themselves to otherwise have been trapped and tortured in an unborn purgatory prior to birth, they’re going to irrationally conclude that every single torture they face in life is definitely worth it, i.e if someone who is dying of cancer right now on their death bed thinks that if they didn’t get born, then had their first orgasm at some point, they would’ve really missed out on that first orgasm from the pits of the unborn purgatory, to be eternally tormented, of course they’re going to think that now dying of cancer is definitely worth it for that first orgasm.

They are imagining it as ”I wouldn’t be here” from the perspective of ”I’m here right now, and then I would be really upset that I’m not here! That would make me angry not to exist!”.

It’s like I’m addicted to crystal meth, going through a lot of suffering and watching my face fall apart, and a genie in the bottle or the toothfairy offers me to take away my addiction in about three seconds by waving a magic wand, but I say no, because as an irrational addict, all I’m hearing is ”taking away my meth” instead of ”taking away my addiction for meth”, I’m so owned by the drug that I fail to even possibly imagine that it’s possible for the addiction to not exist.

I think if the life addicts got rid of this irrational perception, they couldn’t think that the first orgasm justifies dying of cancer later on anymore, because they know that they didn’t have any pre-existing need to experience need, no pre-existing want to experience want, no pre-existing desire to experience desire, so it’d be questionable why any of life’s suffering is worth it.

It’s just like they also think they’re still going to be alive and conscious after they’ve died, so they’re irrationally scared of death rather than the dying process, as if afterwards they’ll be a ghost and then look down on all the fun things to do that they’re now missing out on, when in reality they’re just going to be dead, so of course won’t experience any distress in response to no longer being able to eat chocolate cake. They just grasp that the goods will be gone, they fail to grasp that their need/want/desire for the goods will also be gone.

And of course, they will deny that this is the case and state that they know they haven’t been here before they were actually born, or they know they won’t suffer once they’re dead, but rationally comprehending something still doesn’t mean that you can’t falsely intuit there to be a harm in something, as in this case non-existence.

Many people simply seem intuitively terrified of death, we make associations between the painful dying process and death, it’s something that looks scary.

I can rationally comprehend that a little spider is not going to eat me alive, but still irrationally feel otherwise, there are certain deeply engrained intuitions that don’t necessarily make a lot of sense, take for example arachnophobia, the fear of even little spiders even though you know they won’t attack you, fear of non-existence is similarly irrational.

Their worship of life is also perfectly analogizable to a form of stockholm syndrome, that’s how life works, you experience unfulfilled desire, and if you fulfill it, another one pops up, like appetite out of boredom after hunger, or in time the initial desire, hunger, is going to return and you’ll have to eat again. They cannot imagine anything else, it’s all they know, it’s all we can experience.

We get continuously whipped by our needs, wants, desires, and sometimes we fulfill some of those needs, wants, desires, avoid some of that suffering of being whipped. You can observe that children for instance are until a certain age much less used to this mechanism of deprivation, they still feel raped by their desire and scream if they can’t get something they want in the middle of a supermarket, their flesh is still in the process of acclimating to the whip.

This is an uncomfortable state to be in, so at some point they adapt, and then they start being grateful and think life is their friend and has any purpose except to impose need conditions onto them that if not alleviated in time, will lead to even worse harm than before, sometimes the whip is hitting you less intensely, so now you’re happy that you’re getting whipped, because that makes you able to appreciate when the whip is not hitting you as intensely, perhaps even taking some kind of pleasure in the fact that other slaves are getting whipped harder.

The kids in Africa have no food to stave off the suffering of hunger, at least I have food to stave off the suffering of hunger, without ever fully coming to recognize that the existence of the suffering of hunger itself is suboptimal, it’s a deficit to experience hunger at all. If you didn’t exist, you wouldn’t be hungry anymore.

It is a harm to impose unfulfilled desires, plain and simple, you might as well say that when you whip people, some of them are really happy afterwards when you stop whipping them, so that then they can appreciate what it’s like to not get whipped anymore.

Pointing all of this out directly to others makes them uncomfortable, so another important aspect that should be pointed out here is also that if someone comes to these realizations, there’s also always a certain amount of social pressure from others against it. If there’s no unborn purgatory and the absence of me wouldn’t be a problem, then maybe the absence of you also wouldn’t be a problem, this has the potential to make others uncomfortable.

You can see this when someone is suicidal, even if they don’t know that person’s circumstances, their convictions are quite strong that there’s always something wrong with said suicidal person and that life must be worth it, there’s never a good reason to kill yourself, it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem (as if it’s an issue to end a temporary problem permanently?), and if you question any of this, then automatically you must be mentally ill and wrong because you want to end life, and you want to end life because you’re mentally ill and wrong, it’s circularly justified.

So there’s not only illogical reasons that lead many of us to think that life is always worth it no matter what, but once the taboo is questioned, there’s also social pressure from viviocentrist fascists to keep pretending that life is always worth it no matter what.

Optimism-bias is a real thing, you risk being exposed to unpleasant social consequences by revealing your dissatisfaction, but there are many dissatisfied individuals on some kind of prescription, legal or illegal drug to get through the day, every day on planet earth there are at least one or two suicide attempts here and there.

So is just world-bias a real thing, people who consider themselves victims of life creation are unlikely to come out anyway because society is prone to shame anyone who complains about anything, you don’t really hear their opinions because they’d just be told to toughen up anyway.

Not to forget the imposition aspect.

Another aspect to point to and explain is also that using ”most are happy to have been born” as a breeder to defend yourself is also kind of like saying you’re a good gambler, so therefore, it’s justified to risk someone’s welfare by gambling for them, because most people are happy that you gambled for them when you won the game.

It’s a useless game to start with, so that makes it even more absurd, because again, the absence of pleasure is only be a problem if someone is experiencing being deprived of it, there is no one who needs the money.

So a more fitting, better analogy would be you take money to a gambling house where you can only either:

Win back the exact amount of money you put in.
Lose more money than you initially put in.

Absolutely none of your victims have any desire for you to risk their money and then win it back, they are completely apathetic about it you winning money back for them that they already had, and much of the time they don’t even get everything back, only half or a quarter of it, and then you justify all the losses you create by saying that you also ”win” sometimes, you win back the money you put in.

Then in practice, something to point out is also that you’re playing with high risks. If you’re about to gamble with someone else’s money, it’d at least be great to know that you’re going to win the game, or if you’re about to practice surprise anal sex on someone, it’d at least be great to know that they’re going to be into it, this is almost impossible to fully ensure with the life gamble, even if someone might be happy with it afterwards, the list of possible risks isn’t low.

I don’t go around and make someone happy here and there by practicing surprise anal sex on them, it’s generally more important that I don’t traumatize someone who doesn’t want surprise anal sex by sticking my dick in their ass in their sleep.

Some might be happy about it, but wouldn’t have been terribly devastated by me not fucking them in the ass either, some might come to cope with it after the fact and rationalize what happened as not so bad, just like many do the exact same with life in general and rationalize everything that happens to them as not so bad, and some will be completely traumatized about it.

And again, making people happy by creating them is even dumber than doing it by surprise anal sex, at least you can argue that there are some already existent people that would enjoy getting surprise anal sex, and they can suffer from not getting the surprise, but non-existent people do not exist, they don’t have any desires to fulfill.

Not even taking into account any kind of genetic defects, any possible illness or any crime of other organisms the child could fall victim to, the fact that they’ll die one day which will likely not be too pleasant, even if you create a sentient organism with unfulfilled desires and you always fulfill them just in time, you always risk money, then win it back just in time, said organism can still randomly get hit by a car and suffer from an unfulfilled desire to not get hit by said car, or get struck by lightning randomly and suffer from an unfulfilled desire to not get struck by lightning.

Accidents happen to the happiest still – one wrong move and you’re fucked, and with most cases of procreation it’s perfectly fair to say that these procreators have no absolute guarantee that nothing will go wrong when they’re about to procreate.

There’s a possibility for great failure and the absence of possibility for their happiness is obviously never a problem until they are created, so why should even one accident be justified? There we’re back to the asymmetry argument, natalists are essentially arguing that it’s acceptable to inflict harm for unnecessary pleasure, our top priority is surprise anal sex and all the traumatized victims can go fuck themselves in the ass.

So ultimately, I think that this argument of ”most people are happy to have been born/are glad to be be here” is an emotional reaction largely based on them not comprehending this fundamental asymmetry of prevented pleasure not being a problem for the non-existent as they do not experience desires, and why they’re making said argument could be motivated by many different factors from stockholm syndrome to real social pressure from viviocentrist fascists not to talk about dissatisfaction with life, but it doesn’t seem to come from any place of rational inquiry, there’s no reason to think it’s an argument for the production of sentient organisms in the grand scheme of things.

The idea that suffering can be good.

An idea often espoused in response to hearing about antinatalism or just in general as a delusional coping mechanism with life is that suffering can be good sometimes, individuals like Jordan Peterson for instance get celebrated for speaking to people with this type of ”tough love” approach, and telling them that life is suffering but it’s all worth it, we shouldn’t just stop the production of suffering-capable organisms.

The idea behind this general idea of suffering supposedly being good sometimes and we shouldn’t just prevent it all from happening by stopping the production of sentient, suffering life (e.g. humans, other mammals, insects, not necessarily fruits, vegetables, fungi) right away is that basically when you suffer, it builds character, strength and resilience that you will need to deal with aforementioned sentient life, or it might be a warning signal of some sort.

The issue with this should be obvious though – negative sensation itself is by definition bad just like water is watery, it is literal badness, a negative sensation/experience of some sort, the fact that sometimes one suffering is required to avoid an even greater suffering doesn’t prove suffering itself to be good. Suffering, badness itself, is bad.

For example, if we have to torture one person to prevent a billion from being tortured just as intensely and there’s nothing else we can do about it, then it’s the lesser of two evils, but the torture itself still feels bad, it’d be better if we could prevent it by cutting up an apple instead. If you say negative sensations can be positive, you might as well say wet is dry or hot is cold, it automatically cannot be anything but contradictory, good suffering is an oxymoron.

Sometimes in life, you have to experience one suffering to avoid an even greater one, but that doesn’t mean that suffering itself is good, that just proves it’s less bad than the more intense form of suffering that otherwise would have happened.

An example would be the painful vaccination in order to avoid a much worse disease you’d otherwise be prone to dying of, but you’re getting it exactly because suffering is bad, because suffering from an illness would be worse than one little needle prick in your arm for a few uncomfortable seconds. If you could snap your fingers in order to obtain the immunity, you would do that instead. The pain itself is bad, the good is the immunity to the illness.

Pain is a warning signal is also something that defenders of suffering will often say, i.e you feel your hand being burned on the stove top so you pull it away.

Again, we can demonstrate again that it’s not the pain itself that is good, but the avoidance of the greater pain, if you could be informed of the danger by something else without the pain, like someone standing next to you who notices it quicker always simply reminding you you’re about to burn yourself before you accidentally leave your hand on the stove top for too long, you would go for that instead of burning yourself to any degree at all.

So we can notice a pattern here in all of these situations where suffering is supposedly good, the person only falsely identifies it as good because it later on results in the prevention of an even greater form of suffering, and if the person could prevent the greater suffering without having to inflict a lesser suffering onto themselves, like snapping their fingers instead of getting an injection, then they would take that less painful option.

Why would you need a warning signal to prevent the worse pain of completely burning your hand on the stove top from happening instead, if pain is not a problem? You wouldn’t, so suffering can have instrumental value to the avoidance of a greater suffering sometimes, that doesn’t prove negative sensation itself to be simultaneously positive.

Suffering makes you stronger they say, but why do you even need to be stronger? Right, only to avoid more suffering associated with being weaker, thus vulnerable to more suffering in the future. If suffering is only ”good” because it helps you to avoid more suffering in the future, then that if anything proves that suffering is bad, because you’re only bearing said suffering to avoid even more of it in the future.

The only reason why you even need more character, strength and resilience built out of suffering in your life to begin with is to later on deal with more potential suffering emerging in your life, to not fall into deep despair upon being faced with adversity and challenges, so it actually doesn’t prove suffering to be good, it proves suffering to be bad.

When your hamster died of cancer, it was ”good for you” because it desensitized you to you later on seeing your mother die of cancer.

But why is it good to be desensitized to your mother dying of cancer?

Only because otherwise you’d suffer even more intensely from witnessing that incident, which is bad, it’s the avoidance of that suffering which is the real good which the suffering of seeing your hamster die has only been instrumental to achieving, not the suffering itself, suffering itself is always bad, just like all water is watery and all shit is shitty.

Negative sensations are indeed not positive. Going with the lesser of two evils doesn’t make it no longer feel bad, just less bad than the other bad. The needle in your arm still produced a negative sensation, it’s just that getting a disease would hurt even more, if you could snap your fingers to grant yourself immunity to illness, you’d probably do that instead.

If someone holds a gun to your head and forces you eat either one bucket of horse shit or ten buckets of horse shit, that doesn’t mean that one bucket of it suddenly tastes good, it just tastes less bad than ten buckets of horse shit.

The fact that suffering sometimes happened prior to a good event doesn’t mean that it is good, if a fire burns down your house in the winter and now you’re sitting in the cold, that doesn’t prove fire to be cold. Now you might be sitting in the cold, but the fire burned your house down exactly because it was hot.

But what about masochists?

Even a masochist ramming a needle into his urethra or a depressed individual cutting their arm isn’t enjoying suffering – they are enjoying the relief of a suffering they are already experiencing, merely using a pain to eliminate a greater pain.

A masochist will experience intensified sexual frustration if he doesn’t inflict pain onto himself, then leading to him becoming more tense and pressurized, thus ultimately more suffering in the long run.

A depressed person will experience intensified depression or other negative states if they don’t cut their arm, so they cut their arm to blend out the worse pain with the pain in their arm, so to speak.

If I told anyone beforehand who has absolutely zero masochistic preferences that I’m a magician and could it make it so that by snapping my fingers, they won’t be able to have an orgasm anymore unless they cut their eyeballs out and rub some chili sauce in their sockets, set their pubic hair on fire and extract every tooth they have with a plier, they wouldn’t want me to do that.

Perhaps they would even use lethal violence to prevent me from doing that, they would rather be able to cum without having to inflict intense suffering onto themselves, because all suffering is bad, just like all water is watery, all shit is shitty, if the masochist could get the exact same relief without the pain involved, they would do so.

Sometimes, some extreme masochists may find themselves in a situation where they have to do these things to avoid sexual frustration, which is a form of suffering, but if you could choose beforehand to get the exact same amount of pleasure from something else, you wouldn’t want to be the one who has to extract all their teeth with a plier in order to cum.

So what is happening here is essentially that as a delusional coping mechanism, when suffering is experienced by people, they observe that it is sometimes the lesser of two evils to bear one suffering over another even worse form of suffering, like the sensation of the needle pricking your arm to avoid a worse illness like small pox.

Then, they fall victim to the delusional conclusion that this now means that even when the suffering in question is not required to avoid a greater suffering, it is still good, because somehow, bad feelings can somehow be good, wet can somehow be dry, hot can somehow be cold.

I get that it’s a delusional coping mechanism which might help some of them to get through the day, but it’s a problem that they even have to get through a day where they require such a coping mechanism to begin with, and it certainly becomes a problem when this coping mechanism is used to justify all sorts of suffering that isn’t required for the avoidance of any greater problem.

War? Whatever, pain is a warning signal.

Factory farming? Whatever, suffering creates great wisdom.

Children dying of starvation in Africa? Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.

You have terminal cancer? Whatever, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

It’s being used as an excuse for not fixing problems.

The problem with this ”suffering is good” approach in the context of reproductive ethics (natalism vs. antinatalism, to procreate or not to procreate) used by pro-natalists and pro-lifers should also be rather obvious – there is no unborn purgatory from which children need to be rescued, no one is spared from a worse fate by being reproduced.

It’s true that once you exist, you sometimes have to tolerate one suffering to avoid an even greater one, but obviously before the child actually exists, the child doesn’t actually exist, so it’s not somehow worse off, suffering in an unborn purgatory, lamenting that their parents that don’t reproduce them are somehow subjecting them to worse suffering in the unborn purgatory than by subjecting them to life on earth.

You’re just creating a pain machine to be motivated by that pain to try to avoid that pain again, there’s nothing efficient or productive about that, the suffering caused by reproduction is not instrumental to avoiding some kind of greater pain that exists in the universe.

So if we use the vaccination example again, the child might need the vaccination to avoid a much more painful illness once it exists, that is true, but obviously, before it existed, it didn’t need to become prone to that illness it now needs to be vaccinated against in the first place, it wasn’t sitting around in the unborn purgatory thinking:

”I wish I became prone to small pox so that I can get a vaccination against it one day! Why do I have to suffer from an urge to obtain an urge to avoid illnesses?”

That the child is prone to illness in the first place is the fault of the parents that produced it, so it would still be perfectly rational for the child with a fear of needles to blame their parents for even creating its proneness to illness in the first place without knowing whether or not the child will be fine with that later on.

This same line of reasoning is then of course even used to justify more child abuse on top of reproduction:

”The child needs to be spanked!”

Why?

”To learn discipline!”

But why does the child need to learn to be disciplined?

”To toughen up and compete with others, get a good job! Hardship builds great character!”

But why do they need to be resilient and successful in life? Right, because otherwise they will fail to acquire resources to fulfill certain needs, wants, desires in their life, they won’t be as fulfilled and satisfied, perhaps not achieve their goals in life due to said lack of discipline.

And who’s to blame for that?

You are to blame for them experiencing those needs, wants, desires they need to fulfill to avoid being tortured by them, because you imposed those needs, wants, desires onto them by reproducing them in the first place, non-existent individuals don’t need, want, desire anything.

It’s like I create a some sort of sadistic game, call it torture and the carrot, where I’m locking you in my basement and tell you that in order to obtain food for further survival, the carrot, you have to saw your left hand off. Then I can justify cutting your little finger off, because that will get you used to pain and desensitize you to later on getting your entire left hand cut off, which you have to do to obtain the carrot or starve to death. See, I’m actually doing you a favor I could say, I’m helping you get closer to the carrot!

See the problem? The problem with this is that I created that problem of you being in need of the carrot in the first place. It’s true that sometimes children have to learn to be disciplined (though highly questionable if beating them will achieve that) to not fail later on in life, but they only have to do that in the sense that if they completely fail at life, they’ll fail to fulfill needs, wants, desires that the procreator instilled into them by not aborting them before they became conscious.

The procreator creates the sick torture and carrot game, sometimes the child now has to endure hardship to get to the carrot, so the procreator justifies giving the child a spanking so it’ll be more desensitized to the more intense hardships and adversities later on in life, but all of this is only a problem if the procreator puts the child into this torture game where you have to bear torture to avoid even worse torture in the first place, which they still haven’t explained why anyone should think that’s a worthwhile endeavor.

If little billy is not created, he doesn’t need to be spanked harder to be more disciplined in order to obtain a good job requiring his emotional resilience and strength later on in life in order to avoid suffering from a low income and being a loser, non-existent little billy does not suffer from an urge to obtain an urge to obtain a job to obtain enough money to fulfill his needs in life from the unborn purgatory in this very moment.

So first you abuse the child by imposing the threat of deprivation on it – need, want, desire, i.e do x or suffer, and then you justify making the child suffer as a necessary evil by disciplining it to desensitize it to later on facing even more intense suffering which will be instrumental to avoiding only some of the suffering you have imposed on it by creating the threat of deprivation in the first place, that seems rather absurd.

Bullying is another great example of this flawed thought process of ”good suffering”.

First you were all skinny and weak, were called a faggot and beaten up in school every day, every girl denied you access to her vagina, then you started working out, taking steroids and beating the shit out of everyone and now you’re drowning in pussy because now you’re much stronger.

Totally proves that negative sensations must be good, right?

Wrong, because again, even if the suffering helped you toughen up which then later on resulted in you staving off the suffering of sexual frustration by finally being tough enough to be sexually selected for by some females, the suffering itself you experienced was still bad, the experience of getting bullied was not enjoyable regardless of whether or not it helped you to avoid an even more unenjoyable experience at some point.

Now you exist, so now you need to stick your peepee in a vagina to avoid even worse suffering from not doing so, but when you didn’t exist, you were not trapped in an unborn purgatory, needing to need to stick your peepee in a vagina to avoid even worse suffering, thinking to yourself ”Man, I wish I had to stick my peepee in vaginas in order to avoid suffering sexual frustration, unfortunately my parents won’t impose sexual needs onto me by reproducing me”.

You need it now, but you didn’t need to need it, your parents put you in need by reproducing you, it’s a net negative, you didn’t want to want it before you wanted it, you didn’t desire to desire it before you desired it.

So ultimately, whilst you already exist where you have to tolerate negative sensations from time to time to avoid an even higher amount of negative sensations in the future, the negative sensation itself is always bad, just like water is always watery and shit is always shitty, and before sentience evolved in this universe, the universe was not somehow worse off without us, starving for sentient organisms to be put inside of it.

There was no pre-existing damage to fix, we are the damage.

The faulty idea that suffering is good is largely used to justify its continued infliction, it might help one as a coping mechanism to get through the day once in a while to believe it’s all happening for some kind of greater good, but the fact that you even need to get through a day to begin and tell yourselves these lies is a negative, a problem – you are in need, you’re in desperation.

And if we don’t start being more honest about the fact that suffering is bad, procreators will keep putting organisms into situations where they have to tell themselves that suffering is good to cope with life.

The reason why you need that coping mechanism in your life to begin with is because procreators keep creating problems, in an emotional state where they themselves are falling victim to the exact same coping mechanism, thinking:

”Suffering is good, might as well breed, if my children suffer horribly and die of cancer, it’s gonna be real good somehow, it’s just gonna toughen them up!”.

Once suffering exists, it can be necessary to bear one suffering to avoid an even greater one, but the existence of suffering itself to begin with is unnecessary in the grand scheme of things, the universe was never somehow worse off without sentient organisms inside it, our suffering serves absolutely no greater good.

Need and want – same thing.

Need and want sound distinguished, but if you question what distinguishes a want from a need on any deeper level, it seems the same. The answer as to what is the difference is most often that you need something if you need it to live/survive, whereas when you want something, you don’t need it to live/survive.

The problem is that this ignores that you do not need to survive either – you just want to because it’d make you feel bad if you didn’t. But ultimately, there is no great distinction, it’s the same process, the same function, same mechanism.

Need, want, desire all essentially describe the exact same phenomenon.

Needing something means that there is a certain thing and/or circumstance, and you have to obtain that certain thing and/or circumstance in order to avoid a given amount of suffering – obtain x or endure a certain amount of suffering, and that’s the exact same thing that wanting means.

We just usually refer to ”want” as a less intense form of a need than ”need”, as in, you want a new car, but you need food, because one suffering you’d experience as a result of not obtaining food would be more intense than the suffering you’d experience as a result of not obtaining the new car.

If you don’t get the new car, you will suffer to some degree, but if you don’t get the food, you will suffer more intensely. You will experience negative qualia either way, but more intensely if you’re not given food than when you’re not given a new car.

It can be vital and important in ethical discussions to find out which need is the most intense to avoid the greatest amount of suffering, and to simplify this process, at some point this distinction of need and want has (I’d conjecture) probably been created to tell the intensity of needs apart, as in:

We have a certain amount of money to donate, we could spend it on rich asshole who will experience suffering if he doesn’t buy a new mercedes, or we could donate it to starving children in Africa, and the suffering of said children from not obtaining food would be more intense than the suffering the rich asshole would experience from not obtaining a new mercedes, so we spend it on starving children in Africa.

Or:

The rapist will experience suffering if he doesn’t rape you, but this suffering is likely not more intense than the suffering the victim will face upon being violently raped, and there are other outlets that he could use, such as porn and prostitution to play out his fantasies in a harmless scenario, so we don’t allow rape.

But this doesn’t mean that the rapist doesn’t need to rape you to avoid suffering from being deprived of raping, our potential rapist needs to have sex or even assault others to avoid suffering intensified sexual frustration (if that’s what he gets off on), of course we shouldn’t just let him rape because that will very likely cause worse suffering, but it’d still be dishonest to say that a rapist never suffered from not raping or a thief never suffered from not stealing – and that’s all need is, do x or you get tortured in some way – that’s what need is, that’s what want is, that’s what desire is.

This makes people uncomfortable, so they accusatorily call it ”want” instead of ”need” to downplay the fact that there will still be suffering, to rationalize that we live in an inefficient world where we cannot meet everyone’s needs without frustrating someone else’s, where when one avoids suffering, another one is suffering because of it, so they stop to acknowledge that it is suffering at all.

It’s an easy excuse to dismiss others suffering, I ”need”, you just ”want” so you’re unimportant, I’m important, I need things, you just want them.

The sadistic serial killer shouldn’t be allowed to rape you with a jackhammer just because that is what he needs to do to get off, it would cause much more frustration of need than satisfaction of need overall, but it’s similarly delusional and unfair to deny that he’s a victim of need, in need, tortured by this unfortunate need – every need is a problem, doesn’t matter what it is.

It’s bad for him to rape you with a jackhammer, but it’s also bad he’s suffering if he doesn’t do so, just most likely less bad than getting raped with a jackhammer. The problem in allowing him to rape you with a jackhammer would not be satisfying wants instead of needs, the problem would be satisfying less intense needs rather than more intense needs, or less rather than more needs, ultimately it’s about how much suffering is being prevented and caused.

The real solution to the problem of all need is obvious – don’t create it.

As long as the needer exists, it will need, i.e suffer if it doesn’t obtain certain resources. There are living things, like plants and bacteria, and then there are living things that are also conscious, and those conscious things desire all sorts of different things.

When a plant doesn’t obtain water, it doesn’t notice it, when a conscious thing doesn’t obtain water, it notices it, then tries to obtain it.

Sentient organisms are motivated by pain, they experience pain to be motivated by pain to try to avoid that exaxt pain again – hunger, thirst, constipation, sexual frustration, fatigue and the more complex the organism, the more small needs there likely are, the metaphor of a whip is good, you get continuously whipped, and the whipping will get less intense by obtaining different objects.

Sometimes of course, they do fulfill their needs, they stave off suffering for a while, but that is all it is. We put some form of a weight on you, and then we take it off again, this feels good, that is what the good is, and that constitutes all need, want or desire means.

You get whipped, and when you obtain the resource you need, you get whipped less intensely, this feeling of having the weight lifted off of you is what we call pleasure, the defecation wouldn’t feel what we call good if you weren’t made to feel uncomfortable by the shit clogging you up first.

Of course, pleasure is good in the sense that it avoids the alternative of getting whipped even more intensely, but it is the inferior option as compared to not getting whipped at all, which is what we can only achieve by not creating a needer/wanter/desirer that runs on suffering in the first place, existence has zero advantage over non-existence.

If there are no more desire machines, there is no more pleasure either, but the lack of pleasure can obviously not be a problem as it is just a relief of the suffering, if no one is getting whipped, then it’d be absurd to bemoan that now there’s no pleasure of avoiding the whip anymore, you don’t need to avoid the whip if you’re not getting whipped (literally, suffering would not be the alternative to there being no pleasure).

You do not need a relief of suffering that doesn’t even exist anymore. It’d be absurd similar to bemoaning that if we cut a cancer tumor out, there’s no point in chemotherapy anymore, when the whole idea is that chemotherapy is only good because it gets rid of cancer.

All needs, including the need to survive or propagate life are a problem resulting out of the continued creation of needers, if no needers exists, life won’t need to continue existing for them, there is nothing beyond us that needs us.

You could say that procreators need to create more needers to satisfy some of their needs, the children were needed by their procreators and the procreators of those procreators also needed those procreators, but obviously this doesn’t efficiently solve the need problem in the long run and in practice also subjects the new needer to possibly enduring much worse suffering than the suffering the procreators would have experienced if they didn’t procreate.

And if we question long enough:

”But who needed the needer that came before that new needer they created?”

We will at some point arrive at the first sentient organism that ever existed, and who needed that first sentient organism to exist? No one, before consciousness itself existed, no waters felt horribly tormented over the lack of conscious fish swimming inside it.

Most organisms fail to fully grasp that if they didn’t exist anymore, suffering would not be the alternative to pleasure (relief of suffering) they now experience, so they believe that needs must be created for the good of filling them up again, which is about as absurd of a concept as giving someone a wound to put a bandaid on it.

Instead of admitting that while they need things now, they didn’t need them before they existed because they didn’t exist, they’d rather become suffering denialists that downplay the massive amount of unfulfilled needs in the universe and keep injecting new needs into it, satisfying some of their needs but causing a much bigger need problem.

And then when their child turns out to be the one that can’t adequately fulfill their needs in life, they play word games like this and pretend the child’s needs aren’t needs, the victim of reproduction ”just wants” things because they’re selfish. They have the right to inject the victim with need, but the victim has no right to even file a complaint against these void rapists.

Antinatalism and the question of a hypothetical utopia.

An occasional objection to antinatalism/the idea that it is better never to be brought into existence is the idea of transhumanism and a future utopia in which things are perfect or just better than they are now.

”What if we just made the world a perfect place for everyone, and then there’d be no more suffering?”

The first flaw to detect in that question is obviously that the pleasure is still a relief of suffering, they exist in direct relation to each other. For example, more pleasure of satiation, less suffering of hunger, more suffering of hunger, less pleasure of satiation. If you feel better, you feel less bad. If you feel worse, you feel less good.

So by creating a world of no suffering, you must create a world with no sentient life in it, thus no pleasure either.

To use a metaphor, it’d be like saying what if we just alleviated the pain of the stabwound by putting a bandaid on it, but the stabwound didn’t actually exist?

That makes no sense, you don’t have pleasure, relief of suffering, without suffering, just like you don’t have extinguished burning house without burning house, or cured infection without infection. If the infection is cured, that indicates that the infection must have existed beforehand. If fulfilled desire exists, that indicates that unfulfilled desire must have existed beforehand to some degree.

Where would that pleasure come from if there’s no pain to relieve? A utopia in the strictest sense of perfection involding ”no suffering at all” seems impossible.

So still, life involves suffering that must be fixed, you’re still creating the problem and then perfectly alleviating it instead of not creating it to begin with.

It’s not that I dismiss the utopia hypothetical because it is unrealistic, dismissing hypotheticals based on being unrealistic is irrational, I dismiss it based on it being contradictory, if you fulfill a desire then it had to be unfulfilled beforehand, just like if you told me you extinguished a forest fire, the unextinguished fire also had to exist beforehand, I wouldn’t believe someone that they extinguished a fire they just told me doesn’t exist.

Let’s assume that utopia instead simply means we could alleviate every need, every pre-existing condition of suffering in due time before it gets too out of hand.

Right now, sentient organisms have needs that are not being fulfilled – they have to go to work, they may get lonely, they rot and expire, they get addicted to substances and suffer the negative side effects.

In the utopia, this wouldn’t be the case.

Let’s say in the utopia, they could fulfill all their needs in time without too much suffering involved, the desire mechanism is never left to fester and rot like it is right now in our current world, e.g. you could be an alcoholic forever and you never suffer any great side effects like there are right now, like liver cirrhosis or throat cancer.

Would it be worth it to create conscious life then?

I still don’t think the perfect problem solving means obligate us to create more problems.

The endless orgasm utopia is an important priority if there is someone that is sexually frustrated, requiring to be endlessly jerked off, if you just don’t create the organism with a need for the endless orgasm utopia, the endless orgasm utopia loses its extrinsic value to solving that problem of someone being frustrated sexually.

So the same fundamental question remains, why does suffering need to exist at all?

Why do we need to instill sexual frustration, deprivation, tension into an organism so that it can be endlessly jerked off afterwards? Why do you need to create the problem that made you become an alcoholic in the first place? It’s still a deficit/harm, you’re in need…you just always manage to resolve it in time before it gets too bad.

You may say because the procreators also suffer a desire to create more children, but even then, just going extinct once would solve all suffering, whereas by putting things in the utopia, you still didn’t solve the problem, you just created the best possible bandaid for the wounds of desire and deprivation, which is better but not optimal, and it will take a while until any such thing will exist if it will ever exist at all, which will mean a lot more less benign suffering until then.

The procreators also experience deprivation, but what would truly solve the problem of deprivation is stopping the creation of more pain machines, not creating more and more and trying to manufacture more perfect bandaids.

They have an irrational perception that necessity – need, want, desire must exist, when the only thing that in reality needs anything is us, there would be nothing horrible about us simply no longer existing. They assume conscious life must be, so that then we can solve problems (need, want, desire) that the creation of that life caused in the first place.

Just because the cure for AIDS exists, I would not necessarily intentionally try to give myself AIDS in order to get rid of it again afterwards, so why would you insist on creating unfulfilled desires, instilling deprivation into a perfectly non-conscious, non-bothered organism, just because the perfect means to fulfill those desires, alleviate that suffering exist?

You can use many metaphors to demonstrate the absurdity of creating desire for the good of fulfilling it, creating damage for the good of fixing it again afterwards, for example:

Setting a house on fire for the good of extinguishing it again.
Throwing the child into the ocean for the good of saving it from drowning.
Infecting someone with AIDS for the good of giving them AIDS treatment.
Breaking someone’s leg for the good of giving them painkillers.
Stabbing someone in the chest for the good of pulling the knife out again.
Shitting on someone’s floor for the good of cleaning it off again.

In the utopian scenario, we just solve the problem perfectly after creating it, but there’s still a problem of being in need.

So:

perfectly alleviated suffering in endless orgasm utopia > unalleviated suffering left to fester and rot in our current world.

But:

zero suffering > perfectly alleviated suffering in utopia.

The perfect solution to a problem is still to not create it to begin with.

So to use the same metaphors again, we could say:

No burning house > perfectly extinguished house > unextinguished house.
No drowning child > perfectly rescued child > drowned child.
No AIDS > perfectly cured AIDS > uncured AIDS.
No broken leg > perfectly numbed broken leg > no painkiller.
No stabwound > perfect bandaid > untreated stabwound.
No shit on floor > perfectly wiped off shit > shit on floor.

It is good to solve a problem perfectly, but it doesn’t get any less bad than to not have any problem in the first place.

Another problem to point out, despite also other practical factors like humans using future technology to do bad things rather than good things, is also that even if we accept that such a utopia where everyone’s needs can be satisfied in time before they mutate into too much suffering will definitely exist in the future, is that right now, it does not exist, so the future utopia still doesn’t justify causing suffering by reproduction right now where you have no means to alleviate it.

That’s like someone setting your house on fire before the waterhose was invented, just because in the future the waterhose might be invented, or injecting someone with AIDS blood before the cure for AIDS exists, just because in the future the cure for AIDS might exist, how is it a good idea to cause a problem now just because in the future there might be a solution to it? It’s not.

It doesn’t help the victims of reproduction right now, and there’s simply no necessity for a utopia in the future if you don’t produce more victims that will desire to live in the utopia, if you don’t create the necessity for it.

So it’s kind of as if we could get kill the AIDS virus, get rid of it forever right now by pressing a button (sentient life going extinct), but you insist on creating more AIDS (desires) so that then we can find the perfect pill to cure individual AIDS infections in the future (perfectly fulfilling desire instead of putting an end to desire), then we can always infect ourselves with AIDS and get rid of it immediately afterwards by taking the anti-AIDS pill, instead of just pressing the button to kill the AIDS virus forever right now.

It doesn’t matter if we drown a bunch of children here and there by throwing children into the ocean for the good of trying to save them from drowning afterwards, because in the future, we’re going to have perfect fishing nets that will be able to save every child we throw into the ocean from drowning – if we were to keep throwing children into the ocean for the sake of saving them from drowning, instead of just not insisting on throwing children into the ocean in the first place.

Solved problems don’t exist if they have not at some point been unsolved problems, a perfectly solved problem is good, it prevents an unsolved problem, but not as effectively as never creating that problem to begin with.

Promortalism and the ”just kill yourself” argument.

When you exist, you need to constantly chase relief in order to avoid suffering, you need/want/desire. Eat or hunger, drink or thirst, defecate or constipate, masturbation or sexual frustration, breathing or suffocation.

You obtain relief, or you are forced to keep suffering, that is the fundamental mechanism. When you never come into existence, you don’t obtain any relief from your suffering, but I would say that that’s not a problem, because you never exist, so you won’t feel bad about it.

By not reproducing any conscious lifeforms, we prevent all harm/suffering, all relief/pleasure as well, but again, also all harm/suffering, so there would be no one to feel bad about not eating favorite dish anymore when they don’t exist.

What comes up in these discussions is sometimes the question of promortalism. If this reasoning is used to justify not giving birth, doesn’t it also justify killing someone to put them out of their misery?

”If life is so bad, aren’t we all just better off dead then, doesn’t this justify killing everyone?”

The answer is in principle – yes, in practice – no.

In principle:

As long as a sentient organism lives, it experiences suffering, that is bad.

If you never exist, you don’t feel pleasure, but you also don’t suffer, so it’s no problem. If you die now, you won’t feel pleasure once you’re dead, but you also won’t suffer, so it’s no problem, unless you felt suffering in the process of dying.

By obtaining any given pleasure, you’re always minimizing a greater loss/negative, no neutral point in between. If you don’t eat, you’ll suffer hunger, if you don’t drink, you’ll suffer thirst. No pleasure, then suffering. But just like never being born in the first place would solve this problem perfectly, dying as soon as possible would solve this problem of needing constant gratification for you as well.

So as long as the dying process is entirely suffering-free, let’s say in your deepest sleep, I simply painlessly lethally inject you with a substance that of course also causes no distress in any way, then I would say there’s no intrinsic harm – you didn’t see it coming and you didn’t feel it when it happened.

Your departure was painless, I prevented all future suffering, you are not going to wake up later on as a ghost in non-existence and lament that you still needed to do x (just like you didn’t before coming into existence), but now you are being deprived of life because you are dead.

Even if you say you can rationally recognize that this isn’t the case, you’re not going to be a ghost afterwards, you can still feel threatened by something even if you know it’s not going to harm you later on, just like I could feel scared by a spider even if I know it’s not going to attack me. As as long as you’re sentient, the alternative to not obtaining pleasure, the relief of suffering, is suffering, you might still have a stupid intuition that you’re going to suffer from not obtaining pleasure once you’re dead – could be. I think people often don’t think of death as the end, they think of it as some kind of second life where they feel tormented over missing out on their life.

Dying may be bad, but death, non-existence is the absence of all badness, the absence of all needs that even demand to be fulfilled, the thing we call wellbeing is no longer needed once you’re dead, so you can’t conclude rationally that death is a problem because it lacks wellbeing any more than to conclude that never being born in the first place is bad because it lacks wellbeing. The underlying philosophical idea here is antifrustrationism, and from that follows both global antinatalism and promortalism in principle, not fulfilling a need isn’t a problem if the need doesn’t even exist. Feed the hungry, but don’t make the hungry to feed them.

In practice:

There are some factors that complicate just killing yourself or someone else, it isn’t too easy to just kill someone entirely painlessly without them noticing it.

By killing yourself, you may cause more suffering to yourself or others than you would experience from staying alive.
By killing someone else painlessly in their sleep, you may cause more suffering to others than you would prevent by ending their existence.

I would not be too sure that it does always cause more suffering to end life though, right now, even terminally ill individuals are denied the right to die to maintain the delusion of religious idiots that life is always good even when you’re being tortured 24/7, because it’s life, so it must be good.

Equally, many do nothing but cause harm to others, you’d likely save a million farmed animals from being tortured by euthanizing some people painlessly, so I don’t particularly always trust their evaluations of how horrible it would be to end a life.

Arguably, the strongest argument against just ending life is that once a sentient organism exists, there is the potential for them to reduce and most importantly prevent suffering for other sentient organisms. So whilst being alive is worse than not being alive, it is currently instrumental to achieving the reduction or prevention of suffering, we have extrinsic value to that goal.

The cessation of anyone’s, of any suffering, negative sensation whatsoever is obviously a good idea, but in our current world, being alive is instrumental to convincing others of the fact that life is fundamentally flawed, so you can try to prevent more suffering than by just preventing your suffering by killing yourself, it would be even better than just ending your suffering.

So see it like this – if you’re in a senseless war, you don’t end the war by just killing yourself, there is more utility to staying alive and stopping the radicalization of more soldiers, so that as many as possible other soldiers stop thinking there’s some kind of greater good to all this suffering, and as such minimize harm/cruelty caused in the war by other soldiers, perhaps the soldier can even go back home at some point and start writing books about why exactly they disagree with the cause of those that initiated said war and try to convince people that it’s a bad idea, dedicate life to becoming an anti-war activist.

Whilst you are alive, you can convince others of the idea that sentient life should be brought to an end on a global, not just individual scale, and prevent other harms from befalling the other organisms around you, chances are there’s always a problem to solve. But you only need to do that because they exist in the first place, so this is not an argument for making new life, only for staying here whilst you’re already here.

If we were already all convinced that life is a failure, we’ve already managed to sterilize or painlessly euthanize the other animals, then indeed it would be questionable why we should stay alive, at that point I’d simply say it depends, will committing suicide cause you more suffering in a single instant than you will experience from staying alive and needing, desiring, wanting until dead?

You being dead certainly wouldn’t be a problem anymore, if everything is fixed, there needs to be no problem fixer anymore, because there is no problem left, except you.

So if I could painlessly evaporate all life by snapping fingers on my left hand and my life by snapping fingers on my right hand, there’d be no reason not to snap the fingers on my right hand after I’ve snapped fingers on my left hand.

In conclusion, as stated before, I think life can be worth living in practice, but not in principle.

Now let’s also address what the pro-natalist asking this question ”why not just kill yourself?” could mean as an argument against antinatalism and demonstrate how those arguments fail.

”Because everyone has the option to commit suicide, it is totally fair to bring a child into existence, they can just kill themselves if they want to! You can always opt out! It’s a perfectly fair deal, take it or leave it!”

Giving someone the chance to commit suicide doesn’t diminish the harm you caused them, if they want to kill themselves, it’s already too late, you already fucked them over.

The underlying logical structure of this argument is essentially:

”If the subject has the ability to free themselves from x harmful circumstance, it is justifiable to impose x harm circumstance onto the subject.”

By this standard, if a rapist locked a girl into his basement and raped her every day, he should walk free just as long as he gave her a rope to hang herself with, the judge would have to say:

”Well, you could have committed suicide, so therefore, as long as your rapist gave you a rope, it’s all your fault pretty much anyway. Free the offender, forcing girls to suck your dick at gunpoint is fine because they can just choose to die if they don’t want to suck your dick, that seems sensible!”.

This is exactly the attitude the natalist is demonstrating in this scenario, it’s ok to cause potentially severe harm, because after all, your victim can still commit suicide if they don’t like it.

This can be applied to every single harm that anyone could take issue with. Don’t like being sexually harassed? Just kill yourself. Don’t like not having certain freedoms in life? Just kill yourself. Don’t like being hit by me drunk driving? Just kill yourself, I’m never going to stop!

Just like any other harm causer, natalists sometimes excuse the pain they cause by pretending that if the victim did not commit suicide yet, that proves that they actually secretly enjoyed getting raped repeatedly. If they really didn’t like it, they would have killed themselves by now.

Considering that life supporters frequently also oppose the right to die, the right for victims of their imposition to escape, we have to add even another factor in: she has to commit suicide at a time when the rapist isn’t in the house to monitor what she’s doing, otherwise he’ll lock her in a cage and take away her ability to free herself from the circumstance until she pretends to enjoy the rape.

”You’re a hypocrite for not killing yourself immediately if life is so bad, therefore, antinatalism is wrong, only consistent antinatalist is a dead one!”

This again fails to take into account that life itself is correctly identified as the problem and cause of all harm, not just one life.

The underlying logical structure of this argument is essentially:

”If you dislike/disagree with x circumstance, it follows that you therefore would immediately try to escape from x circumstance.”

Which is simply untrue. You can dislike the circumstance of drowning in a swamp, but still think it’s worth getting in there again to save two drowning children from it, you can be repulsed by life, and still think it’s worth staying in it to prevent more life from being created.

This does not in any way imply or mean you support life any more than thinking it’s good to jump into the swamp again to save the children means you think drowning in a swamp is a good thing, and we should throw more children into the swamp.

To go back to the basement rapist example, it would be like the rapist has three girls in his basement, and one managed to escape, then went back to the house to save the other two, and then the rapist concludes that this means she secretly thinks his basement is really cool and rape isn’t a big deal, because she returned to the basement, but that is only because the rapist is too selfish and myopic to understand that others can understand that not everything is about them.

This wondering about why someone wouldn’t just commit suicide likely follows from a myopic delusion that only one’s own suffering is bad and thus worth preventing, not understanding that it isn’t only about your suffering but suffering in general, it’s the same thing, it’s no better in someone else, so obviously you can do better by saving more than just yourself.

It’s also just an appeal to hypocrisy, similar to saying that a drug isn’t harmful because the person who points out that the drug is harmful is taking the drug as well.

Just replace ”life” with ”crack” for a moment.

Let’s say some crack addict is forcing children to smoke crack, another addict points out that crack addiction can be harmful. Is ”but you smoke crack yourself, if it’s so bad, then why don’t you just quit?” a good counterargument?

No, because that doesn’t diminish any of the negative effects of crack, you don’t have to quit crack yourself in order to know that your addiction has negative side effects, it’s perfectly fair to point out that forcing others to smoke crack is a bad idea.

Similarly, antinatalists are still correct for pointing out that life is harmful, even if they themselves are on some level addicted to it, the pro-natalist is simply trying to distract from their bad behavior of forcing life addiction onto other organisms.

Whether or not I quit life has nothing to do with whether or not it is a bad idea to start it, ”starting smoking is a bad idea” is a perfectly fair statement to make, even if you’re smoking cigarettes yourself.