Value realism – feelings are facts about objective reality.

Vital to a lot of ethical discussions is the question ”what is good and bad?” The answer is they are sensations, and sensations are in fact real, good and bad are words we use to refer to them, adjectives for the nouns pain and pleasure I would argue.

Pain and pleasure, these are objectively existent brain states. Pain is a useful motivator, at some point, organisms developed the ability for consciousness, a fish will struggle much harder to survive and replicate itself, motivated by pain and pleasure, feeling pain when it is stuck in a situation that would hinder its success at making more fish copies of itself, like starvation or another animal biting it, trying to rip it out of the water.

Nature accidentally, unintentionally invented a motivational mechanism called suffering that helps the organisms that can feel it survive better than non-feeling organisms, it’s not a delusion that this mechanism is really happening in animals.

Can we put pain, suffering, negative valence into a petri dish and analyze it? No, but we can easily prove it by experience, unlike supernatural claims about gods, unicorns or ghosts. The manual is in general rather simple, you can easily just stick a knife into your eye, now you know what negative qualia is, this doesn’t work the same way for rubbing your hands together and hoping that a unicorn appears, it’s not a religious dogma.

I think the organisms that experience negative qualia are often confused about whether or not negative qualia exists, because it is often produced in different organisms by different objects, which then leads them to conclude value relativism, i.e ”what is bad is a matter of opinion and taste”, when what is happening in reality is that they simply fail to identify the sensations in and of themselves as pre-determined labels of goodness and badness.

  • Different subjects experience different sensation in response to different objects, circumstances, phenomena, this is not proof that the sensation itself does not exist, just that it is caused by different objects, circumstances, phenomena.

Person A has an almond allergy, upon ingesting almonds, they experience an allergic reaction, triggering the production of pain/suffering/negative qualia.

Person B has a peanut allergy, upon ingesting peanuts, they experience an allergic reaction, triggering the production of pain/suffering/negative qualia.

On the other hand, person A experiences pleasure in response to peanuts, whereas person B experiences pleasure in response to almonds.

So does this mean that bad is just a matter of opinion? No, it just means that bad is caused by different objects in different subjects.

In person A, badness was caused by almonds, in person B, badness was caused by peanuts, but they still equally experienced an instantiation of badness/negative qualia, and that sensation is real, they both objectively speaking felt bad in response to a different object.

To conclude that therefore value is relative, just because different sensations are caused by different objects in different subjects, would be as ridiculous as to conclude that because two individuals broke their legs due to different causes, broken legs don’t exist, or that because two individuals died of different causes, the dying process doesn’t really exist, it’s a matter of opinion.

Person A broke their leg being thrown off of a mountain by a bear, person B broke their leg having a bicycle accident. Therefore, broken legs don’t exist, because broken legs are caused by different phenomena in different subjects. Person A died of cancer, person B died of AIDS, therefore, dying is not real, because it has different causes. Person A suffers feels negative in response to almonds, person B feels negative in response to peanuts, therefore, negative qualia is not real, because it has different causes.

That is the inane assumption value relativists are making.

Similarly, they frequently like to pretend that the goodness or badness of a sensation is determined by what we deem it or acknowledge the sensation to be, something along the lines of:

  • ”But pain isn’t really bad, bad is just a personal value judgement.”

So when I stub my toe, it does not really feel bad, it feels like absolutely nothing at first, and then I sit down and think long and hard about what I’m going to label my sensation, good or bad? Then I label it bad, although I could have easily avoided feeling bad by labelling it good, and only then the sensation of stubbing my toe, that initially felt like absolutely nothing whatsoever, starts to feel really bad – when I deem it to be bad – otherwise it is not bad.

I just had a cactus rammed up my asshole, but this does not really feel bad, I only personally judge it to feel bad for no logical reason at some point afterwards, and then it starts to feel bad.

It’s idiotic, because it would be impossible to personally judge a sensation on anything other than what it feels like. It had to feel bad, or otherwise you have no information that you could judge it as bad based on, for it to be acknowledged as bad, it has to feel a certain way, i.e bad, otherwise there’d be no way to later on judge and acknowledge it as bad either.

If the sensation literally just felt like nothing whatsoever, how would we judge it to be good or bad? How would we acknowledge it as anything? We couldn’t.

  • Based on personal preferences perhaps? You label some sensations as good or bad based on what you personally like or don’t like?

Even that reasoning would fail, because preference is not disconnected from this fundamental fact that you can objectively feel bad or less bad either.

What is preference, as in, I like apples but I don’t like oranges supposed to mean, if not ”apples make me feel better” and ”oranges make me feel worse”? What is I like vaginas but I don’t like horse cocks supposed to mean, if not ”vaginas make me feel better” and ”horse cocks turn me off”?

  • All preference means is certain things make you feel good – so that already concedes the existence of objective value, i.e good and bad feelings objectively exist.

Fact is, preference is already a term that concedes the existence of objective value, all that having a preference for something means is that it improves your welfare, your welfare that objectively exists. You have a preference for the apple, so that means you feel better when you eat them. If that weren’t the case, and they’d make you feel worse in every possible, conceivable way, then it would be incorrect to say you have a preference for apples.

  • Sensations are predetermined for you, they come with – or rather intrinsically are – certain qualities. There is no such thing as a false pain, a false sensation.

The notion of someone having a false pain is bigoted and incoherent, all that can happen is that someone fails to correctly identify the cause of their pain, or that they are feeling pain because they believe in the existence of a threat that does not exist – i.e you feel frightened and pained in your leg because you have a delusion that a demon is gnawing on your leg.

But none of that changes the fact that the person is still experiencing pain, suffering, qualitatively negative sensation, so it’s not a false pain – you either feel it or you don’t feel it, you can’t point at such an experience of a schizophrenic who feels pain in their leg because they believe a demon is gnawing on it and say ”that is contradictory, false non-sense, just like saying one plus one equals three!” – because it is simply not, it is a real sensation, there’s no debating that they have an actual brain, and that that actual brain is creating a sensation.

You might say they fail to correctly identify the source of their pain, or they feel it because they are frightened by something that does not exist, i.e they are delusional, they think a threat exists although it does not exist, but that’s all. If the sensation is happening, it is real, there is no false sensation in that sense.

Then value relativists and absolute nihilists frequently like to get into even more incoherent thought patterns of concluding that bad sensations aren’t real, because they only exist in organisms that are able to feel them, but not in trees or computers, ”the universe” is an all-around favorite here.

  • ”Well, to the girl I’m brutally raping, rape might be bad, but, fact is, the universe does not care about rape, the universe doesn’t think rape is bad, so it’s not really bad”.
  • ”But notions of ”bad” and ”good” only exist if sentient beings exist, they don’t exist somewhere else in our careless universe, so it’s just a notion in the girl’s head that it is bad when I’m brutally raping her”.

This is simply them failing to acknowledge that some facts are contingent on other facts.

Bad sensations only exist if sentient organisms that can feel feelings exist, but the fact is that feeling organisms exist, so as long as that’s the case, bad sensation exists.

A road that is 10 miles long is only 10 miles long if prior the last 5 miles of that road, there are another 5 miles that then ultimately add it up to 10 miles.

Another thing to point out with this relativist/nihilist argument is also that of course if these objects they are appealing to, e.g. ”the universe” would actually start to feel feelings, they would just dismiss it on the same basis that they are now dismissing the experiences of sentient organisms on.

So if someone like that is brutally raping a girl and says ”but it’s not really bad, because, uh, the tree that is standing next to me doesn’t think it’s bad!” – we just need to create a hypothetical scenario in which a tree could feel suffering.

So let’s say we now have a sentient tree that is observing the rape and also says ”stop raping, rape is bad, I’m the anti-rape tree!” – then the nihilist would just dismiss it on the same basis:

  • ”But rape is only bad TO the girl I’m raping AND the tree, it’s not bad to, uh, the sun. See, the sun doesn’t care, it’s only the irrational rape victim and the tree with their irrational ”bad” feelings” that have a problem with rape!”.

Fine, so let’s say we now have a sentient sun that is observing the rape and also says ”stop raping, rape is bad, I’m the anti-rape sun!” – then the nihilist would just dismiss it on the same basis:

”But rape is only bad TO the girl I’m raping AND the tree AND the sun, it’s not bad to the universe. Ha! See, the universe doesn’t care, it’s only the irrational rape victim, the tree and the sun with their irrational ”bad feelings” that have a problem with rape”.

So let’s say we now have a sentient universe that is observing the rape and also says ”stop raping, rape is bad, I’m the anti-rape universe!” – then…you know the conclusion.

Ultimately, the nihilist is just saying ”because bad is really happening, it is not really happening because it’s only happening in things in which it can happen after all” – truly bad sensations somehow aren’t really real because they happen in organisms that can feel them, and not outside of them in trees or stones.

  • So some of them might concede at some point that bad sensations can exist, but then the next question of obligation comes in: ”why shouldn’t I cause suffering to others?”.

Because you care about it when it happens to you based on the fact that it feels bad.

There are categories, like ”worthy of being prevented” or ”worthy of being repeated” in your mind when you navigate the world, and the fact is that you put suffering into ”worthy of being prevented” based on the fact that it feels bad.

So if I can find you another organism that can also feel bad, like your mother, or a pig, or an octopus, your obligation is the same – suffering is worthy of prevention because it feels bad, and your mother, the pig, the octopus feel bad when I stick a knife in their eye, so you ought to stop me, unless I’m preventing even more badness by sticking a knife in them.

If you want to say that you only think of suffering as worthy of prevention because it happens to you in particular, then we would arrive at the conclusion that you ought to avoid pleasure just as much as you are trying to avoid suffering, because pleasure also sometimes happens to you in particular, same category, so if that qualifies suffering as worth avoiding ”it happens to me”, then you would try to avoid the orgasm just as much as the knife in your cock.

If I say I should flush shit down my toilet because of a characteristic intrinsic to shit, i.e it’s shitty, then I should also flush it down when I shit in a different toilet, because it’s still shitty, if it’s on the other hand only worthy of being flushed down my toilet because it sits in my toilet in particular, not in your’s, then I must also flush my credit card down my toilet if it were to fall into it.

In conclusion, truly bad sensations exist, and if you think of them as worthy of being prevented because they really feel bad, then you ought to prevent them for others as well, if they are worthy of being prevented because they happen to you, then any sensation that happens to you is worth avoiding by virtue of happening to you.

So you either have to think of suffering in other organisms just as worthy of prevention as in you, or you have to start treating pleasure and suffering as equivalents when they happen to you, which is physically impossible anyway because if you avoid suffering, you feel pleasure, and if you avoid pleasure, you feel suffering, so it would be an impossible task.

You put yourself into category ”worthy of consideration/protection from harm” based on a certain characteristic, which is sentience/consciousness, others share this characteristic with you, so they logically have to go into the same category.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 2: Intentional vs. unintentional harm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On toughening up children.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • See how this would be completely unfair?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is an unhealthy addiction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it brings up the question:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can it be good to create desire?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s circular logic entirely basically.

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

Everyone loves Rebecca, because she is so popular.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Possible answers and my responses:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pro-life ideology frequently motivates speciesist behavior.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right to die.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Possible life apologist objections and points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pain is pain, no matter by what it’s caused.
  • I think ultimately all animals should go extinct to be saved from suffering.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Sentient existence itself is unnecessary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lack of consent and procreation.

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

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

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

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

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

When is it important to ask for consent?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you procreate, you:

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

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

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

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

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

  • What if I want to give a fetus cancer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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