Desire serum – a thought experiment.

Most people would probably agree that if I made someone addicted to a drug like heroin deliberately and then locked them in a basement room without heroin, leaving them to experience the suffering of withdrawal, squirming in deprivation, that would be unethical, I’m making them suffer by creating an addiction and leaving them to starve, I should have just not done that.

Now let’s say hypothetically I had desire serum – not heroin, it’s just liquid that contains any possible random desire one could think of.

Some trivial, like the desire to eat spaghetti with tomato sauce, some unrealistic, like the desire to transform into a different animal or travel back into the past, some that would require hurting others in order to fulfill, like the desire to rape and torture for gratification.

I take that stuff and inject it into people in their sleep without knowing their life circumstances, gambling with how this will affect them in the future. Perhaps they wake up the next day craving a certain type of meal, perhaps they will crave to live in a different country, perhaps they will crave to become someone they are not or travel into the future, perhaps they will crave to rape a kitten with a sharp object – I don’t know.

Would that be ethical? I think the answer is no.

And that in a sense sums up why I’m opposed to procreation, reproduction of conscious life. A conscious lifeform is essentially a desire machine – a pleasure addict. We have to chase pleasure/relief, or we are subjected to the alternative of suffering/harm, having a child is creating a slave to pleasure.

Eat or hunger.

Drink or thirst.

Shit or constipate.

Masturbate or become sexually frustrated and tense.

Socialize or get lonely.

Sleep or fatigue.

Breathe or suffocate.

So on and so forth. Pleasure or suffering. More pleasure of satiation, less suffering of hunger. More suffering of hunger, less pleasure of satiation.

Fulfill a desire, like hunger, now a new one pops up, like appetite, now you have to eat dessert to avoid boredom, or in time, the old desire will simply come back and now you’ll have to eat just to avoid starvation again – we’re desire machines.

  • It’s fair to say that before procreating, you also don’t know how this will turn out for the victim.

Perhaps they will largely experience trivial desires, perhaps unrealistic to fulfill ones, perhaps those that require harming someone else, so you are creating an addict to pleasure without guarantee of them always being able to get their fix, and if they don’t get it, they suffer, they are harmed, that’s how sentient life works.

No certainty how tormenting the desires will be.

No certainty how long lasting the fulfillment of those desires will be.

No guarantee the desires can even realistically be fulfilled.

No guarantee that the desires won’t require the victim to harm someone else to fulfill.

So it’s very similar to the hypothetical of desire liquid, you’re creating an addict with no guarantee that they’ll be able to get their pleasure fix to prevent them from suffering. You force a pleasure addict into an existence where there is no guarantee that they’ll be able to obtain whichever pleasure is needed to prevent painful withdrawal symptoms.

Some desires might be easy to fulfill, like the desire to eat a certain meal, some are just basic needs/wants/desires. It’s already rather high maintenance though and not every pleasure addict/desire machine gets what they need to be properly satiated.

  • The desire to eat.
  • The desire to drink.
  • The desire for taste satisfaction (appetite).
  • The desire for constant entertainment (boredom, something we deal with all the time).
  • The desire for sex.
  • The desire for affection, acceptance, reassurance.

But many of the desires that exist can also be hard to fulfill, require unrealistic measures to be taken, might be impossible to fulfill.

  • The desire to live an unhealthy lifestyle but simultaneously stay healthy.
  • The desire to travel into the past.
  • The desire to travel into the future.
  • The desire to have more sexual/romantic partners than you are able to find.
  • The desire to be someone else you are not, alter your body.
  • The desire to not decompose and rot away, although you inevitably will anyway.

And some of the desires will also necessitate harming others, making their desires unfulfilled in order to fulfill them.

  • The desire to rape.
  • The desire to torture others for sexual gratification.
  • The desire to subjugate others to gain a sense of superiority.
  • The desire to believe in religious fairytale stories (to gain comfort) that subjugate others.
  • The desire to become violent towards others (aggression/anger).

Bullying, rape, serial killings – you name it.

So while you aren’t forcibly making someone addicted to heroin and then locking them in your basement room without any heroin, you are risking creating that scenario of experiencing intense deprivation, you create the pleasure addiction with no guarantee of absolute fairness, where the victim is always guaranteed to get whatever they need to avoid suffering.

You create someone with a need for movement, they desire to move their limbs, an addiction we usually just take for granted to be satiated at all times, and then they get hit by a car and are paralyzed for the rest of their life.

  • But even if one desire machine/pleasure addict always obtained their pleasure fix just in time, fulfilled every desire just in time before the suffering got out of hand, without harming anyone else in the process, they still wouldn’t miss their life if you never created them, so I still don’t think they justify all the deprived, suffering addicts.

Child A is experiencing a desire for christmas gifts and is happy upon receiving gifts on christmas, child B is also tormented by such a desire and dies of leukemia before christmas, not getting their wish of a perfect christmas fulfilled.

I believe it’s within reason for me to say that if we didn’t risk creating either of these children by stopping reproduction, child A would not be trapped in some kind of pre-birth torture chamber, horribly tormented over their lack of christmas gifts, crying their eyes out over no gifts.

So why create child B? Child A would not miss happiness if they didn’t exist, so don’t risk child B.

The would-be happy ones would not miss their happiness if they didn’t exist, their addiction would not exist, so there’d be no unresolved cravings anywhere else if you simply abstain from creating the cravings in the first place, so why risk creating unhappy ones in the process? No matter how great your life supposedly is, it not existing would have not hurt you in the least.

That’s of course a huge factor here, it’d be a different story if the pleasure addiction already somehow existed outside of us here one earth and you could point me to some kind of unborn purgatory where children are already addicted to pleasure, but no, that’s not the case, procreators create the pleasure addiction from scratch.

If all desires could be fulfilled, I’d be less passionate about stopping procreation, the more desires can be fulfilled, the less harmful the act of procreation becomes, but I still believe that fundamentally a utopia is impossible – utopia means perfection, everything is perfect, this cannot be the case, to get your perfect pleasure, you still need to create the desire/suffering for it, if no one craves (suffering) the perfect meal, it’s not the perfect meal anymore.

Pleasure and suffering exist in direct comparison to each other, so if in the utopia there are higher and lower states of pleasure, then there is still suffering, the lower state of pleasure being the greater state of suffering (a little more satiated, a little less hungry/deprived) – so a literal utopia I don’t think exists in the first place.

Right now, procreation is completely reckless, it is just like injecting organisms with the hypothetical desire liquid, you’re forcing an organism to become addicted to pleasure with no absolute fairness guarantee that they’ll get whichever pleasure is needed to prevent them from suffering horribly.

Benatar’s asymmetry – some thought experiments.

Benatar’s asymmetry states that when one exists:

The presence of pain is bad.

The presence of pleasure is good.

Whereas when one does not exist:

The absence of pain is good.

The absence of pleasure is not bad.

The first few ones pain=bad, pleasure=good should be obvious. In and of itself, negative sensation is always negative, never positive.

Sometimes there might be situations in life where you have to tolerate one negative to avoid a greater negative, i.e get an injection to avoid the negative of a worse illness in the long run, but if you could just snap your fingers instead and be immune, you would do that, and if I only assaulted you with a needle for no benefit in return, you would decline the offer as well.

Similarly, that a rapist is gaining pleasure from raping is good, the bad thing is that he’s causing harm to the victim, but if we could just connect him to a machine that gave him intense pleasure from living in a virtual reality fantasy scenario where he’s raping people all day, that’d be good.

  • More confusing tends to be the idea that the absence of pain is good but the absence of pleasure is on the other hand not a bad thing.

I think the asymmetry can simply be seen as an acknowledgement that the whole point of obtaining pleasure is largely to avoid being in pain.

That pain is a default state of sentient existence that we are constantly seeking distraction/relief from, metaphorically kind of like a knife in your chest, and you have to take painkillers all your life to alleviate it, whereas if you are never born in the first place, there is no knife in your chest, the absence of the painkiller is only a problem when you have the knife in your chest.

Benatar also uses such an example in his book where person S (sick) has a capacity for a quick recovery, which is important, because person S is sick, person H (healthy) on the other hand has no capacity for a quick recovery, but this is irrelevant, because person H is not sick.

We have needs/wants/desires, that is a guarantee. We try to fulfill those needs/wants/desires our entire lives, and if we fulfill them, either a new set of fresh needs/wants/desires pops up (you already ate, now your appetite increases for dessert) or the old ones simply come back in time (you go back to being hungry again), rinse and repeat.

As though I’m on a treadmill, suffering behind me, relief in front of me. If I stop running, the direction I’m being pulled into is suffering. In case I reach relief, the treadmill simply extends further and now there’s relief in front of me again, and the relief I just reached will soon convert into suffering again. Or, if I wait long enough, I’ll just be pulled back into the other suffering that was behind me previously.

  • If the whole point of obtaining pleasure is to avoid being in pain, then we have an explanation for some our common intuitions and assumptions about reproduction, so let’s get into some of these examples.

One example Benatar also frequently uses is the one of preventing a bad life vs. preventing a good life. If you know you’re going to bring a severely disabled child into existence that will do nothing except to be in chronic pain for 3 years and die, you would likely consider it good to abort such a child before this happens, or if you’re a hardcore pro-lifer who thinks even killing a freshly fertilized egg is wrong, you’d think I’m an asshole if I knew my cum contained such a child and I deliberately used it to produce a child instead of flushing it.

On the other hand though, you’d have a hard time finding even some of the most insane pro-lifers who would argue that I’m doing something horrible by flushing semen that contains potentially very happy future persons down the toilet, how dare I deny the cum their happiness?

So although the severely disabled, pained child that never comes to be will not be able to appreciate that their horrible pain has been prevented, we consider it good that their pain has been prevented (absence of pain=good, even if there’s no one to feel good about it), but unless I prove that my sperm suffered as a result of being flushed down the toilet because it wanted to become a conscious child in the future, we wouldn’t think flushing it is a harm (absence of pleasure=not bad, unless there is someone to feel deprived of that pleasure).

  • I also like to use the example/experiment of making a dissatisfied population satisfied vs. creating a new satisfied population (of more individuals than the other one).

We have two planets, planet A and planet B.

On planet A, there are 1000 miserable aliens. On planet B, there is no conscious life.

We have two buttons, button A and button B.

If you press button A, the 1000 miserable aliens will receive the resources needed to satisfy them.

If you press button B, 2000 satisfied aliens will be put on planet B, while the aliens on planet A will remain in their miserable, tormented state, living lives of abject misery.

Which button should we press? By pushing button B, you would ultimately create more pleasure, but is it really important to create that pleasure when there is no one on planet B who even craves to feel said pleasure? I would say no, you should press button A.

If I could either 1. make every suffering organism on earth happy right now or 2. create a higher number (than all inhabitants of earth combined) of happy aliens on a different planet like mars, we’d have to go for the second option if we accept pleasure maximization rather than suffering elimination as the most important priority, it would create more happiness.

Even the topic of reproduction vs. adoption could be brought up here although that is somewhat of a different topic – there are already millions of need machines on this planet to be satiated, but instead you just create a new need machine. Why?

  • Pain is more painful than pleasure is pleasurable. If pleasure and pain were symmetrical, why wouldn’t you tolerate a high amount of pain for an even higher amount of pleasure? Heaven and hell scenarios.

Another important and strong point to establish the asymmetry.

Let’s say heaven and hell existed, and the deal would be that after we die, we can just choose between 1. eternal nothingness or 2. going to hell for 100, 1000, at the highest 10.000 years of the worst imaginable tortures, but then going to heaven to experience the best imaginable pleasure for all eternity afterwards.

I’m willing to bet that if we actually had this possibility in front of us that no one would with honest conviction say that they could bear going to hell first and then go to heaven afterwards, we would all choose nothingness.

But the question is why? If pain and pleasure are perfectly symmetrical, it shouldn’t be this way, even if I said it’s a million years in hell. What is a mere million years in hell measured against an eternity of the best imaginable pleasures in heaven? If you’re really convinced that pleasure is just as pleasurable as pain is painful, that we should symmetrically, rather than asymmetrically consider these things, then why not take the deal? An eternity should make up for that pain.

Over your lifetime, you’ll be subjected to two scenarios, one is 10 years of being unconscious vs. 10 years of being in hell and the other one is 10 years of being unconscious vs. 10 years of being in heaven. The deal is you can only make a clear choice in one scenario (hell or nothingness, heaven or nothingness), but in one scenario of your choosing, you’ll have to leave it up to luck and flip a coin. In which scenario will you feel more comfortable flipping a coin, will you flip a coin over which scenario you will flip a coin in?

No, you’ll be certain that not experiencing pleasure when you’re not feeling deprived of it is not that big of a deal (absence of pleasure=not bad unless it is a deprivation for someone) and you’ll be certain that avoiding hell is important even though whilst you’re unconscious, you won’t appreciate the prevention of your suffering in hell (absence of pain=good, even when there’s no one to enjoy it).

If we assume that the whole point of obtaining pleasure is to avoid pain, then we can easily make sense of all these intuitions – it’s good that the bad life has been prevented because the goal is pain avoidance, it’s not bad that the happy life has been prevented because no one is suffering as a result of not having a happy life in some kind of pre-birth deprivation chamber, unborn purgatory, so there’s no problem with that happiness not existing.

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

The general argument for sentiocentric (all sentient life) antinatalism is that suffering is bad, by creating life we cause a certain amount of suffering in all cases, we may also cause pleasure/relief, but you will not miss any of that pleasure/relief if you are never created in the first place, there is no unborn purgatory where anyone is trapped, suffering from a lack of pleasure.

Is the absence of pleasure in and of itself a problem? Think of a planet like mars, there’s no pleasure whatsoever going on there, but there’s also absolutely no suffering from a lack of it going on there, so I fail to see how it could be a legitimate problem.

Or similarly, imagine we had two planets, one filled with tormented, dissatisfied aliens living a life of abject misery, but the other one empty of conscious life. You could either A. Choose to give the miserable ones the resources needed to become satisfied or B. Create a higher number of happy aliens and put them on the empty planet.

I think the absence of pleasure is only a problem in so far as it causes suffering, once you’re here, you have a constant deprivation/desire problem that needs to be mended, fire could be used as a metaphor. By procreating, we give someone the problem of now having to constantly chase pleasure in order to avoid being subjected to suffering (eat or get hungry, drink or thirst, shit or constipate), some desire fires are temporarily extinguished while others are not.

If you wouldn’t accept the idea that a fireman did good by setting people’s houses on fire and extinguishing only some of them, why would you think creating desire and fulfilling only some of it is good? All our lives, we’re trying to suffer as little as possible, when the only way to truly avoid suffering is to not come into life in the first place.

So a question that is common in discussions about this topic is:

  • ”If life is so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself immediately?”

Often implying that there’s some kind of hypocrisy on part of the ones opposing life creation.

And the proper answer to that would be that if everyone who comes to these conclusions just commits suicide, there would be no one to talk about it, simple.

If you are thrown in a war and you are staunchly anti-war, it isn’t necessarily clear that the best move is to shoot yourself in the head, maybe you can convince other soldiers that the war is bad and minimize cruelty along the way, stop them from inflicting rape/torture here and there, maybe you can go home again and write a book about why you disagree with the war you were thrown in, maybe other soldiers can even do the same thing, so on and so forth.

It isn’t necessarily clear that if you disagree with x, you would necessarily free yourself from x immediately, because perhaps by staying in x you have a chance to reduce x, another example would be let’s say I wanted to convince everyone to live in a forest with me without technology.

Perhaps buying a computer and phone and using said technology to argue that point would ultimately further my goal of getting more people to give up technology and live in the forest with me, but then ultimately we’d abandon technology.

(Sentiocentric) antinatalism is against all life propagating, that problem is not stopped by just ending one life. It ends that particular suffering and all potential future suffering, yes, but not all the potential future suffering of all other organisms, so it’s not a solution.

  • But there’s also another important aspect to this, which is that giving someone the option to kill themselves doesn’t justify imposing harm on them in the first place.

It’s often said with this implication that as long as we all have the option to opt out, that somehow makes life creation a fair game, because you can just opt out at any point.

  • ”Doesn’t matter if some people have a torturous life, there are also many happy lives, and the ones that don’t like it can just kill themselves, fair deal, you can always opt out at any time, so don’t complain!”

The problem with this is that once somebody is planning to commit suicide, they have already been harmed, so unless you believe that it is justifiable to harm someone because they have the option to later on end that harm by committing suicide, you are being logically inconsistent in using this justification for breeding.

  • I didn’t know I was going to put you in extreme debt by taking your money to the gambling house and losing everything. If you don’t like it, you can kill yourself.
  • I didn’t know she didn’t want surprise anal sex, if this slut is now traumatized, she can just commit suicide, so what’s the big deal? Some like surprise anal sex.
  • I drove over your legs when I was drunk and now you’re a cripple, but so what? If you really don’t like it, you can always end it, life is not supposed to be fair.

If it were only bad to harm someone if you deny them the option to commit suicide, then it should not be possible to prosecute a rapist who locked a girl into his basement and raped her every day, as long as he also threw her a rope to hang herself with.

”But your honor, my client gave the girl in his basement a rope to commit suicide with, she didn’t do it, so that proves that she secretly enjoyed getting raped, it was consensual for sure. What’s the objection here?’

”Forcing others to suck your dick at gunpoint is fine because they can just choose to die if they really don’t want to, free the offender!”

”It’s a fair deal, I lock you in my basement and rape you, and if you really don’t like it, you can kill yourself, I put a rope in your room.”

Here many procreation supporters will say that this is an unfair example because you know fully well that people don’t like being abducted into basements and raped, but with creating life it is not as clear that the person will have a horrible experience.

But that’s irrelevant if their excuse for it is that if severe harm takes place, the victim can commit suicide, if harm is justified on the basis that the victim can still commit suicide if they don’t like it, then this point applies.

Furthermore, it of course also exposes another of their double standards, ”you don’t know the outcome beforehand, so that justifies breeding” – so taking a risk like this at someone else’s expense is fine as long as you don’t know the outcome? Isn’t that exactly what we think makes it wrong in almost all other cases? I went to the casino with your money, but that is perfectly fine, because I didn’t know that I was about to lose all of it, it’s only wrong to gamble with someone else’s money if you know the outcome is that you’ll lose, if you don’t know the outcome, it’s fine.

  • Another problem on top of this is that the ones who are making this brilliant ”you can always kill yourself after we already harmed you” point is that they are also frequently exactly the ones opposing the right to die.

Pro-life ideology/viviocentrism often times doesn’t stop at just being perfectly fine with the reckless creation of consciousness and suffering, many of these pro-lifers don’t want the victim to be able to leave life either after having been severely harmed already, which they base usually on entirely circular reasoning, as in ”you are irrational if you want to leave life, and you want to leave life because you are irrational” – A because B, B because A.

In many places althroughout history and to this day, you can be arrested if someone suspects you are about to commit suicide.

A suicidal person must always think that the game of working to fulfill your needs/wants/desires is worth it even when there are little to no prospects of doing so, you can’t just realize that your needs/wants/desires not being fulfilled wouldn’t be a problem anymore if you’re dead, because you won’t have them anymore so once the desire wound is gone the fulfillment bandaid loses its value, no, we have to re-addict you to life and force you to think that not fulfilling a non-existent need/want/desire is a big problem – stay addicted.

  • So let’s go back to the rapist metaphor.

It’s not like this rapist locks you in his basement with a rope you could potentially use to kill yourself, you also have to do it when he’s not home, otherwise, he has a little door in his rape dungeon he’ll lock you behind, and then you won’t be released again until you admit how irrational you are for rejecting his cock, his gift to you.

You must admit you don’t want his cock because you’re irrational and you’re irrational because you don’t want his cock (A because B, B because A), but you promise to worship his cock from now on, you admit you are diseased.

And of course, you see that some of his victims also don’t have the same fair chance as others to kill themselves because he amputated them (an analogy to people who are in a position where they have a hard time killing themselves on their own and aren’t being granted the right to assisted suicide), so they can’t just pick up a rope.

They have to plead with him to help them commit suicide, but often he decides that they must still stay here to worship his cock (just like the absolute pro-life religious nutjobs will force someone to live until the end because anything else goes against their idiotic delusional religious beliefs), maybe they’ll get some better painkillers and that’s it.

So this whole argument that ”they can just kill themselves” has lots of problems as we can see.

  • Antinatalists killing themselves doesn’t solve the overall problem of suffering, even here we can make an analogy to the rape dungeon. If one somehow manages to escape the rape dungeon but comes back to it in order to save the other victims from the rapist, would you say the rapist is right to conclude that this means you secretly want to live in his rape dungeon and are just denying it, otherwise you wouldn’t be coming back to it?
  • Giving your victim the option to commit suicide doesn’t justify imposing the harm on them, otherwise I might as well also start drunk driving over people’s legs to gambling houses where I lose the money of people I stole from, and then when I lose I angrily rape a bitch, but that’s all good because if they don’t like it they can just jump off a building together.
  • Some victims are not even in a position where they can easily kill themselves and the most insane pro-lifers still aren’t for allowing them to exit, they wouldn’t even allow a paralyzed patient to die so what’s their point anyway?

In conclusion, the best way to prevent a problem is still to not make it, it’s better if someone never ends up in a position where they have to kill themselves to escape suffering in the first place, and while you are also abstaining from creating happy future people, you have to keep in mind that they are not trapped in some kind of pre-birth deprivation chamber, unborn purgatory where they are horrifically tormented over not receiving life’s pleasures.

Free will is impossible.

If we assume we live in a cause and effect universe, the concept of having free will should seem absurd right on its face. If every action has a cause of some sort, why would you assume your individual brain, or brains are somehow disconnected from this law?

Most people are able to understand this to some degree when it’s overtly visible, like with a brain tumor causing someone to act a certain way. They already understand that this person had no choice to act the way they did when they committed a crime because of how the brain was being effected, so they wouldn’t say they had a choice in the matter.

But they do suddenly see it as different when someone has a different brain configuration that makes them act a certain way right from the start or developed in a way that was less visible/observable to the average person, like a sadistic psychopath who presumably also 1. didn’t choose to be aroused by inflicting pain on others and 2. didn’t choose to be incapable of feeling empathy for others.

  • It’s incorrect to assume we ”have brains” we can control, it’s more like we are brains that are being caused to act up in certain ways by our environment, or we are the emotions and thoughts produced by that thing called a brain, that has a certain structure from the start and is also being influenced by the environment to create what we call ”us”, just like any other organ.

We make decisions, but these decisions are always preceded by factors ultimately out of our control, so it wouldn’t be fair to consider them truly free.

A similar example I’ve heard before that I think is good is let’s say you’re currently sitting in your living room, then you go to the kitchen to make food.

Was that a free choice? Not really, in order to be motivated to do so, you need to either be 1. hungry or 2. have appetite (for example). These are two things out of our control, it is fair to say we don’t choose to be organisms that feel hunger and appetite, it just happens.

If the discomfort of hunger and appetite is more intense than the comfort you derive from sitting on the couch, then you will likely stand up and go make some food, but if the comfort you derive from resting on the couch is more intense than the discomfort of hunger and appetite, then you will likely keep sitting on the couch.

  • Perhaps you’d say ”no, I can choose not to eat even though I’m hungry to prove you wrong!”.

But then the only reason why you’d do that is because I’ve triggered you into to wanting to prove to me that you can choose not to eat despite being hungry. Did this urge to disprove me not arise in you as a result of me telling you this, you wouldn’t keep stubbornly sitting in the living room.

Now the discomfort of losing an argument against me is stronger than the discomfort of the hunger, so you choose to keep sitting there on the couch.

  • Perhaps some people would still choose to get up to make food.

But that’s only because they don’t have the same psychological tendency that you have, which is wanting to desperately disprove me on this matter, they did not feel provoked to try to disprove me, and they didn’t choose to be unable to feel provoked by me into trying to disprove me, some people are just more apathetic.

  • And if you take the time to search long enough, you’ll find that there is no true freedom in any choice anyone ever made at any point.

You buy chocolate ice cream at the store. Is that a 100% free choice? I don’t think you chose to like the taste of chocolate. Perhaps you want to stop at some point because you’re getting fatter and fatter, fine, but did you choose to feel uncomfortable about getting fat? I don’t think so.

Likewise, if someone is getting fatter and doesn’t stop buying all that ice cream, did they choose to feel less discomfort than you at the thought of getting fatter than they feel from no longer eating all that chocolate ice cream, was that a conscious choice they made, did they sit down one evening and say ”I wish to feel that the discomfort I get from abstaining from eating chocolate ice cream is much more intense than the discomfort of becoming obese” – and abracadabra, magically, suddenly they were wired that way to be someone who’ll become fat?

And even if they did that, that just brings up another question, which is did they choose to want to want to feel more discomfort from abstaining than from becoming obese? How did they choose to want to want that?

And even if they did that, that just brings up another question, which is did they choose to want to want to want to feel more discomfort from abstaining than from becoming obese? How did they choose to want to want to want that?

  • Let’s use a more intense example where most people would be quick to judge since it involves harm/violence.

Let’s say two guys like Ted Bundy have a fetish for brutally raping and killing people. Did they choose that fetish? I don’t think so, seems highly inconvenient.

Person A rapes and kills people, person B doesn’t.

So you might say they have that fetish, but they can choose not to do it.

Sure – depending on different factors ultimately out of their control.

Person A could have chosen not to rape and kill people, perhaps, if he:

  • Had higher capacity to empathize with others like person B.
  • Didn’t grow up with abusive parents acting as bad role models.
  • Felt more discomfort from the idea of going to prison than from not raping.
  • Were less easily triggered into arousal.
  • Were less temperamental and angry.

So just another set of factors that we ultimately didn’t choose either. Do you think serial killers like that sat down with a magic wand one evening and decided to not be able to feel empathy so that they can be able to fulfill their fetish? And if they did have the ability to blend out feelings of empathy, at what point in time did they choose to acquire the ability to blend out empathy?

And if they did supposedly choose this ability and became emotionally colder when they had a traumatic event in their life when their mother exposed them in public for being a bed wetter in front of all the hot girls, did they choose that this event made them feel so uncomfortable that they were triggered into blocking out feelings of empathy for the female gender they now like to attack, starting to see them more as objects? Did they choose that it made them severely uncomfortable?

So on and so forth, so on and so forth. If you question long enough, you’ll find that not only some things are out of our control, ultimately all are out of our control, we are being motivated or we’re not being motivated to do certain things that will then directly affect how we later on do other things, nothing more to it it seems.

  • Some also like to say some acts are ”just random”, so that escapes the notion that it is all just cause and effect.

But even then of course, that still wouldn’t prove determinism wrong, that would just mean that it’s randomness effecting the outcome of our actions, so then randomness would become the deterministic factor for certain actions.

All in all, I don’t think there is any great evidence for the idea of free will in a cause and effect universe, we’re brains caused to act by factors we didn’t ourselves create, and the only way we can sustain the illusion that there’s some kernel of freedom is because we can’t directly observe which chain of events led to which chain of events – unlike with the brain tumor example at the beginning.

Brain tumor is easy to explain, that’s why this guy snapped and attacked everyone with a knife, it gets more complicated to grasp when you don’t have a clear example like that where multiple factors come into play as to why someone ultimately snapped and attacked someone with a knife.

This also doesn’t mean that therefore there is no point in ethics, I understand all ethics to be simply about sensation (consequentialism/utilitarianism), good and bad, pleasure and pain exist regardless of how free our will is – pain is still bad, even if you didn’t choose to cause it freely.

So of course, I wouldn’t say a serial rapist and murderer necessarily chose to commit serial rape and murder, so I wouldn’t think that a vengeful notion of going to hell for eternity as it is often preached by the religious would make any sense, but we can still argue that it is better to stop and arrest said rapist, just like it would be better to stop other harm-causing phenomena that didn’t choose to cause harm, like a cancer tumor or a tornado.

About the speciesism of pro-lifers.

Pro-lifers sometimes bring up historical examples about how certain minorities have been dehumanized in the past, and then say that individuals of the opposite position, like pro-choicers and antinatalists are guilty of a similar mindset as nazis and slave owners.

I would argue that pro-lifers are the ones that are guilty of the nazi mindset, not the other way around, many of them are speciesists with no respect for consciousness and suffering, frequently they don’t care about harm to non-human animals, they only think that all humans need to be protected, even when those humans are incapable of being harmed like a freshly fertilized egg, which is analogizable to a slave owner caring about his braindead white grandmother because she’s white, but not about fully conscious black slaves being whipped all day – zero respect for suffering, they only respect what looks similar enough to them.

Their go-to point is that fetuses are a human life. They are human, and also alive.

To that I would respond that sperm and braindead humans are also human and alive. Bacteria is alive too, so are fruits and vegetables, but fair enough, they’re not human.

If you really think about it on a deeper level for a moment, is being human actually what makes it bad to have certain things that you currently don’t want to happen to you (like having a knife in your throat, being burned alive, cut open, etc) bad?

I could do these things to a braindead human, and it would in no way bother that braindead, but still perfectly human and living (other than for the brain) organism, it would not bother ”them” one bit, so it seems like containing human DNA is not what determines whether or not something is actually bad or good, this is determined by consciousness, sentience, pain and pleasure.

Of course, it’s possible to offend family members and friends by let’s say having sex with or defecating onto a braindead human body, but that just proves again that then the thing that made that activity problematic is sentience/consciousness, not human DNA, it offends the feelings of those around the braindead human.

But just in and of itself, how is a braindead human harmed more by being pulled the plug on than a computer is harmed by being pulled the plug on?

Here they might say fetuses will become conscious over the course of 9 months, braindead humans won’t. But then you just need to ask about fetuses of other species and if they think it’s fine to abort them, or in fact just hypotheticals, like grassblades that become conscious if I let them grow long enough, am I now obligated to completely inconvenience myself for them and never mow the lawn again because it’s important to let grassblades become conscious?

I’m sure they’d say no, it’s only important to not stop a human organism from becoming conscious before it can have any desire to become conscious because it simply isn’t conscious yet, which then again reveals that it is about the sacred human DNA particles for them, in which case the question is still relevant – their notion that we must wait until an organism becomes conscious is again only confined to organisms containing the sacred human DNA.

  • Having human DNA is not what makes being harmed problematic, it’s irrelevant just like having white skin color or a certain set of genitalia.

I would make the exact same point to a racist slave owner that values the protection of all whites, whether those whites have the capacity to be harmed or not, but on the other hand can’t be bothered to care about the welfare of black slaves.

A braindead white human might be white, but so what? Do you think it bothers them to be whipped? Having white skin color is what makes being hit with a whip into a bad thing? You’re an idiot if you think that. If you were honest you would name the characteristic ”sentience” as to why you would like to avoid being hit with a whip, and guess what, black slaves are also sentient.

Just that pro-lifers are not racists, they are often speciesists. They care about the poor fertilized egg that doesn’t care any more about its own existence than a tomato cares about being kept alive, the concern of the fertilized egg not to be squashed is as non-existent as a tomato’s concern to not be turned into tomato soup – but many of them will gladly pay someone to abuse pigs, cows, chicken for them because they don’t contain the sacred human DNA.

Thinking that dehumanization is some kind of problem is already bigotry, because you are assuming that just because something is not human, it is perfectly fine to harm that organism.

  • ”Despite clearly having the ability to create value notions, good and bad, pleasure and pain, you get no ethical consideration, because you’re not in my particular group, you’re not white/human.”

Just like a racist slave owner or nazi, such pro-lifers have zero respect for consciousness and suffering, or only manage to acknowledge it as existing when they see someone of their close ingroup, i.e other white humans, anyone who looks too different is falsely identified as an object, despite being a feeling (obviously, non-subjects don’t feel) subject.

The mentality is quite similar, so it just looks completely self-unaware that they’re accusing the other side of thinking like the slave owners and nazis, similar to when said speciesist pro-lifers accuse someone of being hostile towards the disabled for aborting a severely disabled fetus but then justify harming other animals by pointing out that they are less intelligent than humans, which would mean that there’s nothing wrong with farming sufficiently intellectually disabled humans on the same intelligence level as such animals.

I think sometimes they get away with all this because pro-choicers are also speciesist and go along with this non-sense, there are some that will make uneducated or confused claims that human fetuses are somehow not human or alive (although even that is often times a misinterpretation on the pro-lifer’s part when the discussion is about what constitutes a human, i.e a person, not if it contains human DNA), because if they really insisted on sentience/suffering-ability, they would make themselves vulnerable to being consistency-tested about their speciesism as well.

”So do you not eat other animals? They’re also sentient! Hypocrite!” – so they figure instead they’ll resort to saying some complete non-sense like ”human fetuses aren’t alive”, to which the pro-lifers will then proudly respond that science is indeed ethically on their side and fetuses are indeed living organisms just like jizz and bacteria, so the debate is over.

  • It shouldn’t even matter if something is human or alive.

What the nazis did to the jews wasn’t bad because they were human, what the slave owners did to the black slaves wasn’t bad because they were human, it was bad because they were conscious.

Sure, if hypothetically, the nazis were a group of people that only rounded up a few braindead jews that are clearly incapable of feeling pain, and these braindead jews had no family or friends to grieve over them, and then they put these jews into the oven, there’d probably be no harm in that, not inherently more of a problem than doing it to a piece of wood, it would cause the exact same amount of bad feelings and grievances in the world: zero.

We might be inclined to feel bad for such braindead jews because they look similar to humans we know to be conscious, so that bias overcomes us, but ultimately rationally analyzing the situation would lead one to conclude that that is as silly as feeling bad for a living, but non-sentient grassblade or a piece of wood.

The benevolent world destroyer objection to suffering-focused ethics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pin prick objection to suffering-focused ethics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • So let’s pick a slightly different scenario.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

”We have to draw a line somewhere.”

A common argument in the debate about sex between minors and adults is that we just have to draw a line somewhere. Even if we’re being intellectually honest enough to admit that youngsters sometimes want to have sex with someone over the age of consent, it’s still wrong, because it opens the door to the chance of abuse, so we just have to draw a line somewhere, like 16, 17, 18 and treat everyone who had sex with a person under that age as a rapist, even if they’re not, to deter real rapists who would rape people under those ages.

The first problem that should be easy to see with this type of argument is that it can literally be applied to tons of other things that society is not making a big deal out of, so why exactly should we apply this disproportionate amount of worry to sex?

Example 1: Children are allowed to ride bicycles. This carries a certain risk of danger, because it opens the door to parents forcing children to ride their bicycles to school because they’re too lazy to drive, although these children are not yet competent and smart enough to navigate traffic.

Some of these children will get into car accidents and be crippled for life. So what is the solution here, kill everyone who gives a child a bicycle? Does that sound sensible?

Example 2: Young girls are allowed to use make up, the use of beauty products amongst young girls is socially acceptable. This carries a risk of danger, because it opens the door to narcissistic parents manipulating and forcing young girls to partake in beauty contests that they don’t want to partake in, damaging to their self-esteem, causing them eating disorders.

So what is the solution, what should I do whenever I see a young girl wearing make up? Assume that everyone who lets a little girl wear make up is an abuser, beat the shit out of her father?

Example 3: Children are allowed to hear about religion and spirituality. This carries a certain risk of danger, because it opens the door to terrorist organizations trying to lure children into joining a terrorist group like ISIS.

So what is the solution, shoot every more or less harmless religious person taking a willing child to church to sing in a choir, because some ISIS terrorist uses the freedom to talk about religion to try to indoctrinate children?

  • The problem is the same in all these situations.

Yes, sometimes, a freedom is abused to do something bad, but this doesn’t mean it always happens, so it’s not a clear harm in all cases, so it’s unfair to subject the ones who are innocent to consequences that are supposed to protect against harm causers.

Some children also willingly ride a bicycle, some little girls also willingly wear make up, some children also willingly go to a church, and although I think religion is garbage and generally does more harm than good, I still don’t think a peaceful religious person taking a willing child to church should be treated the same way as an ISIS terrorist to uphold some kind of principle of absolute caution, it’s simply not the same.

  • Ultimately, I see sex between children/minors and adults as similar of a topic to drug use, prostitution, gun use, etc. It’s something that needs to be regulated in certain ways, but it shouldn’t be banned.

It’s not a red-light, absolutely harmful activity. Sometimes it has a higher chance of resulting in harm, but it’s unfair to say that it always results in harm, like torturing and/or raping someone.

Manipulating, blackmailing and forcing others, including children obviously should be illegal, unless someone can name a good reason why they had to do it to prevent a greater harm, like self defense for instance, or giving a child or intellectually incompetent adult a vaccination that they need to not contract a painful disease.

Forcing a minor to have sex can still be perfectly illegal regardless of strictly adhering to a certain age of consent, and similarly this should be more taken into consideration when it comes to those over the age of consent as well, e.g. in reality it’s worse to drug and then fuck an 18 year old than to have consensual sex with a 14 year old, but there are some sexists who would want to kill everyone for fucking their 14 year old sister and then being perfectly fine with manipulating/pressuring a hot 18 year old girl into having sex in some way.

That is why close-in-age exceptions are also still an unfair deal, you’re still persecuting an adult for having sex with a willing minor, and you might be less likely to detect abuse between two children because they’re both under 18 or 16 or 14, so it must be fine.

Which isn’t true, forcing someone to have sex is the problem, not sex at any particular given age, there’s nothing that says an 11 year old can’t voluntarily have sex with a 19 year old, but on the other get abused by a 12 year old in their family.

This reasoning can also be applied to everything else, you shouldn’t be allowed to force the child to ride a bicycle when they’re too incompetent to ride it, or a little girl to wear make up, or a child to (non-sexually) hug you just because you feel entitled to it either – all I’m saying is that same standard should be applied to sexuality ultimately.

Then, there are some other risks in practice that might arise, same as with other somewhat risky, but not intrinsically harmful activities like drug use or prostitution, or even just riding a bicycle.

STDs and pregnancy could potentially happen, so children need to receive sex education. If it’s possible that a child can learn traffic rules, how to navigate the road, then I really don’t see why it should be so complicated to teach a child or a mentally retarded person how to use contraception, it is not much more difficult – and again, manipulation, blackmail, force from abusers who want to pressure someone into not having safe sex can be illegal regardless of age of consent, that would still fall under rape/molestation nonetheless.

Some adults might be able to pressure a child into riding the bicycle without a helmet. So what? Does that mean you now think everyone who gives a child a bicycle must be publically castrated and shot for their crimes against children? I don’t think so.

  • More subtle forms of rape like manipulation or blackmail still fall under rape, so they’re no reason to have an age of consent, rape is already banned.

Pedophobes seem to be scared that even though rape is already illegal, children would still be manipulated and blackmailed into sex…but if someone manipulates a child or an adult into having sex by giving the child false information about something, lying to the child/minor to get them to have sex with you, that still falls under rape, so that doesn’t explain why we need an age of consent for that, rape is already perfectly illegal.

In conclusion, I think sex at a young age can sometimes result in harm, but doesn’t have to. Banning it is also guaranteed to cause a lot of harm, so the best thing we can do is to make it safer by social acceptance and regulate it, similar to topics like drug use and prostitution, where harm can be involved, but it’s not inherent to the act, so just banning it for everyone would be unfair, it’s better to make it safer by social acceptance.

Teach children about contraception and safe sex early on, and hammer the idea into people’s heads that they ought to respect a child’s autonomy, unless they can actually legitimately demonstrate that a child is harming themselves by doing a given thing. You can still have the right to give them a vaccination if it’s truly necessary to prevent a greater harm, sure, but you’re not entitled to hug an unwilling child, you’re not entitled to force a child to play the guitar instead of the violin just because it suits your personal preferences more.

If you question it a little, you’ll see that it is frequently the pedophobes who are abusive, and that is what is stopping them from being reasonable about the topic of sex in childhood. It’s exactly the most anti-pedophilia conservatives, puritan bigots who think they have the right to force a child to hug grandma, the child has no right to refuse what the slave owners want, the child only can’t be abused sexually, that’s the only way you can’t abuse a child. Fuck it, even if the child actually wants to hump a pedophile’s leg, it doesn’t matter, it’s still wrong, but forcing the child to do other things that are not even necessary to prevent a greater harm to the child in question is perfectly acceptable, don’t respect children’s autonomy to any degree.

Another ulterior motive that some men have might also be that they don’t actually want rape to be illegal, perhaps they use lies and manipulation to get laid with girls over the age of consent, but if it were actually more about rape rather than age, then you couldn’t do that, you wouldn’t be allowed to tell an 18 year old girl lies in order to get into her pants either, so then they just want an age of consent to protect their younger sisters for a while until they’re hopefully old enough to not fall for any tricks rather than to truly insist that non-consensual sex be illegal.

If you promise a 14 year old girl a relationship in return for anal sex, it’s wrong, if some 18 year old girl is dumb enough to fall for it, you did a good job, her fault she fell for it. All sex must be rape, defiling a girl’s ”innocence” and all we can do is protect our younger sisters from that as long as possible because sex has to be about manipulation…I’m sure if it were up to some men, they would simply only make it illegal to have sex with their female family members and that’s it.

  • I think ”we have to draw a line somewhere” is also just an excuse violent bigots are using to hide their bigotry.

If people really just thought we had to draw a line somewhere, so it’s really unfortunate that a 30 year old is being arrested for fucking a willing 15 year old as a safety measure to ensure that no one manipulates 15 year olds into sex when they don’t want to, they wouldn’t be nearly as outraged about it as they are right now.

Why are they always foaming at the mouth then, regardless of whether or not the child/minor wanted to have sex? Either way, you always see comments from them like:

  • ”ALL PEDOS MUST BE KILLED!!! NO CURE FOR THIS PERVERSION!!!”
  • ”CUT THEIR DICKS OFF NOW!!!!!!!!!!! SUPPORT PEDO GENOCIDE!!!!!”
  • ”I HOPE YOU GO TO JAIL AND GET ASSRAPED BY A NIGGER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
  • ”THERE’S NO EXCUSE! A 15 YEAR OLD CAN NEVER CONSENT!!!!!’

And other such pleasantries. If it’s so crystal clear that this idea of an age of consent just exists to deter a few bad people from doing bad things, why are people so outraged when they are perfectly rational enough to admit that sometimes sex between minors and adults is voluntary, even when you talk about it to them in private sometimes?

I think the answer is clear, they are living in a delusional disney fantasy world where children are supposed to be asexual, and they want to force anyone under the holy age to fit this role of being completely asexual. The idea of your child being sexual is icky, similar to how children also find the idea of their parents being sexual icky, but they don’t have the same amount of power to destroy their parents sexual lives on a whim.

This is clearly revealed in certain arguments the pedophobes make, like the argument about power imbalance. An adult has authority and power over a minor, so if they have sex, it’s abuse of power.

You only need to put this in any other context to see what a failure this argument is: a child voluntarily does garden work for extra pocket money for a parent who has power over them, they could force the child by grounding them if they don’t do the garden work, that is true.

But so what? The child clearly did it voluntarily, so power has not been abused. Same is possible for sex too, a minor could be pressured to have sex by a teacher if they threaten the minor with a worse math grade, but the minor could also just voluntarily have sex with the teacher in spite of the teacher’s power over them. Just because I own a gun and thus have power over you, that doesn’t mean I raped you if you had sex with me…as long as I didn’t use the gun to pressure you and you wanted to have sex with me regardless of my gun.

Power difference does not equal power abuse, pedophobes only assume this in the sexual context, because they likely already made another false assumption – which is that children are fundamentally asexual, so the only reason why a minor would have sex with their teacher is because they have been manipulated into being sexual by some evil pedominati propagandist, because obviously what everyone under 18 really wants is sit in a sandbox and play with barbie dolls, and then this evil pedo whipped out his dick and my daughter thought it was candy and accidentally put it in her mouth!!!!! – in delusional pedophobe disney fantasy land.

So I don’t believe this line drawing argument for a second, religious idiots and sex negative feminists legitimately act as though they believe even a person one second under their holy age is too stupid to tell the difference between cock and candy, they are living in a delusional fantasy world.

Does a society have the right to make a harmless act into a harmful one?

A common disagreement in the discussion about sex in childhood/youth is intrinsic vs. extrinsic harm. Some things are intrinsically harmful, in and of itself harmful, e.g. someone sticking a knife in your eye when you clearly don’t want that, we could argue that is always harmful.

But some things are only extrinsically harmful, e.g. a girl wears a skimpy dress and gets raped, this doesn’t prove that wearing a skimpy dress is in and of itself results in harm. Someone instigated harm in response to it, but it doesn’t in and of itself always result in harm.

Those with philosophical positions accepting of sexual relationships between children/minors and adults generally make the point that sex in childhood/youth is not intrinsically harmful, what can be harmful is when someone is manipulated, blackmailed, forced into sex regardless of age, in which case the coercion is the real harm, not the child sex itself obviously.

Or when society has an overtly harmful, negative reaction to a completely voluntary sex act that was intrinsically harmless, but then society made it extrinsically harmful by reacting in this hysterical fashion, harm caused by social stigma, the child/minor enjoyed the sexual encounter but was shocked to find out how society feels about it.

Those opposed to all such relationships often have an intuition that all such relations are harmful because children and minors are fundamentally asexual (or ”innocent”, whatever that means, sex supposedly makes you guilty) and would never have sex unless someone forced them to, or they believe that for some reason even if some want it, ”we just have to draw a line somewhere” and not even try to distinguish between the harmful and harmless cases in a more detailed manner in court.

Even when you point out to these people that in case a minor simply wanted to have sex with an older person, they weren’t manipulated, it didn’t result in any harm to them, except the negative reaction from society, some of them would still say ”but there are still social consequences to this that the child cannot comprehend yet!” although there is no evidence that these consequences are anything but self-caused, society’s fault and nothing else.

Basically blaming the victim, appealing to a self-created consequence, just like a rapist ironically. Even if dressing like a whore isn’t harmful, who cares? Once I rape you, you’re still harmed, so that proves dressing like a whore is harmful.

Even if having sex with a child/minor isn’t intrinsically harmful, who cares? Once we send you to jail and socially ostracize you for it, you and the minor (by extension) are still harmed by our hysteria, so that proves that sex at a young age is harmful, because we harm you for it.

  • Which raises the question: does a society have the right to make a perfectly harmless act into a harmful one by having an overtly negative, violent reaction to it?

It doesn’t have to be sex, we could pick any other subject for demonization and public hysteria and we would have the same argument, anything can be made extrinsically harmful.

Let’s just say as an example to test for consistency, we had a society that didn’t demonize children receiving orgasms, but children eating broccoli, both can be perfectly healthy if someone is not overtly averse to receiving either.

This society does believes that giving a child broccoli is always child abuse, automatically it is assumed that when a child eats broccoli, it can never be anything but harmful, it must have involved force and coercion – innocent children should not be eating broccoli. Period, end of discussion, if you question this, you’re one of these disgusting assholes who forces children to eat broccoli at knifepoint as well.

If a child finds out that they might like green vegetables by having eaten another one first (similar to how some children find out they would like to have sex by discovering masturbation and porn), and then they voluntarily receive broccoli from an adult, society has an overtly negative reaction to it:

  • The adult is socially ostracized, sent to jail.
  • Everyone is hysterically screeching at the child, asking them about their abuse.
  • People make jokes in front of the child how this evil abuser is now hopefully going to get repeatedly assraped in prison. Don’t drop the soap you piece of shit, HAHA, if you give kids broccoli you get raped in jail, so therefore, broccoli is unhealthy, it’s basic logic!
  • The child repeatedly hears that they now ”lost their innocence”, there’s something indescribably magical about never having eaten broccoli under a certain age, and if you did it before, you ruined your ”innocence” for life, now you are guilty! Oh no! What a travesty!
  • If the child doesn’t admit how horribly abused they were, everyone will assume they are completely mentally defective and just don’t understand how horribly abused they were, so the therapists won’t stop harassing the child, they become a social outcast, the weird victim of broccoli who doesn’t even admit they were victimized, how outragous! The evil broccoli pervert certainly manipulated this child!

After a while, this takes a toll on the child, the child feels confused and bad about it.

Society reaches the inescapable conclusion:

  • Broccoli is bad and unhealthy for children, it’s obvious!

Most humans are socially imitative creatures who don’t have it in them to tell all of society to go fuck itself, so what does the child do? The child grows up to parrot the lies that have been imposed on them by the anti-broccoli cult, the child grows up to associate the negative feelings that were really caused by society with the person who gave them broccoli, and grow to resent that person, when really it would be more reasonable to direct that hatred at society.

Therapists and psychologists who aren’t really deep thinkers but just social status quo enforcers who have similarly just been socially indoctrinated into thinking broccoli is the devil now conduct a study in which people like this, who have eaten broccoli as children partake, even people who did not voluntarily eat it, but have been forced to at knifepoint (which is the same in society’s eyes anyway, since children can NEVER consent to broccoli! NEVER!).

They reach the conclusion that people who have eaten broccoli as children indeed often times grow up to feel very bad. See, this settles the debate, broccoli is bad. A perfect post hoc fallacy, is it not?

Child eats broccoli, child is traumatized at some point after, this proves broccoli traumatizes children.

A happened, then B happened, therefore, A directly caused B. The child left the house, the child was wetted by the rain, therefore, leaving your house causes you to get wet, even when it does not rain outside. Ironclad reasoning right there.

  • Should this society really have the right to insist on their stupid taboo and claim that they have demonstrated that eating broccoli causes harm to children? Or would anyone who has not been indoctrinated into their insanity think of them as primitive barbarians in desperate need of being educated (perhaps even forcibly) in order to change their ways?

I think the answer is obvious, you wouldn’t accept this type of picking a subject and making it into a taboo in any other context unless it were actually legitimately proven to be harmful, so it’s logically inconsistent and hypocritical when you do so when it comes to child sexuality.

I’m sure if they observed this behavior in a cult where something else would be demonized that isn’t sex, like broccoli, they would be perfectly able to observe the fact that these imbeciles have never come up with a reason as to why they think broccoli is inherently harmful to children and point out to them how society isn’t exactly making it easy for the child to enjoy eating broccoli.

  • ”You fucking retard, YOU YOURSELF are creating this negative consequence, children don’t have to be harmed by broccoli, YOU HARM THEM by having this negative bigoted reaction to it! This is no better than saying homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to raise children, it’s harmful, just because you raise your children to bully children of homosexual couples, you’re clearly the asshole here!”.

But when it comes to seeing that they are the ones that create the harm in response to sexual relations between children/minors and adults, they completely fail to recognize that they are the monster and somehow manage to rationalize the harm that they inflict as harm done by the perfectly harmless orgasm.

  • ”My 14 year old daughter voluntarily had sex with a 30 year old man, she got an orgasm and was overall satisfied, so I beat him to a bloody pulp in front of her! She started to scream in panic, see, this proves that orgasms are traumatizing unless you’re exactly the holy age, like 16, 17 or 18 that our religious cult has deemed to be the only correct one!”.

It’s idiotic, come up with a reason for why you think x is harmful, don’t just appeal the to the fact that people who engaged in x as children often grow up to feel traumatized and depressed in the confines of a society that does everything in their power to make children feel bad about x, whatever x may be.

If you don’t accept the ”evidence” of the anti-broccoli cult, then it’d be inconsistent for you to accept the ”evidence” pedophobic bigots lay out for how sex in childhood and youth is harmful, because they’re using the same method: lumping voluntary and in-voluntary sex together and ignoring social pressures and biases.

If an act is only harmful because society reacts badly to it, then the act isn’t really harmful, it’s society that is being harmful. So why not ban the harm caused by society rather than the act that it demonizes based on irrational grounds? Because they’re just irrational, so they just fail to see that they’re being irrational, that’s the most plausible answer here.

Real value vs. projected value.

Good and bad are real facts, not up to opinion. The reason why people think it is entirely relative whether or not something is good or bad is because different circumstances and objects produce different sensations in different subjects, so they end up falsely concluding that ”everyone just finds something different good or bad, it’s a matter of opinion”.

As in, person A experiences a negative sensation in response to almonds, because person A is allergic to almonds, person B experiences a negative sensation in response to peanuts, because person B is allergic to peanuts. So the value relativist says ”see, the person A thinks almonds are bad, person B thinks peanuts are bad, so what nut is good and bad is a matter of opinion”.

Wrong, almond is not good or bad, it’s a neutral object.

Peanut is not good or bad, it’s a neutral object.

What is negative is negative sensation, and in person A it’s caused by almonds, and in person B it’s caused by peanuts. So what is bad here? Very simple, negative sensation, nothing else. It’s not the almond or the peanut, it’s the sensation that is bad, just because it’s caused by different objects in different subjects, doesn’t mean that bad sensation is not objectively real.

Sometimes, two organisms die of different causes too, one of cancer and one of AIDS, that doesn’t mean that the answer to the question of ”did someone die?” is ”it’s just a matter of opinion”.

Sometimes, two organisms break their legs of different causes too, one by falling off a bicycle, one by falling off a mountain – but they both had a broken leg, that’s the same for both, it’s not up to personal interpretation just because the leg was broken by different circumstances.

This idea that we all just have different things that we find bad is a delusion, what is bad is always the same – bad sensation. You can feel bad and less bad, this function objectively exists in sentient organisms, it’s predetermined for you, you have no choice but to feel pain when someone attacks you with a chainsaw.

  • Then why is there so much disagreement over what is good and bad?

The reason why there are ”disagreements” in ethics is exactly because everyone ends up falsely detecting and identifying where harm is and where harm is not, but if everyone simply had a clear understanding that it is only harm itself which is harmful, then they wouldn’t have all these stupid supposed disagreements.

Different objects cause different sensations in different subjects, so the subjects end up falsely concluding that the object that brought them alleviation of suffering is the good, rather than the elevation of their sensation state from one negative to one less negative state.

For example, John experiences suffering reduction in response to the American flag, eliciting feelings of group membership and patriotism, John falsely ends up concluding that the American flag is now ”a good thing”, when obviously the American flag is just a neutral object, the real good was the elevation of his emotional state from one negative of feeling lonely and excluded to a less negative state.

Now John feels more empathy for the poor American flag being burned than a fully sentient chimpanzee being burned alive, because he illogically equates the American flag with his conscious experience of pleasure, so he concludes American flag=conscious being, if you burn the poor American flag you’re causing suffering to it!

  • Analyzing in detail all day what would best reduce suffering is more complicated of a task than simply generalizing and thinking that one holy rule like ”never break the law” saves everything.

And everyone is guilty of this to some degree, we can’t help but to some degree equate the object that brings us alleviation from our suffering with the alleviation of suffering, but it is vital to recognize that this is what prevents us from being perfect.

This type of intuitive, sloppy, lazy way of processing reality is exactly what leads to deontological ethics, where we start to stubbornly think that adhering to a given dogmatic rule is more important than preventing real life harm, because we stubbornly equate that one rule with the reduction of suffering and don’t want to go through the more complicated process of thinking what rule is appropriate for each and every situation that could possibly exist.

This could manifest in many different stereotypes:

  • The police officer who supports causing suffering to peaceful drug users because he observes that law is sometimes important to prevent suffering in society, maybe his sister got raped once and he saw that law mitigated against that suffering, the rapist got arrested, so now he subconsciously associates law with suffering prevention and harasses people for smoking weed and pissing against a tree because law=always good!
  • The irrational sex-negative feminist who has been sexually exploited by a man in a position of power over her once (maybe the sister of the police officer) and now she equates power with abuse and thinks no relationship where two parties have a different level of power is possible, it’s all rape, women are weaker so all sex is rape!
  • The libertarian who doesn’t think any rich person should have to pay taxes because they observe that being locked in a cage, being restricted causes suffering and misery, so they end up completely ignoring that never restricting anyone’s liberties and forcing them to share resources can also lead to extreme suffering and misery.
  • The corrupt con artist who thinks money is all that matters, because money can buy resources that can be used to alleviate suffering. But if money could not buy you resources to alleviate suffering, why would money be important? It wouldn’t be, so money itself isn’t important, suffering alleviation is the real good, and chances are their scams cause more suffering than they alleviate overall.

It’s a projection, the subject fails to comprehend that good and bad are just emotions, not located in objects around them. You suffer appetite, so you eat a piece of chocolate, the piece of chocolate alleviates your suffering – so if you really lack the critical thinking skills, I just need to give everyone in the concentration camp getting a tortured a piece of chocolate and you conclude ”what a wonderful place to be! They look happy! Piece of chocolate=good!”.

Pro-lifers are an excellent example of this, this type of thinking is exactly why people are so opposed to the idea of antinatalism. By stopping the production of all conscious life, we could end all suffering, we would also take away every moment of joy and happiness, but that’d be irrelevant, because people that are never born they don’t feel the need to acquire joy and happiness, just like if you’re not addicted to heroin, heroin has no value anymore.

Non-existers don’t need pleasure to avoid suffering, only disadvantaged existers need to obtain pleasure to avoid suffering, before I was born I didn’t enjoy a piece of chocolate but I also didn’t feel any appetite for the piece of chocolate.

But many don’t get this, because intuitively, we notice that when they don’t get a pleasurable experience, they suffer from not having that pleasurable experience, so they chase it, that is the nature of our sentient experience.

And they know that in order to have pleasurable experiences, one must be alive too. So they want humans to be alive, because in life they can chase pleasure in order to avoid suffering, suffering that did not exist before the life was created. It’s good to extinguish an already burning house, it’s not good to set it on fire for the good of extinguishing it again, that’s not a profit.

It’s like an immature child only seeing ”extinguishing fire=good” and now wants to play fireman, so they set the house on fire, so that then they can extinguish that fire again. Make a need/desire, so that then you can fulfill that need/desire, create suffering in order to avoid it.

In all of this, they simply fail to see that if we simply weren’t alive, then we wouldn’t need pleasurable experiences to avoid suffering anymore, you only need to achieve pleasurable experiences to avoid suffering once you’re already alive, and they are projecting their experience as a sentient organism onto the ”experience” of the fetus who literally has no experience whatsoever because it isn’t conscious.

It’s good to extinguish an already burning house, it’s not good to set it on fire for the good of extinguishing it again, that’s not a profit. But this applies in many areas of ethics, all deontology I would argue is tainted by this type of irrational projection.

We identify certain things as important, because they help us to or we’re under the delusion that they’ll help us to alleviate some form of suffering, that is the real underlying goal, but if we’re not constantly careful, we start to falsely identify the object itself as good and forget that it’s about the emotions, the piece of chocolate you just ate isn’t good, what is good is that it alleviated your suffering, you went from a deprived, negative to a less deprived, less negative state.

It’s impossible to even find a different example of this phemonenon, because every endeavor can be traced back to suffering avoidance. So for example, people value money, but I could argue that they don’t really value the money, they value obtaining certain resources with it, the money is only an instrument, so them thinking ”money is good in and of itself” is wrong, an identification error.

But ultimately, neither are the resources that are bought with it good in and of itself, we also only try to obtain those resources to alleviate our suffering, so that’s really all it ever boils down to – and humans constantly lose track of that and falsely start to identify the object that is used to achieve the end goal as the real good, when the real good is the end goal that they just lost track of.

Like the police officer thinking law is good because it prevents harm, but then causing more harm in the name of the law. Or the democrat thinking giving everyone a right to vote is good because it prevents the harm of dictatorship, but then causing more harm as a majority voting for a violent dictator. Or the corrupt thief thinking money is good because it prevents unfulfilled desires, but causing much more desires to be unfulfilled in the process of making the money.

Sensation=intrinsic value.

Everything else we proclaim to value=extrinsically valuable to improving intrinsic value.