Category: Antinatalism

Why exactly reproduction is a harmful act, explained step by step.

  • Suffering is bad.

Unpleasant sensation is not pleasant, sometimes in life we are forced to endure suffering to avoid even greater suffering, but that doesn’t mean that suffering itself is good which is a misconception many then seem to come up with to justify it, it just means that it is the lesser of two evils, i.e if you have to torture one person to prevent a million from being tortured just as intensely, it’s arguably the lesser of two evils, but it’s still going to feel bad regardless.

The vaccination is painful, but dying of the illness it grants you immunity to is more painful, or going to school might be painfully boring, but being homeless and without money in the future would cause you even more suffering, or standing in a traffic jam might be a suffering-inducing experience, but not arriving at the amusement park would cause you even more suffering.

So to prevent the greater pain, you take the stabbing sensation of the needle as the lesser of two evils, this doesn’t mean that the stabbing of the needle no longer produces negative sensation. If you could snap your fingers and grant yourself immunity to illness, you’d probably do that instead.

Even those that inflict pain onto themselves are still trying actively to avoid harm. If the masochist didn’t already experience sexual frustration leading to him feeling more tense and pressurized in the long run, he wouldn’t pour the hot sauce into his pisshole to alleviate that tension, if the bipolar person didn’t already experience emotional pain and depression, they wouldn’t slice their arms to alleviate that pain.

If I told you right now that I’m a magician and could by waving my magic wand make it so that you won’t be able to have an orgasm anymore unless you cut your eyeballs out, you likely wouldn’t want me to do that, maybe you’d even use violence to stop me, as you’d rather be able to ejaculate in a less harmful manner. And even if you’d want me to wave my magic wand, you’d just be a transmasochist who is suffering as a result of not being turned into a masochist similar to how a trans-person can suffer from not having a different set of genitals, so then by waving my magic wand I’d be alleviating your desire to turn into a masochist.

Suffering can at best be instrumentally required to avoiding an even greater suffering in the future sometimes, but suffering in and of itself is always a bad thing, the good thing about the painful injection is not the pain of the needle being stuck into your arm, but the avoidance of the illness.

Humans experience suffering and as a delusional mechanism to deal with it mistake the fact that they sometimes have to tolerate one suffering to avoid an even greater one to mean that bad now somehow is equivalent to good, wet is equivalent to dry, cold is equivalent to hot, so that they can rationalize all the suffering they experience or inflict on others as some sort of greater good. Good suffering is an oxymoron, similar to dried wetness, or cold hotness.

  • By creating (sentient) life, you cause suffering.

The deal of sentient life is always the same, suffering is created, if a state of deprivation is not alleviated, the suffering will intensify, if it is alleviated, two things could happen:

  • Option A: Another deprivation pops up, e.g. after hunger has already been alleviated, appetite, aching for taste satisfaction becomes more insatiable, now the subject has to eat just not to suffer an increase in boredom.

Built to chase satisfaction, not to be satisfied, imagine the desire as an irreparably broken pipe, when you fix one hole, another spot bursts open and it starts to leak out of that new hole.

  • Option B: The initial deprivation, hunger, will return in time and you will have to eat again to prevent greater suffering.

You experience unfulfilled desire, and if you fulfill it, another one pops up that will have to be fulfilled as well to avoid suffering, or the other one will simply go back to unfulfilled, then you’ll have to fulfill that initial desire again to avoid suffering.

We lock you into a factory where you receive a tank and you get whipped, you have to fill it up with water or you’ll get whipped more intensely. If you fill it up, you get another tank and get whipped less intensely. But if you don’t fill that new tank up in due time, the older tank will be emptied and you’ll get whipped more intensely again.

You can keep filling the tanks and the whipping will get less intense, but it never fully stops, at some point you just don’t receive a new tank and the last one you filled up will slowly be re-emptied. You can also stop filling the tanks, but then the whipping will get unbearably intense in a short period of time. Itch, then scratch itch, then new itch comes up or old itch comes back in time, rinse and repeat.

There are probably various suffering prevention measures you constantly take in your everyday life that you don’t even acknowledge as such anymore, like breathing air to avoid suffocation, eating food to avoid starving, drinking water to avoid dehydration, working a job for certain resources to avoid poverty, having house, bed and clothes to avoid freezing.

  • There is no pleasure disconnected from relieving/eliminating suffering.

You are constantly itched by different urges and compulsions, the pleasures in life consist of fixing said conditions of suffering again and again, so the idea that suffering is not necessarily guaranteed would be non-sensical, it is intrinsic to life that you constantly experience needs/wants/desire you have to fulfill.

  • If you don’t eat (good), you experience hunger (bad).
  • If you don’t drink (good), you experience thirst (bad).
  • If you don’t defecate (good), you experience constipation (bad).
  • If you don’t orgasm (good), you experience tension, pressure, stress (bad).
  • If you don’t socialize (good), you experience loneliness (bad).
  • If you don’t sleep (good), you experience fatigue (bad).
  • If you don’t breathe (good), you experience suffocation (bad).

There are just some examples, it doesn’t have to be just hunger that is relieved when you eat food, as some will say here that if eating is just good because it prevents the suffering of hunger, then they’d only eat old, hard bread or something rather tasteless to avoid hunger, I’m being too reductive in my description.

But, if we locked that person in a prison cell, gave them only old, hard bread for the rest of their lives, forced them to abstain from ever eating their favorite foods again, they would experience suffering as a result of that, appetite – when it actually goes unalleviated for a while and you can’t obtain a partial relief from fantasizing about grabbing another snack, because you know it’s unrealistic, you’re sitting in prison, easily it’d turn into non-trivial suffering.

And if we starved the subject long enough of course, then indeed just flour mixed with water would start to taste good, the more suffering we add, the better the subtraction is going to feel, water tastes best when you’re just about to die from dehydration, but once we’re back to 0% suffering which pretty much never happens in life, there will be no more pleasure to derive either.

A metaphor similar to the previous tank metaphor that I sometimes like to use for this would be you being on a treadmill with suffering always behind, whereas pleasure is in front of you. When you fulfill a need/want/desire/reach pleasure, the treadmill either extends further and now there is pleasure in front of you again while the pleasure you just reached will slowly turn to suffering, or the treadmill doesn’t extend and you’ll simply be pulled back into the suffering behind you if you don’t keep running.

  • So I would argue that it’s fair to say you’re harming someone by bringing them into existence.

You initiate a constant source of harm/suffering so to speak, the mechanism is simply that pleasure/relief will always have to be chased after, or else the victim will be subjected to more suffering than before.

More pleasure=less suffering, just like more bright=less dark, more wet=less dry.

So you create this suffering organism, make it addicted to pleasure/happiness and if it doesn’t obtain it it will suffer worse, it is similar to making someone addicted to a drug without guarantee that they’ll be able to obtain the drug, the object of their addiction, causing them severe suffering.

Yes, if you don’t create the organism, then the organism will not experience any pleasure/happiness, but the organism also won’t be addicted to pleasure/happiness in the first place, because it won’t exist.

So to bemoan that ”state” of non-existence would be like saying ”if we don’t make you addicted to heroin you won’t be able to enjoy the rush when you satisfy your addiction to heroin with a new injection” – though even worse arguably, because a person that already exists could at least already be depressed and thus benefit temporarily from taking drugs, they might already be dissatisfied and in need of some form of alleviation.

But when you don’t exist, you don’t need/want/desire any improvement whatsoever, not being born is experientially just like being a rock or being a chair, you won’t feel anything, neither pleasure nor suffering.

Similarly I would say that a rock or a chair not experiencing pleasure is not a big deal, but I would advise people against making a rock or a chair suffer if it were somehow possible, i.e if we had both hypothetical pleasure liquid and torture liquid that we could inject into inanimate objects in order to make them feel either intense pleasure or intense suffering, I would also say that injecting the torture liquid into things is a bad thing to do, but simply not injecting pleasure liquid into things is not a problem, if the object never becomes sentient it won’t be able to miss pleasure.

On suffering – part 2, antifrustrationism: positive vs. negative utilitarianism.

“Positive utilitarianism recommends the promotion or maximising of intrinsic value, negative utilitarianism recommends the reduction or minimising of intrinsic disvalue. At first sight, the negative kind may seem reasonable and more modest in what it recommends. But one way of ending human misery is by putting all human beings out of their misery. This course of action is usually considered unacceptable. This has led to a search for reformulations of negative utilitarianism, or to its rejection.”

https://www.utilitarianism.com/posutil.htm

A fatal flaw here is that most assume that the maximization of wellbeing and minimization of suffering are two different things, when in reality, pleasure is essentially just a relief sensation you get from resolving suffering, and if you take it away again, you suffer more.

Name a pleasure, most likely we will be able to name a form of suffering that it serves to alleviate. So very simple examples would be:

  • eating food (pleasure) – hunger (suffering)
  • drinking water (pleasure) – thirst (suffering)
  • defecation (pleasure) – constipation (suffering)
  • ejaculation (pleasure) – pressure (suffering)
  • sleep (pleasure) – fatigue (suffering)

and so and so forth. If you maximized wellbeing by eating food, you just reduced the suffering of hunger, no way around it. We put a weight on you, then we take it off again, this is what a good feeling is, the alleviation of a pressure that has been put on you. Put knife in, take knife out, not being harmed is what feels good, but once all harm is taken away, there’s no more pleasure.

You can get a small relief from resolving a small suffering, or a greater relief from resolving a greater suffering, workouts would be another example, it can be stressing and painful at times, but it ameliorates another pain, another form of tension in you, so that then in the end one is more relaxed than before, otherwise you’d never feel pushed to work out anymore.

Once every torturous urge that could have pushed you to eat it is extracted from you, be it hunger, appetite or boredom, the food no longer tastes good, the good feeling is what happens when we’re extracting the minus points, there are no plus points.

You can only get your head up to the surface of the hole, but you cannot crawl out of it, you’re just struggling to crawl up to the surface of the hole. You’re always sinking, and then you have to pull yourself up again, in this process, you feel pleasure, but once we’re at neutral, pleasure will stop and you’ll start sinking deeper into the hole again.

Positive utilitarianism makes this assumption that somehow our goods in life are somehow unconditionally required and important, that it could be a good action to throw someone into the hole for the good of them then crawling up to the surface again.

It’s important to fulfill desire in the sense that it prevents unfulfilled desire, but in and of itself, there is no point to creating unfulfilled desire in order to then fulfill it, e.g. if you for some reason already have an urge to stare at a red painted wall, then I may do you a favor by painting walls red for you to stare at, but I am not doing you a favor if I could hypothetically give you a pill that made you crave staring at a red painted wall, just to then paint it red (unless of course, you already had a desire to have that desire, in which case giving you the desire has instrumental value to achieving the absence of your desire to have that desire, but that desire to have that desire would still be a problem).

This realization is sometimes also referred to antifrustrationism:

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]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifrustrationism

If there is need, then it can be good to fulfill it, but there is no good in creating the need to begin with, just to then fulfill it, even if you fulfill it, it’s not better for the victim than never having happened at all, similar to if there is already a knife stuck in someone’s chest, then it can be good to pull it out, but there is no good to sticking the knife in someone’s chest to begin with, just to then pull it out again, even if you pull it again, it’s not better for the victim than never having happened at all.

Let’s say I have a car, I can make it into a sentient, suffering car that goes ”I NEED TO HAVE GASOLINE INSIDE ME, I WANT MORE MORE MORE, FUCK ME HARDER!” by snapping my fingers, can I improve this car by snapping my fingers?

I would argue no, because the only predictable good to come from that would be to afterwards make it content and unneeding of the gasoline by pouring gasoline into it again, to ameliorate its urge to have gasoline put into it, but it is already perfectly unneeding of the gasoline, so I can’t possibly make an improvement here by snapping my fingers and putting it into emotional distress over not having enough gasoline in it.

And the same reasoning consistently applies to a human or any other fetus, you cannot upgrade a non-conscious thing by turning it conscious, you can only degrade it by doing so, it’s a minus, not a plus. You create need/deficiency conditions, and then in the best case scenario you manage to erase all of them again, but chances are you’ll make more minuses than before.

A graphic demonstration that can be used to showcase this reality is also David Benatar’s axiological asymmetry from his book better never to have been:

If unfulfilled desire, suffering is the alternative, then fulfilled desire, pleasure, is important. But if there is no pain anymore, then there is no need for the pleasure anymore either, here one could use many different examples to demonstrate that point. This is another example from the book:

  • X exists: forest fire.

Forest fire=bad.

Fire extinguisher=good, because there’s a forest fire.

  • X doesn’t exist.

Preventing forest fire=continues to be good.

Preventing fire extinguisher=not bad, because there is no forest fire to extinguish.

  • X exists: cancer.

Cancer tumor=bad.

Chemotherapy=good, because you have cancer.

  • X doesn’t exist.

Preventing cancer tumor=continues to be good.

Preventing chemotherapy=not bad, because there is no cancer tumor to treat.

Preventing a harm is always good, but preventing a pleasure is only conditionally bad, i.e if someone is already in pain. There’s no problem with all chocolate being liquidated if no sentient organisms are left on planet earth, because no one who wants to eat it would suffer from its absence.

But by not creating the creatures that need the chocolate, we can still efficiently prevent their craving and addiction (suffering) for chocolate, just like if they were to actually exist and crave the chocolate, the chocolate would then be preventing their craving for chocolate. So the benefit of prevention is the same, you eliminated the craving for the chocolate either way.

If you prevent me from ejaculating, I’m suffering intensified pressure and tension as a result of that, but I’m not hurting my ejaculated sperm by flushing it down the toilet, refusing to turn it into a child that will one day be able to alleviate tension and pressure by ejaculating just like me, that can’t possibly be an issue for my sperm that I flushed down the toilet, and that’s the point.

When you bring a sentient being into existence, you just create suffering, a constant addiction to pleasure, which if not alleviated will result in intensified suffering, and even if you alleviate it, it’s still not better in the sense that it didn’t prevent suffering as efficiently as never creating it to begin with.

Saying the good in life justifies the bad is absurd because it’s just an alleviation of bad, it’s like saying it’s a good idea to stab people because then you can pull the knives out of them again and give them painkillers afterwards, some victims don’t get painkillers, but that’s justified because some of them do, the fulfilled desires justify the unfulfilled desires.

Supporters of positive utilitarianism think it can be good to create a new sentient organism, when in reality, it’s just the creation of a lifelong problem, a deficit bundle, a need and desire mechanism that constantly needs to be alleviated for it to not result in even more intense suffering than it started off with.

By gaining in pleasure you are relieving your suffering, it doesn’t get rid of suffering as efficiently as preventing it from existing in the first place though, a lifeless planet is the best (or least bad) planet by virtue of it containing zero suffering. It’s better for an already existing addict to get their next fix, but it’s even less bad if no suffering ever pushed them to chase the object of addiction in the first place.

This is a conclusion many find too repulsive to accept, so they point to supposed absurdities about the antifrustrationist view, which fall apart with the information that I just previously layed out and won’t seem quite as absurd, such as:

  • The painless genocide/benevolent world exploder button.

If preventing suffering is the only thing that matters and you had a button you could push to painlessly end all sentient life in an instant, it would be the best thing to do, you’d have to take that option, all suffering ended forever.

This is supposed to make you feel instinctively repulsed and then say ”oh no how horrible, this is like Adolf Hitler!!!”, failing to take into account that they didn’t actually establish any kind of coherent argument against pressing such a button.

Of course, if every good in life is just the relief of suffering, which it is, then it is the best possible thing you could ever do to press this button, whether you like to admit that or not, that doesn’t change the facts of the reality and its value relations we occupy.

If I press this button, I will end all suffering, I will also end all pleasure, but that is completely irrelevant, because the pleasure is just a relief of the suffering, if I have already extinguished all hunger and starvation from this universe, then there by default can’t be any problem with there being no more food to enjoy either, the need for it no longer exists, but no one who has no access to food is starving either.

I solved all suffering, the lack of pleasure isn’t a problem, that’s called a win win situation, no way around it.

If anything, it’s absurd to be opposed to pushing such a button based on the fact that it will deplete future wellbeing, it would be like saying that it’s bad to push a button that destroys both cancer and chemotherapy, because then all chemotherapy is gone.

The reason why you want to go through chemotherapy is to get rid of the cancer, so if the chance of cancer is destroyed, we’ve already achieved the goal efficiently. The reason why you chase satisfaction is because otherwise you would become dissatisfied, so if we push the big red button resulting in eradication of all dissatisfaction, we’ve already achieved the goal efficiently, you don’t need to have a relief from suffering if suffering doesn’t even exist.

  • Cancer tumor – unfulfilled desire.
  • Chemotherapy – fulfillment of desire.
  • Cancer tumor excision – painless death resulting in depletion of unfulfilled desire.
  • Knife in chest – unfulfilled desire.
  • Painkiller – fulfillment of desire.
  • Pull knife out of chest – painless death resulting in depletion of unfulfilled desire.

This of course equally applies to the question of euthanizing others painlessly. If I still want to do x, and you euthanize me in my deep sleep painlessly, then I’m not going to wake up in the thereafter non-existence and still be left wanting x, but now I can’t obtain x because you just painlessly euthanized me, taking away my wanting.

Death is not an intrinsic harm, it can only be an extrinsic harm, i.e family members and acquaintances might miss the painlessly killed person, if we legalized this act, it would scare others they might be next, perhaps you prevented someone who was interested in reducing suffering in other sentient organisms from doing so.

But there is nothing inherently harmful about you simply not being there anymore, this might be offensive, but is true nonetheless, no matter how repulsive you find that fact.

  • The pin prick of harm.

Let’s say there is a near utopian scenario where everyone’s needs are being perfectly satisfied. Perfect meals, perfect defecation, perfect sex, perfect sleep, etc, perfect eternal orgasm on morphine whilst eating chocolate cake or perfect whatever you want, but it satisfies everyone’s needs.

In order to get there though, we must give one person a tiny pin prick of harm, one needle prick in their little finger, if you don’t do this, everyone will be confined to a life of just eating old hard bread and potatoes with no seasoning, mediocre jerking off into a tissue at best, no morphine, no eternal chocolate cake.

If reducing suffering is the only thing that matters, then you shouldn’t be giving this one person a pin prick, right?

No, exactly wrong, because this misguided objection again completely fails to take into account that increasing wellbeing is directly entailed in reducing suffering in the organism, as pleasure is a relief of suffering, the increase in everyone’s pleasure is the same as a reduction in suffering. If you don’t give this person a pin prick, you will increase suffering of boredom, if you give this person a pin prick, you will greatly reduce boredom.

But this still doesn’t make life worth starting in the first place, and that’s the point this argument misses completely.

There is no unborn purgatory in which children that do not get to experience the pleasures of life are suffering from not experiencing the pleasures of life, so there’s still no life worth starting for future pleasure. Yes, if I am hungry for it, then I would take a pin prick for a 5 star gourmet dinner, but if I did not in any way need or desire it, then I would not take the pin prick for the 5 star gourmet dinner, and that’s the point.

Non-existence best describes the state of not needing the 5 star gourmet dinner, it is just nothingness, there can’t possibly any kind of problem with nothing, it’s nothing, there’s no nothingness chamber where a child is somehow tormented from not being a something.

The reduction of suffering is good, if you decrease suffering in the organism you increase wellbeing and if you decrease wellbeing in the organism you increase suffering, the only difference here is that positive utilitarians insist that pleasure must exist regardless of whether or not someone suffers from its absence, whereas I don’t see the absence of pleasure as tragic if no one is missing it, suffering from not having it.

Part 1: On suffering – part 1, value realism: utilitarianism vs. deontology.

A detailed refutation of common pro-natalist arguments.

  • There are good things in life too. Surely there are many bad things in life, like cancer, disability and torture, but there are also many good things in life, like sunsets, chocolate ice cream and orgasms, and the good things overall justify the bad things. What about all the good things in life?!

Once you exist in the conscious sense, you need to feel good to avoid feeling bad. But before you exist, while you don’t feel good, you don’t feel bad as a result of not feeling good, so not feeling good is never a problem until the desire machine is created.

You don’t eat, you get hungry. You don’t drink, you get thirsty. You don’t defecate, you constipate. You don’t orgasm, you get tense. So on and so forth, so by obtaining any good in life, you are always preventing a greater negative/harm to yourself, but never as efficiently as by not being born in the first place.

That’s why it’s a ludicrous the idea that we can do any organism a favor by making it conscious, it didn’t need to feel good to avoid feeling bad before it existed because it didn’t exist, but once it exists it’ll have to feel good to avoid feeling bad, it’s doing them a favor in the same way it would be doing you a favor if I gave an illness (a bad condition) solely for the good of then treating that illness (correcting the bad condition, which you did not need before I created the bad condition in need of correction).

So when you bring a child into existence for some supposed good in it, you’re causing a problem to exist for the sake of fixing it, this is about as absurd as to set someone’s house on fire for the good of extinguishing it again, give someone AIDS for the good of giving them AIDS treatment, breaking someone’s leg and stabbing them in the chest for the good of giving them a painkiller and a bandaid afterwards, you’re creating pain for the sake of trying to eliminate it again.

You didn’t need to have your house extinguished before I set it on fire, so to argue that I’m achieving a net positive by creating the negative condition for you to prevent (the burning house) would be non-sensical, the good is contingent on your suffering.

Once every urge that could have pushed you to eat it is gone, the food will stop to induce pleasure in you, be it hunger or appetite, it could also be appetite instead of hunger, appetite is still suffering, if we forced you to never eat your favorite foods again you’d experience a certain discomfort as a result of that, discomfort that isn’t as intense and noticeable in an everyday situation where you are mostly able to quickly satiate yourself.

If unfulfilled desire already exists, then it may be a good idea to fulfill it, but it’s certainly not a good idea to create unfulfilled desire in the first place, it’s a problem, you put the child in need, into a degraded condition – just like if you see a burning house or a child drowning in the ocean, it’s good to extinguish the fire and save it from drowning, but it’s certainly not a good idea to set the fire or throw the child into the ocean in the first place, you’re just creating a problem.

The worst is that the alleviation is not guaranteed either, breeders have no failsafe guarantee that the child will be able to fulfill all its desires in life, they produce this desire machine without guarantee how tormenting the desires will be, how long lasting the fulfillment of said desires is, if the desires can even be fulfilled, if the desires can be fulfilled without harming someone else in the process. Many desires go unfulfilled, and the fulfillment of many harms others, so reproduction as a whole is kind of like setting a renting apartment on fire for the good of extinguishing only some of its parts, while some children will burn to death inside the building.

  • It’s neither good or bad to prevent the suffering of a future child because it doesn’t even exist yet, it can’t be good for that child, so it is irrelevant if you prevent its potential suffering, it can’t appreciate that, morals and ethics can only be applied to those that already exist.

By this standard, you’d ultimately have to bite the bullet on accepting every possible future atrocity being planned ahead for someone that does not exist yet, because right now, the situation doesn’t exist, so what happens in the future will not matter either.

There wouldn’t even be any point in preventing a child from being born that is going to be in chronic pain every day and severely disabled, it doesn’t exist yet, so it doesn’t matter to the child that its suffering has been prevented, might as well just shit it out and keep it in your basement as a sex slave, doesn’t matter that you’re planning to do that, you haven’t done it yet after all, so what happens in the future will also be completely irrelevant – that’s the general idea here.

  • The future generation doesn’t exist yet, so why is it a problem if I pollute the environment for them as much as possible?
  • Terminally ill cats and dogs won’t appreciate the prevention of their future pain after we euthanized them in their sleep, so why not just let them die as painfully as possible?
  • In fact, why does anyone commit suicide if they can’t even appreciate the fact that their pain has been prevented once they are dead? Prevention is pointless, right?

It’s called the non-identity ”problem”, future harm obviously matters as you can see in these examples I’ve just demonstrated, what we do right now will have an effect on the future, so it is completely hypocritical to make an exception for reproduction, or in fact usually just cases of reproduction where we don’t know what the future victim will win in the suffering lottery and it isn’t crystal clear from the start they’ll be severely disabled and in chronic pain every day.

Let’s say it’s just a hypothetical button I could push to create an alien species that does nothing but to feel the worst possible pain ever, would you be ignorant enough to argue it’s not important for me to make sure I don’t accidentally hit the button, because since these aliens don’t currently exist, they can’t appreciate that the worst possible pain ever is not currently taking place?

  • If preventing the future suffering of a yet to be individual is good, then the prevention of their pleasures and goods in life is however also bad, you’re depriving that future person of many good things that could happen too!

If one never comes into existence at any point in the future, one can never be deprived of anything. Do you think it’s good if a semen sample that contains a severely disabled child that will do nothing but experience chronic pain is flushed down the toilet? Most likely, yes.

Do you think it’s a horrible crime to flush a semen sample that contains a very happy future person down the toilet? Most likely, no, we don’t recognize the absence of pleasure as a problem unless it results in pain for someone craving that pleasure.

The absence of pleasure is not in and of itself the presence of pain. The absence of pleasure is the presence of pain as long as you exist as a sentient organism, but the millions upon millions of years before you existed, your pleasure was also absent, but never actually resulted in any pain for you, because you didn’t exist. Was that a big deal, that you didn’t get to eat any chocolate whilst you didn’t exist and therefore didn’t crave any chocolate either?

It is irrelevant, someone cannot enjoy being saved from drowning if you don’t throw them into the ocean, but it wouldn’t matter, you don’t need to be saved from drowning if you’re never thrown into the ocean. There is no good in chemotherapy if you don’t have the cancer, but it wouldn’t matter, because you don’t need chemotherapy if you don’t have cancer.

Some life supporters like to give unfair examples of how you can still meaningfully deprive someone even if they never felt deprived of something, e.g. what if you win the lottery and someone takes your money, but doesn’t tell you? What if someone dropped a gift in front of your door while you were on vacation but then I took it away?

In those cases, you still had an already existent quality of life, and your experience was degraded by not receiving the money to fulfill your already existent needs, wants, desires, your experience was kept in a worse state by not receiving the gift you would have liked to receive.

But non-sentient matter before it becomes sentient has absolutely no needs, wants, desires whatsoever, so you are not hurting it by aborting it before it becomes sentient. No desire, no need for desire fulfillment, you didn’t desire to have desires before you had desires.

By this standard that it’s supposedly bad to not create a new pleasure, relieved conscious experiences, you’d then also have to ultimately mourn every ejaculation flushed down the toilet, it is the destruction of potential sentient life that could be put into a negative condition of need, want, desire, and then feel the pleasure of avoiding said negative condition.

Why do I have the right to experience all the good things in life but not my potential 100 siblings? Is it fair that I discriminate against potential sentience whenever I ejaculate? Shouldn’t every potential sentient lifeform that I ejaculate be incubated, so that then it can one day also experience tension, stress and pressure which they can also alleviate by ejaculating like me?

We’d have a duty to reproduce as much as possible if the absence of pleasure were that big of a problem for the non-existent, but it’s obviously not, there is no unborn purgatory from which any unborn children are missing out on life.

  • Most are happy to have been born, if you surveyed them, almost anywhere, they would say they’re glad to be alive.

The point is that the fact alone that they are happy still doesn’t prove that we should think existence has any important benefit over non-existence, you can avoid suffering by always arriving at your next pleasure rush just in time, but never as efficiently as by never becoming conscious. It’s certainly good that they’re happy, they’re avoiding suffering always just in time before it gets too bad, but they could have done it even better by not being born and then they wouldn’t have missed anything.

The fact alone that a heroin addict feels happy when they get their new heroin fix to alleviate their already existent addiction doesn’t answer the question of whether or not it was sensible to start becoming addicted to heroin in the first place.

The problem is that most people are not really deeply contemplating it like this when they make this point, if it’s possible that a vast majority of humans are delusional enough to iamgine that they will still exist after they’ve died and then look down upon earth, lamenting all the fun things they’re now going to miss out on, then it’s also possible for them to have a similarly flawed intuition when it comes to what happened before their birth, that’s how we sometimes imagine death.

They only know their state of being addicted to life, so obviously they think that if they didn’t come into existence, they would have somehow missed out on something, ”I’m glad I’ve been born!” they say, as if something bad would have happened if they didn’t, imagining their needs, wants, desires somehow existing independently of them, as if if no one were to be left on planet earth anymore, it would somehow be a great problem that no chocolate cake is being enjoyed.

They imagine ”I wouldn’t have existed” from the perspective of ”I already exist, and then I would feel really bad that I don’t exist!”.

So of course, when they see it in this delusional context of ”if I didn’t get born, I would have missed out on my first blowjob!”, they’re going to think that dying of lung cancer is worth it later on, as they intuitively imagine that they would have otherwise suffered from missing out on that first blowjob from the depths of the unborn purgatory, but once you remove that delusional perception, it’d be questionable why they would think any risk of suffering is worth it, considering the absence of their pleasure couldn’t possibly have never manifested as a real harm of any sort.

You may even rationally comprehend that you weren’t a ghost lamenting that you were missing out on the pleasures of life before you were born, or that you won’t be one after you’ve died, but it’s an irrational fear that you cannot fully get rid of, such as arachnophobia, fear of spiders. For instance, you might understand that a little spider is not going to harm you, but you can still irrationally feel that it is an extreme threat, fear of non-existence is similarly irrational as arachnophobia.

Also, why would the fact that some of the organisms are happy justify the unhappy ones?

I could argue if I impose the risk of trauma on others by giving them surprise anal sex, I might make some of them happy, but this doesn’t justify all the ones that are unhappy about it.

Using procreation to make the procreated victims happy is in fact even less justifiable than surprise anal sex, because as stated before, non-existent children have absolutely no desire to be made happy in the first place because they don’t exist, at least the surprise ass rapist could argue there are some people that would want to get randomly fucked in the ass.

Another point is also that it’s socially unacceptable to criticize life likely due to the exact delusions I’ve explained here, such as life’s pleasures being a necessity for the non-existent. With life, similar to a rape I could argue, some won’t be too bothered by the suffering in it, some will rationalize it, some will be completely destroyed by it.

But a lot of it is rationalization, there are a few suicide attempts here and there every day, there are a few individuals here and there that need to use drugs every day to get through said day.

  • If the child doesn’t like life, it can still always opt out by committing suicide, they have a choice, so it’s all fair. Why don’t you just kill yourself if life is so bad? If it were really so bad, you would kill yourself.

Giving your victim the chance to commit suicide doesn’t justify you imposing on them.

If I locked a girl into my basement and raped her every day but also gave her a rope to hang herself with, this wouldn’t justify what I have done, I already caused a great harm that isn’t nullified by her being given the chance to commit suicide.

This is exactly the callous attitude the life apologist demonstrates in this scenario though, if the girl really didn’t want to get raped, she would have killed herself, this proves that rape must be good and it’s perfectly justified to impose rape.

If the birthed really didn’t want life’s suffering, they would have killed themselves, this proves that life must be good and it’s perfectly justified to impose life.

Obviously, if someone wants to kill themselves, you already harmed them, it’s too late, something happened to them in life that they didn’t want to happen to them because you created that opportunity by making them sentient. What makes even more idiotic is that those pro-lifers are frequently also opposed to the right to die on top of being in favor in reproduction, so the rapist throws you a rope to hang yourself, but if you do it when he notices it, he’ll rape you again and won’t let you go until you pretend to like it.

There are also practical reasons for those opposed to procreation to keep living.

While you’re here, you can also spread the message and possibly reduce more suffering than by just killing yourself, so it doesn’t logically follow that just because one dislikes and disagrees with x circumstance, they would immediately try to get away from x circumstance.

See it this way – if you take issue with being sent to a war, you aren’t exactly solving the problem of the war by just killing yourself, if you kill yourself, they are going to send someone else into it anyway, so you might as well try to persuade other people to stop blindly supporting the war and to minimize harm/cruelty in the war as it is taking place.

How is the overall problem of war solved by you shooting yourself in the head? It is not.

Then, life is also an addiction, and the ethical question here is whether or not it’s a good idea to impose the addiction. I am not wrong for pointing out that the addiction is harmful just because I’m not ready to quit living myself, just like a cigarette smoker would similarly not be wrong for pointing out that cigarette addiction comes at a cost, just because they aren’t ready to quit smoking, claiming otherwise would be an appeal to hypocrisy.

The natalist can be seen as the irresponsible heroin addict here, not willing to admit that heroin addiction doesn’t only have benefits, so to reinforce this view, they inject unsuspecting victims that didn’t consent to it in any way with heroine, then if you criticize them, they say ”if you’re opposed to me injecting unsuspecting victims with heroin, you have to quit the heroin yourself first!” – No I don’t, that simply doesn’t follow, just like it doesn’t follow that I have to quit the life addiction myself in order for it to be true that life addiction comes with many great harms.

  • But everything we do in life carries certain risks of damage, that doesn’t mean we should avoid doing it altogether. When you get into the car or sun, you risk getting into an accident or skin cancer, but we still do it, we just take certain precautions like putting on the seatbelt and sun creme.

Producing a child is completely different from all these scenarios because in that case, there is no downside to not producing it for the non-existent child that could justify this lack of absolute risk aversion.

In most cases, we think of 100% risk aversion as absurd because it results in the very thing that it is trying to prevent – suffering. When you avoid everything, like driving a car for instance, you’re suffering from not being able to drive anymore, a great loss for you, so you suffer a loss even though you avoided driving altogether.

The child’s soul on the other hand can never suffer from not having its consciousness activated, it is not writhing in pain in the unborn purgatory, lamenting that the parents are too risk-averse to bring it into existence, there is in fact no unborn purgatory where children are suffering from a desire to be brought into existence, procreators 100% create all suffering of desire.

You might argue that there is a downside of suffering for the person that wants to create the child but shouldn’t, this is however looking at it from the perspective of the perpetrator, that’s like lamenting that you can’t steal someone else’s money and take it to a gambling house.

Notably, it is obviously not even you taking the risk for yourself of course, you are forcing someone else to get into the car or sit in the sun, you are taking a risk for someone else, telling them they ought to think the risk is worth it.

  • Suffering can be good as well, there is great value in suffering sometimes, makes you grow stronger and resilient. Injection is painful, but it’s still good, and what about masochists?

Suffering, negative sensation, is always inherently negative, saying suffering can be good is like saying wet can be dry or hot can be cold. Sometimes you are forced to decide between experiencing two sufferings and go for the lesser of two evils, that doesn’t mean negative sensations are good.

You are not getting the injection because the sensation of the injection itself is a good, you’re taking the injection only to avoid a greater suffering as it grants you immunity to illness, it is not the stab of the needle by itself that constitutes a positive, if you could grant yourself immunity to illness by just snapping your fingers, you would do that instead.

In all these situations, pain is only incorrectly indentified as a good because it helps to prevent a greater pain. Fact is, if you could manage to prevent the same pain in a less painful manner, such as by snapping your fingers, you would choose to do so. Plus, there are tons of pains in life that are not instrumental to avoiding a greater pain.

Even if you are an extreme masochist ramming a needle in your urethra, you are arguably still avoiding a suffering. You are suffering from a strong sexual impulse to ram a needle into your urethra, sexual frustration, tension, stress. To mitigate the frustration, tension, stress, you have to ram said needle into your urethra and accept this in this case lesser suffering to mitigate the greater suffering from the strong sexual impulse to ram it into your urethra, that still doesn’t prove negative sensation to somehow simultaneously be positive.

Of course, there is also only need to endure suffering to avoid greater suffering once you create the victim and throw the child into a state of suffering/deprivation by initiating its consciousness in the first place, the suffering caused by procreation is not a form of suffering that is instrumental to avoidance of greater long term suffering.

The non-existent child right now doesn’t need to go through any injections to avoid the greater bad of suffering from various illnesses, it can’t become ill as it doesn’t exist, so the creation of the problem in the first place still remains unjustified, there is no unborn purgatory from which children need to be rescued to avoid a worse suffering.

The injection might be necessary once the proneness to illness exists, but the natalist in question has still not explained coherently why the proneness to illness has to exist in the first place, so the child would still be perfectly rational for blaming the parents for creating the possibility for them to get sick.

In the case of reproduction, you don’t have to cause suffering to the child to prevent it from experiencing greater suffering, it’s not one of these scenarios, you create suffering and proneness to greater suffering.

  • But what if we just make a utopia then where everything is good, you could have a constant orgasm and there would be no more suffering.

It would still just be a bandaid rather than a cure, pleasure and suffering exist compared to each other. If you have more pleasure of satiation, you have less suffering of hunger, and if you have more suffering of hunger, you have less pleasure of satiation. So if there are varying degrees of pleasuredness in the utopia scenario, it’s not a scenario of true perfection, you’re still always trying to arrive at a greater state of pleasure/evade the punishment of becoming bored with the last one.

The concept of goods in existence without suffering is contradictory, it’s like saying you have an extinguished fire without there having been a fire first, or a cured infection without there having been an infection first, a desire has to be able to be unfulfilled for it to be able to be fulfilled, so if there’s the good (fulfilled desire), then there’s the threat of the bad (unfulfilled desire), you still need to give these organisms unfulfilled desires to fulfill, suffering to alleviate, where else is their relief supposed to come from?

If I’m not in any way hungry for it, the perfect meal won’t be the perfect meal anymore. If I’m not in any way horny for it, the perfect pussy won’t be the perfect pussy anymore. So we still have to create suffering to then later on constantly keep relieving, which isn’t as good as zero suffering, and the pleasure remains disposable in the sense that the non-existers still won’t feel deprived of it.

But let’s suppose that we had a utopia in the sense that all of our desires could be fulfilled, the endless orgasm utopia where we could alleviate our deprivations just in time before it gets out of hand and mutates into long-lasting periods of unalleviated suffering.

Even if future technology granted us the perfect fire extinguishing means, whatever that would look like, it wouldn’t be a reason to just randomly set a forest on fire, it would be worse without the perfect fire extinguishing means in place, but no fire would still be less bad than a perfectly extinguished one.

Even if we discovered the perfect, immediate cure for AIDS, I still wouldn’t inject myself with AIDS blood just to then thereafter give myself the cure for AIDS again.

And in the same way, it would only be rational to ultimately view our desire. It’s good to fulfill it in the sense that you avoid an otherwise unfulfilled desire, suffering, and pleasure, relief is what you obtain when you do that, but still wouldn’t crave if you didn’t exist.

Zero desire > fulfilled desire > unfulfilled desire.

No AIDS > cured AIDS > uncured AIDS.

That’s the point, perfectly solved problem > unsolved problem, but no problem > solved problem, you can’t get any better than no problem, zero suffering is the least bad.

If the goal is to not have a broken vase, the best step to take is to abstain from throwing it onto the floor in the first place instead of throwing it onto the floor and then perfectly repairing it again, it’s better than imperfectly repairing it, but it doesn’t get any better than not breaking it to begin with.

Important to point out is also that even if we presuppose that it is possible to have a solved problem without a problem, or that the existence of perfect problem solving means would obligate us to or justify the creation of problems, it would certainly not be a justification for causing suffering by reproduction right now, it would be like setting a forest on fire before the waterhose is even invented, just because you hope that the water hose might be invented one day, or injecting someone with the AIDS blood just because you hope for an AIDS cure in the distant future.

  • ”If we stopped breeding, we’d go extinct.”

That’s like saying if we stopped slavery, slave owners would go out of business.

You haven’t justified slavery yet, so the fact alone that slave owners would lose their jobs if we stopped slavery is not an argument for the continuation of slavery.

You’re just making an assumption that slavery must be great by saying that if it were to end, it wouldn’t be here anymore, which is wrong.

It’s entirely begging the question – ”if we stop the creation of sentient life, then there won’t be any more sentient life, which is why stopping the production of more sentient life is bad”, this is a bad argument similar to saying ”stopping slavery is bad, because then there won’t be any more slavery, and that is why stopping slavery is bad”.

Also, of course, every little need, want, desire anyone could possibly have, including the need to see life flourish is a problem that has been caused by sentient life existing. If sentient life no longer existed, we would no longer have the problem of desiring for it to exist. There’s no problem that can’t be solved by non-existence, including your impulse to see existence continue.

Wildlife suffering.

The argument for antinatalism of course also applies to other animals, sentient organisms try to avoid suffering their enitre lives and the best way they can achieve that is by not being alive in the first place. Suffering is always bad, sometimes in life you might be forced to bear one suffering to avoid even greater suffering in the future, like a vaccination to avoid a more painful disease, or a boring school life to get a good job liberating you from poverty later on, but suffering itself is always a bad thing.

By creating sentient life, you create suffering of everyday needs and urges, such as hunger, thirst, constipation, sexual frustration, fatigue, all kinds of little irritations and proneness to much worse suffering in the future, e.g. car accidents, drug addiction, cancer, etc, the list goes on and on, for animals in the wild it might be being eaten alive or having parasites in your asshole.

Life also contains good experiences, but you would not have suffered from missing them if you simply never came into existence.

When you exist, you need to chase pleasure, or you are punished with suffering, but when you simply don’t exist, while you won’t experience pleasure, you will not experience any suffering as a result of it either.

  • Eat or get hungry (or experience appetite or boredom, also suffering, someone can suffer from being put in prison and no longer being able to eat their favorite dessert).
  • Drink or get thirsty.
  • Shit or constipate.
  • Cum or get tense.
  • Sleep or fatigue.
  • Socialize or get lonely.

So on and so forth.

Meeting your needs is good, but is it a problem if your needs simply never exist to begin with? No. You can perfectly stitch up a wound, that doesn’t mean you’re better off than never having been wounded in the first place, that’s the game you’re in once your instantiation of consciousness exists, always trying to heal a wound/preserve yourself.

You can fulfill your needs, you can avoid suffering temporarily, but never as efficiently as by just never becoming conscious in the first place. Creating unfulfilled need, want, desire for the good of fulfilling them, creating suffering for the good of alleviating it is about as absurd as to give someone an illness for the good of then treating that illness.

It’s true your victim avoided the pain of a stabwound going untreated, better a bandaid than no bandaid, it’s true that they obtained a sensation of great relief from getting a painkiller, but you could have still done better by just not sticking the knife into their chest in the first place.

Neither is speciesism in any way a more coherent viewpoint than racism, it’s bad to have certain things happen to you, like having a knife pushed in your throat, because you are sentient, you can feel things, it’s not your white skin color, gender, or even your species that makes having a knife pushed into your throat into a problem.

It’s bad to get stabbed, because it simply produces bad sensations, it’s not bad because you contain a certain skin color or human DNA, as you could be braindead and still contain said skin color or human DNA, but it would no longer produce badness if someone stabbed you, so both racism and speciesism fail, they’re just as irrelevant in determining whether or not it’s bad to get stabbed.

Sentience is the only important characteristic here, destroying non-sentient things cannot produce badness, unless it is of course in another sentient organism, i.e a family member might be offended that you destroy a braindead human with a sledgehammer, but it doesn’t produce any badness in the braindead human, but if the family members indeed care much more about their plasma tv, it’s arguably worse to smash that plasma tv in with a hammer.

So the conclusion is that creating sentient life is bad, and so is being a speciesist who only apply antinatalism to human animals.

Ideally, both humans and other animals would stop reproducing, and indeed, when we look at other animals, we can see that in a lot of ways they’re suffering a great deal as well, that’s because they are less intelligent and therefore not as able to work toward reducing suffering.

  • Many are dependent on the nutrients in the flesh of other animals.
  • Hyenas eat their prey alive.
  • Lions dominate other lion groups and often brutally kill off the lion cubs.
  • Many female spiders, some octopuses kill and eat the male after the mating ritual.
  • Ducks commit organized gang rape.
  • Chimps sometimes fight brutal wars where they rip each others body parts off.

Here even many animal rights supporters are indeed complete hypocrites, they’re still suffering from a pro-nature and a pro-life bias, they don’t wish to interfere with nature to stop the suffering of wild animals or as much as with farmed animals, which already frequently becomes apparent when carnists ask them (though in that case most likely with dishonest intent) why it is ok for the lion to kill a zebra for flesh, but not for us to kill a pig for its flesh.

There is actually no great answer to this, the common rebuttal is that:

  • The lion doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to acknowledge it is harming others, humans are harming others intentionally, other animals don’t.

If that is the issue, then there would be no point in stopping a mentally retarded person on the IQ level of a lion from brutally raping someone, to make it more similar, let’s say it’s his mentally retarded sister on the IQ level of a zebra. But the intelligence level of the harm causer doesn’t diminish the harm they cause, the outcome, suffering, is still bad nonetheless.

Why don’t these nature apologists offer themselves to be eaten by lions then, if the fact that lions don’t understand what they’re doing makes what they’re doing not bad?

Intent is ultimately irrelevant, if a rapist with severe mental retardation, schizophrenia or multiple personalities raped you, you’d still want it to stop. If you were the one eaten by the bear, you’d still want it to stop. If you were tortured by a virus or machine with no intent, you’d want it to stop.

  • The lion is a carnivore by nature, needs the flesh of others for survival.

Then again, why don’t these nature apologists offer themselves to be eaten by lions, the lion needs (nutrients in) flesh to survive, so they should have no problem with being eaten by one, the lion derives nutrients from human just like from gazelle flesh.

There should be no problem with a hypothetical, physically stronger (than human) carnivorous alien species hunting or farming us for our flesh, because they’re naturally carnivorous, so that somehow makes the suffering we experience no longer relevant, as long as the aggressor is deriving nutrients from it, it’s acceptable.

Pain is not any less bad by it being caused or experienced by those that aren’t able to grasp what they are caught up in or just because someone is deriving nutrients from their victim, it’s in fact irresponsible of us not to interfere with this completely unfair game, we’re the only ones that can really do anything about it.

It’s the pain in and of itself that is the problem, not the intent to cause it. The only reason why we care about bad intent is because it tends to lead to a bad outcome later on, e.g. a serial rapist and killer in solitary confinement may have bad intent to cause harm to others, but it’s not a problem anymore, because he’s unable to do it, a virus has no intent to cause harm but you’d still try to prevent it from infecting you.

To a wild boar it doesn’t matter whether it is torn apart by a wild predator or tortured by some sociopathic factory farm worker, the suffering is just as bad, if not worse in many cases, torture in the wild has been going on for much longer than in factory farms and there’s no harm mitigation whatsoever, no rules against eating someone alive.

When it comes to wildlife suffering, all the arguments that they refute when carnists make them suddenly come out of the woodwork.

  • It is what it is.
  • That’s just nature, therefore it’s good.
  • That’s how it always has been.

Often times in discussions about what is done to non-human animals by human animals, hypotheticals involving mentally handicapped humans are utilized, as one of the great differences between humans and other animals are their different levels of intelligence, but obviously being less intelligent doesn’t make being harmed no longer bad, so if it’s bad to torture humans that are no more intelligent than pigs, then it’s bad to torture pigs as well.

A good way to demonstrate the horrors of the dairy industry would for instance be to just imagine I’m doing what they are doing with a mentally handicapped human female.

Forcefully impregnate her, steal her kids that are due to their young age no more intelligent than cows anyway, tie them up so they can’t move for their flesh to stay tender, then slaughter them all. Yes, they are all less intelligent, but it’d obviously still be bad if I did that, it would generate negative sensations.

  • The thought experiment for nature and wildlife suffering would just be leaving the severely intellectually disabled in a forest to fend for themselves.

Imagine we isolate all the severely intellectually disabled into an asylum into an abandoned forest somewhere, cut off by a wall or some such object from our general public.

They desperately search for berries in the forest, try to cannibalize each other when food resources are scarce, they die of all sorts of accidents or infectious diseases in said forest they don’t know how to prevent, and once in a while they manage to get on top of another and produce more having the overall same legacy.

This would almost certainly be seen as a problem, the same thing essentially happens in the wild, which is by most not acknowledged as a problem at all, even as something to be preserved, frequently justified by simply pointing to the fact that this is mother nature, therefore it must go on as it is, which is no better than justifying the forest experiment by simply pointing out that it is indeed the abandoned retard forest, so therefore, it must be good because it exists.

That’s just an is-ought fallacy – it’s like you discovered the torture chamber of a serial killer and didn’t call the police because the torture chamber exists, so you figured that what’s taking place inside it must be good, otherwise the torture chamber wouldn’t exist, it exists so it must be fine.

This is a faulty conclusion, because just because something exists, that doesn’t mean that it generates good outcomes for sentient organisms.

It exists, therefore it should keep existing, that’s the assumption.

The blinding difference here is human DNA again, but the suffering endured in the wild is the same as suffering endured in the abandoned retard forest, human DNA alone doesn’t determine your capacity to suffer, human fetuses prior to reaching consciousness and braindead human vegetables being the greatest examples of this, so there’s no reason why we should interfere with the forest experiment for such an insignificant reason but not nature in general.

Both contain tremendous amounts of suffering in the same way and no one is harmed by not being brought into existence, so we should interfere with both the abandoned retard forest and the jungle.

If any of these nature apologists had parasites in their assholes, they would insist on removing them. If we dumped them into the location they are defending, the wild, and they would still have parasites in their assholes, they would still insist on removing them, so in what exact location suffering is happening is rather irrelevant, it’s the suffering part itself that is the problem, regardless of its location.

If the big, strong, 6’5 tall, tiger IQ human sexually assaulted everyone the nature defenders would see it as a problem, even if he doesn’t know any better than to sexually assault everyone, even if he only assaults mentally handicapped girls that aren’t much more intelligent than zebras, you wouldn’t insist on creating more individuals like that because you understand the negative consequences of doing so.

When they a see a tiger causing harm, they get a big boner because it looks so majestic and has pretty tiger stripes too, so that’s different when the tiger is torturing a zebra to death, so we shouldn’t stop this from happening.

Conservation efforts focused on keeping these animals breeding forever are simply misguided (when we’re talking about something directly related to the welfare of already existent animals it’s a different story of course), wild animals will go through much more suffering if we try to preserve them at all costs, first off because they’ll be born which always results in suffering, need, want, desire, just as with humans, the global antinatalist argument based on antifrustrationism applies to both, secondly because of the particularly faulty and destructive manners they are wired to act.

Extinction is benign and should be seen as the end goal, there is no tiger or elephant right now in the unborn (non-human) animal purgatory lamenting the absence of more tigers and elephants roaming planet earth, you wouldn’t be doing these animals a favor by breeding more of them.

These animals first and foremost want to avoid suffering, just like humans by the way, it’s just that they don’t have any of the emotional complications and delusions going on that humans developed as a way to deal with suffering.

A wildebeast with its entrails ripped out of its asshole by a hyena isn’t laying around in the grass, hoping that no one comes to euthanize it because that would violate its religious belief that getting your entrails ripped out of your asshole by a hyena is god’s test and you must endure it to go to wildebeast heaven one day, these are idiotic coping mechanisms and rationalizations only humans come up with to justify all the suffering that surrounds them in life.

How one should go on about preventing all the other animals from reproducing as peacefully as possible for everyone involved is of course a different and more complicated question, but the first step certainly is to at least recognize that negative sensations aren’t suddenly less negative just because they’re being produced in a different location in the wild.

That seems frequently to be the attitude of both carnists and some number of vegans that seem to think non-human animal suffering is somehow only bad if it’s happening at the hands of humans, or worse, anthropocentric antinatalists, vhemt (voluntary human extinction movement) types that think somehow the other animals would be better off if just humans went extinct, which is about as idiotically irresponsible as thinking it’s a good idea to leave a severely mentally retarded person in a forest somewhere and move to a different country forever.

Antinatalism, family obligations and parental delusions.

An idea frequently instinctively held by society is that children ought to be grateful to their parents for having created and taken care of them, perhaps are even in debt to them in some way for that.

When you take into account the certain basic facts of life, primarily that:

  • all the goods in life, like food and water, are only needed once a need, a condition of suffering, like hunger and thirst via the creation of the child is created
  • that the child really didn’t exist before it actually existed, somehow worse off in an unborn purgatory, writhing in agony over not being alive
  • what the parents in reality did by creating said child is creating a desire machine that needs constant satisfaction, a deficit, not doing some poor child from the unborn purgatory a favor by finally forcing it into earth-bound existence

this whole viewpoint that children ought to be grateful for being given certain goods by their parents that are entirely at fault for having created the child’s need, want, desire to obtain those goods starts to seem rather absurd to anyone who is halfway rational.

  • A good analogy to use here is the fireman starting a fire to put it out again in order to play the hero.

You wouldn’t be grateful to a fireman for saving you from a burning house if he’s at fault for having caused the fire in the first place, of course, extinguishing the problem again after deliberately having created it is the very least he can do, virtuous would only be if he extinguished a fire that came about by accident or was set by someone else.

And breeders do a similar crime, they create a problem, a deficit by creating an organism with needs, wants, desires that it is at least at this young stage more or less incapable of fulfilling itself, then fulfill some of its needs, wants, desires and expect gratitude in return for it from their victim despite having caused that very problem of the child experiencing conditions of need, want, desire in the first place because they didn’t abort it before it had the chance to become conscious.

  • ”But I fed them and put a roof over their head, so they should be grateful!”

But I saved the child from drowning in the sea after I deliberately threw it into the sea, so they should be grateful! But I pulled the knife out of that person’s chest after I deliberately stuck the knife into the chest, so they should be grateful!

Yes, after having created their need to ingest food and not freeze to death on the street, in a disabled state where they are incapable of even fulfilling those needs themselves, you fulfilled some of their needs that you yourself created.

So you essentially put someone into a degraded condition, then took care of the problem you intentionally caused, you defecated all over the floor and expect a medal for at best halfway wiping it off again (never fully because the children will experience needs, wants, desires with no failsafe guarantee of fulfillment until they are dead).

Your parents wiping the shit off of your ass after having created you in a disabled state of deprivation where you’re unable to do it yourself was the very least they could do, to let the shit rot on your asshole until you get some kind of disease would have just been worse than it already was to create someone in said state of disability and deprivation.

It would be like the fireman instead just letting the house he deliberately set on fire burn into the ground, so what do these narcissistic breeders expect, the nobel prize for altruism for not having committed an extra horrific violation like first creating a hungry child and then letting it starve to death on the streets afterwards?

  • ”Some children don’t have parents that care for them so be more grateful!”

Some firefighters that set people’s houses on fire in order to play the hero by coming to the rescue and extinguishing it again afterwards, don’t actually even extinguish the fires that they deliberately set again, and just let the whole thing burn into the ground instead. I could have done that as well, ingrate, you should be thanking me that after I set your house on fire deliberately, I saved you from burning to death in it, I’m a true hero and wish to be acknowledged as such.

Children aren’t in debt to their parents, it’s the exact other way around, they have created the child in need of care, it didn’t create itself in that state and then offered the parents to sign a contract promising it will later on compensate them for taking care of the problem, so to brag about having taken care of it is essentially just like the fireman bragging about having extinguished the fire he deliberately created.

Parental arguments to instill obedience into their children in general are often times completely non-sensical, kind of highlighting the mentality of many procreators in fact and how they justify themselves, by might makes right, I can so I will, I’ll impose life and you have to take it in the ass.

  • ”You live with me and I take care of you, so you have to do what I say, as long as you live in my house you have to abide by my rules!”

The parents again are at fault for the child living in their house due to age related inability to move out, which they are at fault for because they have created it with the knowledge that this stage of life will exist, and because they and the rest of parents probably also made a law that says the child can’t move out until a certain age, so what the parents/slave owners making this argument are essentially saying is that because they forced someone to be dependent on them, the slave should now do as they say.

By this argument, if I abduct you and lock you into my basement, you should be obligated to suck my cock, because you live in my basement that I have forced you to live in, from which you have little to no chance of escaping successfully and I’m taking care of you.

  • ”If you don’t like my rules, 5 year old, then why don’t you move out? Oh, too bad, you can’t, so you have to do what I say!”

What kind of sadistic fascist gets off on playing this type of game, what kind of reasonably sensible and intellectually honest individual would think this is a good game to play?

The all known, apathetic towards the child’s suffering:

  • ‘Life is not fair”

Also a great insight. Life is not fair, I created life, so basically all I’m saying is that I am unfair, I create unfair circumstances.

Sorry that you don’t always get what you want, I intentionally forced you into this state of constant wanting and needing without guarantee of fulfillment because I am entirely unfair, just in case this might be helpful information to you at some point. It’s life, not me, although I created it.

It always tends to be said with this subliminal tone as if it should just be obvious to the child, as if the child supposedly has agreed to life’s unfairness in some way, so then it would be reasonable to remind the child that this is what they signed up for, as if they are repeating the guidelines of a game that the child consented to by signing a contract before being born, and now that child is being irresponsible by not following the contract, so the procreators have to remind the child of the rules, that’s the risk the child took, now they have to deal with life being unfair, should’ve thought about that before you came out of my vagina.

When in reality though, of course no one ever agrees to be made conscious, because they’re not conscious before they become conscious, so again, it’s the procreators deciding to awaken the dead into a world that they may not like, so saying ”well, that’s just life, deal with it” in that context is pretty much like randomly shoving dog shit into someone’s face and then arrogantly saying ”well, that’s just dog shit, deal with it”, as if your victim knew what was coming for them and signed up for this treatment in some way.

  • ”But kids have to learn that life is unfair and that they can’t always get what they want because life’s hard and they gotta deal with that when they grow up, little billy has to learn he can’t get the new toy so that then later on he won’t snap and rape a bitch when she refuses to let him stick his peepee in her pussy.”

So children have to learn to become desensitized to suffering, in order to avoid an even bigger amount of suffering that will face them later on, knowing how to deal with life’s suffering.

  • But why are they in a situation where they even have to try to avoid this bigger amount of suffering later on in the first place? A good question to ask.

Right, because you forced them into existence, you didn’t abort him before he became conscious.

  • And was forcing the child into existence necessary in order to help them avoid a worse form of suffering, like it is necessary once they exist and have to learn that life is unfair in order to avoid more frustration with this fundamental unfairness later on?

No, because as far as I know, we have absolutely zero evidence for the existence of an unborn purgatory in which children that are not brought into earthly bound existence are writhing in agony over not being brought into earthly bound existence, the suffering caused by procreation is not instrumental to preventing a worse harm from befalling the child.

It is only instrumental to solving some suffering in the parents, erasing one of their deficits, i.e their desire to have the child, so in the process of getting rid of that one deficit, they create a whole lifetime of deficits in an effort to fix one of their deficits, so it’s necessary for the child to learn to deal with the fact that life is unfair in the same way it’s necessary for you to learn how to deal with poverty because I just can’t give up gambling with your money, woe is me.

On life and reproduction.

(Sentient) life is a problem state demanding of constant fixing. What you do when you create life is essentially to throw something into a state of deprivation, struggling to constantly tame/fulfill their needs/wants/desires, accumulation of urges and compulsions you have imposed on it by having created it.

Imagine it as being trapped in a hole, the further you sink, the more you suffer, the closer you get to the surface, the more you feel relieved of it again, but you cannot climb out of the hole, you’ll always sink down again and have to keep struggling to remain as close to the surface of the hole as possible until you are dead.

Now that the organism has been created, it is constantly suffering, experiencing desire, deprivation. Hunger, thirst, constipation, sexual frustration, fatigue every single day to differing degrees, and proneness to worse future suffering, e.g. all sorts of accidents, drug addiction, loneliness, cancer, paralysis, the list goes on and on.

You fulfill a desire, then either a new desire pops up (e.g. appetite after hunger) or the old desire comes back in time and you’ll have to fulfill that initial desire again to avoid more suffering.

You must eat or you suffer hunger, you must drink or you suffer thirst, you must defecate or you constipate, you must breathe or you suffer suffocation, you must masturbate/have sex or you are sexually frustrated and tense, you must sleep or you fatigue, you must socialize or you feel lonely, etc.

We can use pretty much whatever example we want, we must obtain pleasure or we suffer, that’s the deal of sentient life.

Of course getting higher to the surface of the deprivation hole feels good, but would it really be an important priority to climb to the surface of the hole if you were never thrown into it in the first place? I don’t think so, I may enjoy a fresh breath of air, but I know that before I existed, there was no suffocating version of me trapped in an unborn purgatory, waiting to be brought to earth so that I can finally breathe clearly.

  • Creating a problem because mitigating and/or solving it is good.

Considering there was no kind of desire problem prior to the existence of an individual that demanded for some kind of happy moment to distract the individual, justifying reproduction on grounds of some kind of good in life is akin to justifying setting someone’s house on fire because extinguishing the fire again is good, giving someone AIDS because AIDS treatment is good, breaking someone’s leg because painkillers are good, throwing someone into the ocean because saving them from drowning is good, breaking the vase because halfway repairing it again is good, shitting on someone’s carpet because cleaning it off afterwards is good.

It’s an irrational idea, creating a (light to severe) torture mechanism just for the sake of sometimes stopping the suffering for the victim to appreciate what it’s like to not be burdened, for which they had absolutely no use prior to being burdened with it anyway, all the suffering could be prevented by abstaining from creating sentient life in the first place and no unborn child would miss out on anything, there is no child right now being tormented in the unborn purgatory waiting to be released, suffering from a need to be suffering from needs, procreators create all need.

It might be good to clean shit off of the carpet when there is already shit on it, but you wouldn’t think I’d be doing you a favor if I defecated onto your carpet for the good of cleaning it off again, most likely incompletely. It might be good to repair the vase when it is already broken, but you wouldn’t think I’d be doing you a favor if I broke it for the good of trying to repair it again, most likely incompletely.

  • To create sentient life in and of itself is to harm, you cannot reproduce without breaking the do-no-harm principle.

Let’s say I could bestow desire by snapping my fingers, or there were desire serum, so I could inject different desires into lifeforms, inject you with a substance in your sleep that makes it so that unless you stare at a red painted wall at least once a day and ejaculate into a purple cupboard, you won’t be able to fall asleep anymore.

The reason why everyone would most likely look at me as an asshole for doing that, but not their parents for giving all them all sorts of burning needs for:

  • food
  • taste satisfaction
  • shelter
  • resources you’ll have to do possibly dissatisfying work for
  • constant entertainment
  • acceptance, reassurance
  • affection
  • sex

with this need mechanism perhaps even leading to needs that are hard or nearly impossible to fulfill, which a good chunk of individuals are suffering from, like for example the need to:

  • stay healthy and simultaneously be an alcoholic or eat greasy, salty, sugary foods
  • copulate with more females than you have opportunity to copulate with
  • go back into the past you may feel more attached to than the present
  • not decompose and die, although you inevitably will anyway
  • be someone else that you are not

or perhaps even needs of which the fulfillment will directly necessitate the frustration of someone else’s needs, like for example the need to:

  • rape others for your sexual relief
  • make yourself feel superior to others by subjugating them

is because every sentient being in existence has been harmed in this way, with the evidence being that they currently exist, so you most likely assume it must be this way and take it for granted without ever questioning it, as opposed to me injecting someone with desire serum. It is simply impossible to create a sentient lifeform with the main function to suffer for constant need fulfillment without causing suffering, to create a sentient life is by itself to create suffering, it’s directly entailed.

It’s the creation of preferences that demand constant satisfaction, needing is a problem, you are in need of something, it is a deficit that if not alleviated in time will only intensify. And this is the act breeders engage in, they put you in need, similar to injecting you with heroin, except they bestow not one little deprivation by snapping fingers or using hypothetical desire serum, they create numerous desire wounds without lifelong, failsafe guarantee of bandaid supply.

In that sense, the more frustration is experienced by the victim, or the more frustration would be experienced by others if they were satisfied, the crueler the act of reproducing them – and you don’t know what the victim will win in the suffering lottery beforehand, someone is going to pull the brain tumor ticket, someone is going to pull the ”you can only orgasm if you set little kittens on fire” ticket.

You create an addiction, for example, a dependency on sex. Now perhaps the organism will always be able to find a hole to stick their penis in just in time, before the suffering gets out of hand, perhaps you’ll create an ugly elephant man experiencing lifelong loneliness though. You create an addiction, for example, a dependency on air. Now perhaps the organism will always be able to breathe in and out clearly just fine, perhaps you’ll create a child with cystic fibrosis or lung cancer though.

Every sentient organism experiences needs, wants, desires, every sentient organism is being harmed. Some victims are lucky enough to always get a painkiller just in time, others are not.

I would say that considering that if you were never put into this situation in the first place, you would not be suffering from not having your needs/wants/desires fulfilled (because you wouldn’t exist in the first place), the suffering of the ones unlucky enough to not receive painkillers is not justified.

The ugly elephant man’s unfulfilled sexual need to cum inside a hot pussy is not justified by someone else cumming inside hot pussy for him, because that happy individual would not be trapped in an unborn purgatory missing hot pussy if no one ever took the risk of creating either of these two individuals.

The dissatisfied child with leukemia isn’t justified by the happy child without leukemia, because that happy child would not be trapped in an unborn purgatory missing their life if no one ever took the risk of creating either of these two individuals.

You’re creating a problem, i.e the sentient organism needs to be pumped full of pleasure or else perhaps tragic suffering will ensue, and you created the sentient organism…with no guarantee that they can even be pumped full of sufficient pleasure at all times.

  • Our conditions of suffering may not only be impossible to alleviate sometimes, they also demand one to make others suffer in the process of alleviating your suffering, so perhaps your desire machine will also harm others.

Sometimes in this game, the relief of pain will depend on the pain of another organism. Perhaps you’ll create some organism that can only get off if they brutally rape and subjugate someone else, perhaps the organism will be an animal abuser their entire life, then in the metaphor, you basically created a fire that can only be extinguished by setting someone else on fire, you can only give the one organism the painkiller if you stab the other organism and let them bleed out on the road.

Childhood bullying is an almost instinctive, natural occurence, it’s a good example of sentient organisms being naturally in such a shitty insecure condition that they’re always aching to get a relief, even by making others suffer, in this case alleviating the suffering to be in control and feel powerful, this bad instinct comes naturally, civilized behavior on the other hand may take hard work.

It’s arguably a harm, you are creating states of deprivation, bestowing the itch that then demands to constantly be scratched, with no 100% guarantee that the itch can even be successfully scratched all of the time, possibly creating itches that can’t be scratched adequately or itches that can only be scratched by giving someone else the itch.

  • But let’s even assume we established some sort of as close to utopian scenario as possible where every suffering/need could be immediately alleviated, all itches scratched in due time.

At that point I’d be less concerned about procreation but I still wouldn’t say that it’s obligatory, because likewise, you still wouldn’t be able to miss being here if no one ever brings you into existence, so it doesn’t seem like a big deal.

It’s completely solving a problem (no life at all) vs. alleviating it as greatly as possible (utopia). If we exist in the utopia, we still have needs/wants/desires that if left unattended would lead to greater and greater suffering, but it’s just always being alleviated just in time.

Good without suffering seems impossible because pleasure and suffering exist in comparison to each other similar to bright and dark or wet and dry, when you take away suffering aou have pleasure and when you take away pleasure you have more suffering again, I don’t see any kind of neutral point in between where it’s clearly divided and then we just cut off suffering and have solved the suffering problem once and for all.

If you have more pleasure, you have less pain. If you have less pain, you have more pleasure, so I think the closest we’d get to a utopia would be perfectly alleviating the problem, always putting a bandaid on the problem just in time.

So we might create pain still, but then we always perfectly alleviate it. We have AIDS, but we also have the perfect cure for AIDS on hand. We create fires, but we also have the perfect fire extinguishing technology in place.

But if there’s no problem to fix anymore because life wouldn’t exist anymore, then I don’t think that having no utopia would be a problem either of course.

The endless orgasm utopia would be a great tool to have in place in a case someone is brought into existence and feels frustrated, but it certainly wouldn’t be a reason to create it in the first place, just like I would say that the existence of the cure for AIDS wouldn’t be a reason to infect someone with it in the first place just to then perfectly cure them of it afterwards.

The perfect problem solving means don’t obligate us to create a new problem, there is no need for desire fulfillment before desire is created, it doesn’t follow that the suffering of desire must be created merely because the perfect means to alleviate it would exist.

  • Perfectly alleviated suffering > suffering left to fester and intensify in our current world where desire fires are set with no guarantee of extinguishing

but

  • zero suffering > perfectly alleviated suffering.

And of course, on a more practical level, it simply also isn’t an argument for causing suffering by reproduction right now, just because of the possibility of a utopia in the distant future, that’d be like setting the forest on fire before the water hose was even invented.

On abortion.

  • What does it mean to create life?

When you create life, you make someone addicted to pleasure/relief, and if they don’t obtain it, they will be exposed to suffering, life entails constantly facing series of suffering, like hunger, thirst, constipation, sexual frustration, fatigue, etc.

You have deprivations imposed on you, and if you fail to alleviate deprivation, you will suffer more intensely as a result of that. At its core, you are presented with the task to alleviate deprivation, if you fail to do so, it intensifies. If you alleviate it, A. another deprivation will pop up (like appetite after hunger, now you need to eat just to avoid suffering boredom) or B. the initial deprivation (hunger) is going to return in time, and you’ll have to eat again.

You have to chase pleasure your entire life or you are subjected to harm, and the relief from harm is not guaranteed before you procreate.

  • Eat or hunger.
  • Drink or thirst.
  • Defecate or constipate.
  • Ejaculate or become tense.
  • Sleep or fatigue.
  • Breathe or suffocate.

So on and so forth.

I think it is therefore the responsible thing to do to kill a fetus. You prevent all future suffering by doing so instead of irresponsibly creating an addiction to pleasure that you cannot guarantee will be properly satisfied, and while there won’t be any pleasure, again, it won’t be a problem either, because there won’t be an addict craving for more pleasure in the first place.

Here I’d like to bring up the concept of Benatar’s asymmetry:

  • Benatar’s asymmetry:

Is the absence of pleasure really an issue if there is no one to experience it and suffer from it? Imagine this, I have both hypothetical pleasure and pain serum, if I inject said liquids into inanimate objects, they will turn conscious and either experience intense pleasure or intense pain, depending on which liquid I choose obviously.

Is injecting the pain liquid into my chair problematic? I would say yes.

Is not injecting the pleasure liquid into my chair problematic? I would say no.

  • Sentience is the only important characteristic.

Badness is necessarily something that is happening in feeling organisms, the capacity to have sensations that can either be of negative or positive value, this function is enabled by a brain and nerves that have to be developed to a certain degree. A rock cannot produce badness, neither can a fertilized egg or human fetus until a certain point.

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as “qualia“).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience

Sentience is arguably the trait that makes it most important to avoid having certain things happen to you, such as getting run over by a car, having a knife stuck in your throat or being burned, it opens the door to very negative sensations, it’s the only thing that could make it an important priority for you to avoid it.

A tree doesn’t care if it’s being burned down, it could only generate negative sensations in the sentient organisms that may in some way care about the tree, not in the tree itself. If an asteroid hits and destroys the entire planet, that can only be bad if there are sentient organisms on said planet, otherwise it is a completely insignificant event.

The reason why it’s bad when I’m harmed is not because I contain human DNA, it is bad because I have a functioning central nervous system generating a pain response, enabling me to even be harmed, it is the only reason why I am even capable of experiencing harm in the first place.

  • I think the common question of: ”Is it a human life?” is simply completely misguided to begin with, being human is not why I try to avoid being squashed.

It doesn’t matter whether or not something contains human DNA or is alive, a braindead human contains human DNA, a head of broccoli is alive too, that doesn’t make it bad to destroy a thing, many pro-lifers are simply speciesists.

If they knew they had to experience the life of a factory farmed pig getting its nuts hacked off with no anesthesia tomorrow, they wouldn’t agree to that based on their entirely misguided notion that the thing that makes not having a knife stuck in your throat important is the trait human DNA. Human life by itself is absolutely worthless, life only has extrinsic value to sentience.

It’s similar to a white slave owner accepting the torture of black slaves because they don’t contain white skin color, but having qualms about pulling the plug on his braindead white grandmother because she contains white skin color, neither white skin color nor human DNA are the characteristic that make it important to avoid torture.

Pre-sentience abortion for the ”victim” is essentially just like it’s for tomatoes when you turn them into tomato soup, it cannot matter to them.

Tomato isolated on white background

The only two common objections I consistently hear to this type of argumentation are that:

  • The fetus could become sentient in the future.

This is true of every potent sperm sample, if you don’t impede the process by flushing it down the toilet, I’m in full agreement that life starts in the testicles. Sperm lives, sperm dies, new sperm comes to life, sperm can survive in a moist environment up to 5 days.

If that argument is rejected because sperm could not ”on its own” grow into a sentient child (i.e by leeching off of a female’s body for 9 months, so not really on its own), only the morning after pill, not ejaculation would have to be a crime, as it prevents the sperm from fertilizing the egg on its own once it has been successfully ejaculated into a vagina, then realizing its potential to grow into a sentient child later on, on its own.

  • The effect is the same – no suffering.

It still cannot matter to the ”subject”, so there’s no rational reason for concern because of the aforementioned point I made, I don’t think the absence of pleasure is a problem if it doesn’t result in suffering. The fact that the fetus could become sentient doesn’t matter to the fetus right now when it’s not sentient, so it can’t possibly hurt it to be aborted, if you’re purely asexual, you can’t be deprived of sex.

I like the hypothetical of sentient grassblades. Let’s say if I let grassblades grow for 9 months, they would become sentient. Would it be a problem to mow them down before they have grown for 9 months? I’d say no, because they’re not sentient yet, so they won’t even care about never becoming sentient in the future.

If I took life away from a sentient organism, it could result in some badness as their sentience enables them feel distress in response to their life being taken away, sure, the arguably living organism that is not sentient yet cannot miss anything on the other hand.

So even if there were a hypothetical tomato that could become sentient tomorrow, if I turned it into tomato soup today, it could not possibly matter.

  • Coma patients are temporarily unconscious, but we don’t put them down either.

It doesn’t necessarily harm the coma patient to just not wake up again either, what could worry people though is to know that they could be legally euthanized if they were to fall into a coma one day, before they fall into that coma, because they have some kind of delusional death anxiety that they’re going to miss being alive once they’re dead.

So it doesn’t lead to badness to kill a sufficiently unconscious organism, but it could produce some suffering to legalize doing it, worrying others that they may not wake up again if they were to fall into a coma, that’s the slight distinction.

The fertilized egg/embryo/fetus was never conscious before, when it was a sperm, it never worried that if it were to fertilize an egg one day, it may be aborted by some evil, uncaring monster although it wished to become a fully conscious child one day, so in the case of an abortion as opposed to coma patients, we don’t have this whole problem.

And again, some organisms that live outside of wombs also have utility to helping others, I could argue it’s bad to pull the plug on someone who has to take care of a child, or a scientist who is about to find the cure for AIDS. We don’t live in a vacuum, the fetus kind of does.

  • What if the fetus is already sentient though?

If the fetus is unfortunately already able to suffer, without any great debate now about when exactly that happens, just presupposing the fetus is, then the same goes as for every other organism, if it’s killed entirely painlessly, without any suffering involved, it still wouldn’t be bad. It cannot be intrinsically harmful, it could only be extrinsically harmful, as in:

  • Family members and acquaintances might miss the painlessly killed person.
  • If we legalized this act of painless killing, you may scare others they’re next in line.
  • You prevented the person from reducing more suffering in other organisms.

Death is not an intrinsic harm, it can only be an extrinsic harm. This goes for late term abortion, infanticide, really any death. It’s only a problem in practice, there’s no problem with a theoretically completely painless death in principle, it prevents all future pain/suffering/harm/negative qualia.

Believing in the badness of death itself almost requires the subconscious or conscious delusion of some sort of afterlife. Even if you know that once you’re dead, it’s over, you can still be delusionally scared of things that aren’t a threat to you, arachnophobia, fear of even little spiders that you know to be harmless would be an example, and similarly irrational is fear of being dead.

Obviously, if you are dead, you no longer experience needs, wants, desires just like you didn’t before you were born, so the only thing that could be bad is your departure, you’re not going to wake up afterwards as a ghost and feel the need to come back but being unable to.

  • The general utility of the right to bodily autonomy.

Another thing to point out in general is also that even if the fetus is already sentient, that doesn’t automatically mean that the harm of the abortion outweighs the harm of forced birth.

Of course, anyone’s right to bodily autonomy isn’t absolute.

It matters like anything, only because of the existence of pain. You don’t want to get raped, generally there’s no worse harm to prevent by raping you, as in, we have to rape you or otherwise we all go to hell and burn for all eternity for example, so we write on a piece of paper that person x now has a legal entitlement not to get raped for no great reason randomly.

Fair deal, if you want to violate it, it’d be good to show evidence that you’re actually going to prevent a worse harm by doing so, and this is where pro-lifers fail.

Two organisms are connected to each other here, so if the pregnancy is unwanted by the hostess (which ideally, would be all pregnancies to begin with), we are automatically forced into a situation of having to harm one by abortion or the other one by forced birth. So if the only two options are:

  1. harm the more sentient
  2. harm the less sentient

then it’s still the lesser of two sufferings to abort than to force birthing – the fetus should be sufficiently sedated though if there’s a chance that it can suffer to some degree at that point, there’s still no adequate justification to cause unnecessary (to prevent greater) harm.

Just as when you leave the door open and an uninvited intruder comes in and refuses to leave your house, you have a right to shoot them, not torture them to death over the course of three days, that’d be doing unnecessary harm to prevent the threat.

Here pro-lifers will frequently say but the fetus is innocent, the intruder chooses to harm you, therefore it’s different. This is irrelevant, a rapist with severe mental retardation, multiple personalities or schizophrenic delusions who thinks he must rape to cure world hunger and cancer is also innocent and has a good motive in mind, that doesn’t diminish the harm caused, so it’s probably still better to defend yourself.

Sometimes two organisms are connected to each other and you have to harm one either way, e.g. a cat has an ixodid tick or a tapeworm. All suffering is bad, perhaps you’ll cause some suffering to the slightly sentient tick or tapeworm, but certainly much less than if you let the parasite inside the cat’s asshole, causing worse suffering to the cat.

Pro-lifers would have more of a point if they demonstrated the suffering of the fetus to be worse, more intense than the suffering of the hostess, if pro-lifers could legitimately prove that the fetus has a soul and its soul is after the abortion forever suffering in a purgatory for aborted fetuses, getting raped by demons with pitchforks, then of course it’d be better to take that mother’s right to bodily autonomy away.

In that case, the forced-birth rhetoric would indeed start to make a lot more sense, granting bodily autonomy in that scenario would lead to a much worse outcome, but that is what makes the forced-birth view so absurd in our reality, because abortion does not lead to the more suffering producing outcome, to the contrary, it greatly prevents and reduces suffering.

UPDATE:

What if the fetus is already sentient?

That’s indeed a more complicated question, I have no qualms with anything non-sentient being killed, and technically I don’t think the painless killing of a sentient organism is a problem either.

If the non-existence before existence isn’t harmful, neither is the non-existence after you died harmful, it’s the same non-existence, and the organism won’t miss pleasure. If I’m not sad about my non-existent sibling that was never born not experiencing happiness, and I’m not upset about a potato not being able to experience happiness, why would it bother me that a corpse cannot experience happiness? They all have in common that they don’t miss it.

So what I’m saying is that all that can actually be harmful is the process of you dying and its external consequences (sad family members, friends, etc).

However, in practice I still don’t take the view that you should just walk around trying to euthanize as many people as possible, there would be practical issues with that, it would have lots of negative side effects, so it seems to me I would think this is simply a case by case kind of thing if it can be done rather painlessly, admittedly I’m not an expert on that subject – so I can’t really comment that much at what point a fetus is sentient and it might be ethically problematic to squash it, I won’t declare it’s always right.