Sentient life is useless.

Antifrustrationism is an axiological position proposed by German philosopher Christoph Fehige,[1] which states that “we don’t do any good by creating satisfied extra preferences. What matters about preferences is not that they have a satisfied existence, but that they don’t have a frustrated existence.”[2] According to Fehige, “maximizers of preference satisfaction should instead call themselves minimizers of preference frustration.”[2]

What makes the world better is “not its amount of preference satisfaction, but the avoided preference frustration.”[3] In the words of Fehige, “we have obligations to make preferrers satisfied, but no obligations to make satisfied preferrers.”[2]

The position stands in contrast to classical utilitarianism, among other ethical theories, which holds that creating “satisfied preferrers” is, or can be, a good in itself.

The moral philosopher Peter Singer has in the past endorsed a position similar to antifrustrationism (negative preference utilitarianism), writing:

The creation of preferences which we then satisfy gains us nothing. We can think of the creation of the unsatisfied preferences as putting a debit in the moral ledger which satisfying them merely cancels out… Preference Utilitarians have grounds for seeking to satisfy their wishes, but they cannot say that the universe would have been a worse place if we had never come into existence at all.[5]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intelligence, maturity, consent.

Consent at its core implies agreement and wanting, for your desire to be in accordance with something or not, I offer to give you a cake, you consent, agree, want it, or you don’t consent, you disagree, you don’t want the cake. A simple enough concept.

You cannot consent to get raped or be a slave, that would be what we call an oxymoron, because it innately implies unwanted sex, what might be meant by ”wanting to get raped” is that you want someone to have sex with you who doesn’t care whether or not you want to have sex with them, but ultimately you still wanted the sex, so it wasn’t truly non-consensual.

A common argument against having sex with children/minors, or also mentally handicapped humans of similar intelligence or non-human animals (beastiality) is that they cannot consent, because they are unintelligent and immature.

Intelligence and maturity of course have nothing inherently to do with consent, you can consent to, agree to, want to do things even if you are stupid and immature. A child can disagree to eat broccoli, a child can agree to eat ice cream instead. A dog can disagree to go for a walk outside, a dog can agree to take a shit in the garden instead. Every conscious organism can agree to, want things, or disagree to, and not want certain things.

The argument to my understanding is really about whether or not we should allow children, the mentally handicapped and other animals to consent to certain things, because they may lack the intellect and maturity to make decisions in their best interest and appreciate future ramifications and consequences of their actions, they may be vulnerable to certain harms and risks.

The problem here is the idea that sex is innately dangerous, risky, harmful, so parents don’t want to allow children to agree to sex, whereas in reality, it is not inherently dangerous, risky, harmful, so there would be no reason to not let children agree to it. I would argue:

  • P1: Intelligence and maturity are required when the act has a clear risk of future harm.
  • P2: Sex does not inherently contain a clear risk of future harm.
  • C: Not all sex inherently requires intelligence and maturity.

Whether or not you need the ability to understand future consequences is entirely dependent on the future consequences of the act.

Here we can use differing examples to make this point in both sexual and non-sexual contexts. Let’s say a child isn’t able to understand traffic rules yet, but this child wants to ride a bicycle. Can this child consent to ride a bicycle?

Depends on the environment and consequences would be the answer. On the freeway, no, the child shouldn’t be riding the bicycle, but in a safe and harmless environment with no traffic going on inside it, it’d be perfectly fine.

We can allow the child to ride the bicycle in a safe environment, but we shouldn’t allow it on the freeway. Now let’s use a sexual example, let’s say a child is sexually curious, found out about the existence of sexual pleasure and wants to experiment with it, but is too immature to understand sex education and take it seriously. Can we allow this child to consent?

Again, depends entirely on environment and consequences.

Would it be a good idea to let such a child go to have unprotected anal sex with 100 strangers in a row despite not even knowing what an STD is?

No, of course not, we can entirely agree with the anti-pedo folks here that that would be a bad idea. But would it be bad to let such a child hump the leg of a pedophile they know and trust? No, because that would be a harmless scenario, there’s no risk to that that the child may fail to appreciate due to their childishness, so it’d be perfectly fine to allow that.

  • Similarly, we can use such examples in the context of disabled people.

Can a severely intellectually handicapped person that wants to play with blue marbles but has a tendency to swallow them (and fail to comprehend that this is unhealthy) consent to play with blue marbles?

Depends on the environment and consequences. Alone in their room with no one at home? Probably a bad idea, probably shouldn’t be happening. But under the supervision of someone who makes sure once in a while that they don’t swallow the blue marbles? Fine, no problem, they can consent.

Now let’s use a sexual example again.

Let’s say there’s an adult woman on the mental level of a 5 year old child that doesn’t understand sex education, but it is clear that she wants to someone to stick his dick in her pussy. Should we allow her to have sex? Again, depends on the environment and consequences.

Should we sell her out on the streets to have an unprotected threesome right away? No, bad idea. But let’s say she finds a partner, and he’s willing to stick it in her, and he takes care of the contraception process. Then why not? No problem, she is consenting to receiving the sexual experience, and the risks she doesn’t comprehend are no longer present, there’s no need to comprehend them.

You only need intelligence and maturity to understand potential negative future consequences of your actions, if those potential negative future consequences actually even exist.

We don’t forbid children to eat broccoli, and that is because there is no great foreseeable future consequence to eating broccoli that this child may feel bad about later on, so anyone who would screech that children can never consent to eat broccoli and you should be put in prison for giving a child broccoli would sound insane, but there is an age restriction for alcohol, and the idea there is that while a child may agree to drink a bottle of whiskey, they may not appreciate the risk of harm that it later on imposes on them, so they didn’t really agree to all aspects of it.

  • Some also call it a difference between simplistic and informed consent.

So simplistic consent would just be the ”I want something” statement/indication which a child, mentally handicapped person or even non-human animal can do, informed consent refers more to also understanding the consequences and ramifications of wanting and agreeing to things.

Then the argument would be as follows:

  • P1: Clear risk of harm requires informed consent.
  • P2: Sex does not necessarily have a clear risk of harm.
  • C: Therefore, sex does not necessarily require informed, but only simplistic consent.

So what I’m arguing is mostly to take away from this is that if you are interacting with someone who is less intelligent, less mature, has impaired foresight – there’s extra responsibility on you to make sure that the individual is not harmed by anything you do, because they may not be able to take care of that by themselves, but that doesn’t mean they are fundamentally incapable of consent. In that sense you could even argue that it’s sometimes even better if a young girl who is still somewhat irresponsible would have sex with an older man rather than someone her age, on her maturity level, who would equally be too irresponsible to use a condom, since that is often a concern parents have.

The adult has to make sure the child that doesn’t understand traffic rules isn’t riding the bicycle on the freeway, the caretaker has to make sure the retarded person doesn’t swallow the blue marbles, and similarly a pedophile would have to make sure they are not subjecting the child to some undesirable consequence of a given sex act. Adults already do this with children in other aspects of life, so I don’t see why the same reasoning shouldn’t consistently be applied to sexuality.

This idea that children can never consent to sex is based on the assumption that sex is automatically, inherently and always dangerous/harmful, so no one feels comfortable with allowing less intellectually equipped individuals, like young children, the severely disabled or non-human animals have sex – this becomes apparent when they then like to bring up dangerous scenarios where children supposedly consented to do certain things but have to be stopped by adults because they were endangering themselves, they use these examples to invalidate the idea that we should let children consent to anything, or take their consent seriously.

  • ”So what if a child consented to run across the streets without looking left and right???”

If this is happening in a dangerous environment where the implication is that the child would definitely get hit by a car, then obviously, the child did not actually consent to run across the street at all, because the act of running across the street encompasses getting hit by a car, so obviously if the act ”crossing the street” encompasses ”getting run over by a car”, and the child in question does not want to get hit by a car, then the child did not consent to run across the street.

  • The question to these pedophobes here should really be – what is the harm in sex that the child always fails to see (due to their childishness)?

They never want to allow a child/minor to agree to sex, even if we eliminate all potential harmful factors. It’s true that we don’t always just allow children to do whatever they think they want, but that is because there’s usually some kind of danger to it that the child/minor may fail to see.

Why should I think that sex is so inherently dangerous that a child should never be allowed to have it? Why should one believe that?

Let’s say the child found out about sexual pleasure on their own by humping their pillow, they were not manipulated, blackmailed or forced to hump the pedophile’s leg. The pedophile didn’t do anything to the child that the child did not want, like penetration, the child cannot get an STD or get pregnant, no such risky sex act was performed.

  • Now where’s the risk of harm that requires the child to be a rocket scientist first in order to be able to circumvent it?

In these examples that they give to discredit the idea of a child consenting, they always smuggle in some kind of later on harmful consequence that will befall the child, like the child running across the street and then getting hit by a car, or the child refusing to get vaccinated and then dying of small pox – so I would agree with them that if there is such a harm to an activity that the child wants to do or not do, the child shouldn’t be allowed to do it.

But what is the harm to sex, why should I assume sex is per se harmful? Why would a child agreeing to sexual pleasure necessarily result in harm to the child? There is nothing inherently about sex that makes it so that whenever you have it under 16, 17, 18 (or whatever is considered to be the particular holy age), it would automatically result in pain and trauma, there are acts I’ve listed like voluntary leg humping that don’t carry any significant risk of harm, so it’d be non-sensical to suggest that one needs to have high intelligence or maturity first before they consent to it.

Possible pedophobe answers might be:

  • ”The child could regret having sex later on!”

That is true of every activity a child, minor or even adult could possibly engage in, including riding a bicycle or eating ice cream, so we cannot allow the child to do anything by that standard, they could always regret it later on. I see no reason to think sex what be particularly regrettable unless society started to make a big deal out of it.

  • ”There are still social consequences that the child might not be equipped to deal with yet!”

True, there are certain social consequences to sex between the child and the pedophile that the child might not be equipped to deal with, like being hysterically screeched at by everyone around them how they got raped, forced to have sex, when they really were not forced at all, which confuses the child, plus they witness their partner being ostracized and arrested – a lot of unnecessary drama.

Those consequences definitely exist, but society is responsible for creating them in the first place, they are not innate to the sexual encounter, so if they appeal to those self-created consequences, they are just committing an argumetum ad baculum fallacy – it’d be like saying children can never consent to buy ice cream, it’s harmful, because we live in a society where we burn people alive in front of children for selling ice cream to them, and children aren’t mature enough to deal with that possible traumatic consequence yet. Don’t wear a red hat, it’s harmful, because if you wear one, I’ll cut your head off and set you on fire.

So again, in that case the social environment can be expected to be safer for the less intellectually equipped/less mature individual, why not? Why should they insist on inflicting harmful social consequences after such an act, if the act itself wasn’t harmful?

  • ”I don’t care, the child is still emotionally undeveloped and immature, so the child can NEVER consent, period!”

That is just blind dogmatism at that point. If it’s just per se wrong to have sex with a child just because that child is unintelligent and immature, it’s also wrong to do anything else, e.g. hug children non-sexually or give them ice cream, because the child has the exact same level of IQ and maturity while they’re eating the ice cream as when they’re having sex.

  • P1: It’s wrong to have sex with children/minors because they don’t have fully developed brains and/or cannot consent.
  • P2: Children/minors don’t have fully developed brains and/or cannot consent.
  • C: All social interaction with children/minors is always wrong, not just sex.

If it’s just per se wrong to have sex with a child because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature, then it is just as wrong to give a child ice cream because they are just unintelligent, undeveloped and immature when they eat ice cream. If a child can never consent to sex because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature, then a child can likewise never consent to eat ice cream because they are just as unintelligent, undeveloped, immature when they are offered ice cream. It’s logical consistency, if you like apples because they have a round shape, you must like oranges because they have a round shape.

You actually need to specify why intelligence and maturity are prerequisites for all sex acts, not just say ”they are unintellligent and immature”, because their level of intelligence and maturity is exactly the same in all other areas of life, so if that makes sex with them wrong/unethical, then it makes all other interactions with them wrong/unethical, logical consistency 101.

In conclusion, I would say you only need to be intelligent, developed and mature when you want to engage in acts that carry a significant risk of future harm, sex is not necessarily an act that carries a significant risk of future harm, so sex does not require you to be intelligent, developed and mature by default, a child/non-human animal/mentally handicapped person on the IQ level of a dolphin can perfectly consent to sex under many circumstances.

No one would forbid a child to consent to eating broccoli (or go as far as to say they are somehow intrinsically unable to consent), because they recognize there is no harmful consequence to eating broccoli that this child fails to understand due to their childishness.

The reason why pedophobes won’t allow children to consent to sex is because they already falsely believe sex is intrinsically harmful, based on irrational feelings of disgust and repulsion towards pedophiles, leading them to conflate harmful cases of child sex (where coercion and violence were involved) with harmless cases of child sex (where no coercion nor violence were involved), so they reach the false conclusion that it is innately impossible for a child to consent to sex.

Why I reject the child/underage sex taboo.

  • NO EVIDENCE FOR INTRINSIC HARM AND TRAUMA, INTRINSIC VS. EXTRINSIC, SOCIETALLY MANUFACTURED HARM.

There has always been absolutely zero evidence that sex in childhood/youth in and of itself causes trauma, intrinsic (an important keyword here) harm, there are arguably certain cliché factors that could make it harmful that pedophobes automatically think of when they even hear the word pedophilia, such as:

  • Manipulation.
  • Blackmail.
  • Force of any kind.
  • Early penetration.
  • Early impregnation.
  • STD exchange.
  • Violent abduction, rape and murder.

But nothing says that any of these factors inherently apply to all cases of sex between minors and adults, society is simply disgusted by these relations and therefore fails to adequately distinguish between the harmful and the harmless ones.

There is in fact evidence that suggests children are harmed by these other factors when they feel traumatized after a sexual encounter rather than by sex itself, e.g. Rind et al. as an obvious example, or feel traumatized long after such encounters when they come into contact with society’s negative views on the sexual encounter they had, e.g. The Trauma Myth by Susan Clancy, it can be hard for scientists to talk about these topics in public because it puts them at risk to be publically ostracized by psychotic pedophobes.

This paper is a review of previous works and thus offers no new concepts; the apparent absence of harm in sexually expressed child/older person relationships has been attested to as far back as 1937 (Bender and Blau 1937) and 1942 (Menninger 1942).

C.A. Tripp asked “What is the mechanism {for transmuting a benign childhood sexual experience into harm}?”, noting that “victimologists have never provided one that is scientifically credible;” (as reported by Bruce Rind in personal communication 2002) and Kilpatrick (1987) also posed the question: “What has been harmed – the child or the moral code?” (p. 179).

Bailey (2011) observes what is to him “a surprising… lack of scientific evidence” (p. 3) for these claims. Clancy (2009) proposed that at least initial trauma is a “myth,” and noted that she “cannot offer a clear theoretical model as to exactly how and why sexual abuse damages victims” (p. 142).

Constantine (1981) described the effects of intervention based on this assumed/assigned harmfulness as “psychonoxious” (p. 241).

However, as Rind, Tromovitch and Bauserman (1998) point out, since the late 1970s a large number of mental health professionals have claimed that all sexual interactions between children and older persons “… cause harm, {that} this harm is pervasive,… {is} likely to be intense,… {and} is an equivalent experience for boys and girls…” (p. 22). However, no path or mechanism is offered as to how these sexual interactions actually cause harm.

https://www.brongersma.info/The_missing_mechanism_of_harm_in_consensual_sexually_expressed_boyhood_relationships_with_older_males

It’s just like some spiders are venomous and therefore dangerous, and some spiders are not, but because you find spiders disgusting anyway, you put both spiders into the ”dangerous” category.

Pedophobes feel disgusted by the idea of a child having sex anyway, so they throw the 6 year old girl voluntarily humping a pedophile’s leg into the same category as the 6 year old girl getting abducted and brutally raped, disgust can scare you away from a non-dangerous spider or pedophile.

In and of itself, there is no reason why a child would be traumatized by sex if they found out about sexual pleasure on their own by humping a pillow and now want to receive it by rubbing themselves against an adult’s leg – no manipulation, blackmail, violence required, nothing later on done to the child that the child is harmed by (like anal penetration or impregnation), unless society reacts negatively to it. Why would that be harmful? There’s no explanation of that mechanism, because it does not exist.

If you want to claim that sex in childhood is intrinsically harmful, point out to me in detail why such an encounter of a 6 year old girl voluntarily humping a pedophile’s leg would be harmful if she has not been in any way manipulated, blackmailed, forced into it and the pedophile did not brutally rape her later on, point out how magically trauma will poof into existence out of the great nowhere for no tangible, scientifically explicable reason whatsoever, even if society simply didn’t react negatively to such an encounter.

It is vital to be able to show a mechanism of some sort. Example, with alcohol, we can directly show how it alters your liver, no doubt about it, alcohol can cause liver diseases, independent of which society you live in at what point in time. Now what about sex in childhood, can you show me that a child will feel harmed by voluntarily having an orgasm even in a society that is perfectly accepting of children receiving orgasms?

Pedophobes are engaging in post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning here – B happened after A, therefore, B was caused by A. A child had a harmless sexual encounter, the child is traumatized at some point long afterwards because of secondary harmful factors, which can include society’s negative reaction to the sexual encounter, therefore, harmless sexual encounters cause trauma.

  • ”The child left the house while it was raining, the child was wetted by the rain, therefore, leaving the house causes the child to be wetted.” – is this proper logical reasoning? No.

A child has a harmless sexual encounter with a pedophile, the pedophobes then inflict negative consequences onto the child and the pedophile as they fail to distinguish between harmless and harmful cases due to irrational feelings of disgust/repulsion, such as:

  • Separating the child and the pedophile.
  • Screeching hysterically at the child how they supposedly got molested.
  • Sending the child to a similarly delusional therapist.
  • Socially pressuring the child to ”accept their rape” or be labelled as delusional.
  • Telling the child they now ”lost their innocence”, implying they are guilty.
  • Tormenting/beating the pedophile in front of the child.
  • Making the child feel responsible for sending the pedophile to prison.
  • Telling the child how their partner is now going to get assraped in prison.

Then, the pedophobe confuses the harm they cause for harm caused by the harmless sexual encounter between the child and the pedophile, concluding that orgasms under 18 (or whatever holy age they were socially indoctrinated into believing is the only correct one) causes lifelong trauma and depression – a faulty conclusion.

As neurologically typical humans are predisposed to act as social copying machines who largely care about how they perceived by others, it is no wonder that children who engaged in such initially harmless encounters then frequently grow up to parrot the ”I got raped” – narrative when they grow up in order to be accepted by their primitive tribe.

  • When nothing helps, they also like to appeal to the consequences they themselves are at fault for creating.

When all this is pointed out to them, they then frequently like to commit the argumentum ad baculum fallacy and say that even if the harm/trauma is caused by the social consequences (that we inflict on children and pedophiles), it is still a consequence nonetheless, so there’s still no excuse for having sex with a child/minor, as they will be harmed either way. It doesn’t matter if the harm is just caused by society reacting negatively to the encounter, because society does react that way after all!

This is a catastrophically idiotic argument, considering that the harm is caused by them and could be easily eliminated by them no longer reacting in this fashion to such encounters between children/minors and pedophiles/adults.

It would be like saying if you sell a child ice cream, although selling ice cream to children might not be inherently harmful, if you do so, I’m going to castrate and shoot you in front of the child because I’m an anti-ice cream bigot who thinks everyone who sells ice cream to anyone under the age of 18 should be violently murdered, so therefore, you harmed this child by selling it ice cream, because in response to it, I cut your nuts off and set you on fire in front of the child, thereby traumatizing the child. See, it’s all your fault.

  • Why should a society have the right to make a harmless activity into a harmful one?

It’s blaming the victim just like any other bigoted nazi would do, no better than a rapist saying you can’t be a whore or else he’s going to rape you, or a homophobe saying don’t be a faggot or I’ll beat you, just that the pedophobe is saying don’t be a pedo or else I’m going to traumatize a child by beating you up in front of the child for giving the child an orgasm, don’t make me harm the child by harming you and by extension the child with my psychotic bigot meltdown in response to you giving a volunteering child a perfectly harmless orgasm.

  • HIGH INTELLIGENCE AND MATURITY ARE NOT PREREQUISITES FOR GIVING CONSENT.

It is untrue that children are fundamentally incapable of literal consent, agreement. Any conscious, sentient organism can be agreeable or disagreeable, children have preferences, almost everyone has seen a child spitting out food they didn’t like before or buy ice cream, I could argue even a dog can consent to go for a walk outside, the function of agreement and disagreement, attraction and repulsion exist in every conscious organism.

What is true though is that children are until a certain age indeed less intelligent and mature than adults, but there is no reason to think that this inherently disqualifies them from consenting to sex, which is what pedophobes would like to think.

A good word to use here is foresight and/or future concept, the ability to plan and think ahead, calculate future consequences and ramifications of actions. The point is that whether or not you need great foresight in order to consent to an act is entirely dependent on the future consequences of the act we are discussing.

  • If there is no innate, foreseeable harmful consequence to an act, a subject does not need great foresight, intelligence and maturity.

For example, let’s say we have a child subject that wishes to ride a bicycle, despite not understanding traffic rules yet due to their lack of intelligence and maturity. Would it be ethically responsible to allow this child consent to ride a bicycle? Can they consent? The answer is that it entirely depends on the environment and its consequences.

On the freeway? No, there is a potential negative consequence, i.e getting hit by a car that the child is unable to take into account yet, so they are disqualified from consenting.

In a completely safe, harmless, child-friendly environment? Yes, because there is about absolutely zero chance that they’ll get hit by a car anyway, so in a completely safe and harmless, child-friendly street, even a child with no ability to understand traffic rules is perfectly able to consent to ride a bicycle.

There is no age restriction for children eating broccoli, but there is an age restriction for children drinking alcohol, and the general idea there is that even if a child consents to drink a bottle of whiskey, they may not consent to the future consequences of that act but might not be able to appreciate that, whereas with broccoli, there is no such risk, so there would be no reason to prevent the child from consenting to eat broccoli.

Similarly, using the simple concept of logical consistency, we can apply the same reasoning to sexuality. If there is no innate, foreseeable harmful consequence to a sex act between a child and a pedophile that the child fails to see due to their childishness, then there is no reason to disqualify the child’s consent as ”somehow not real consent”.

So let’s use a similar example in a sexual context. We have a child subject that wants to receive sexual pleasure, but is too unintelligent and immature to grasp sexual education.

Would it be responsible to allow this child to have sex? Depends on the environment and consequences, just as with the bicycle example.

If the situation is sufficiently devoid of harm risk, i.e the child humps a pedophile’s leg, no risk of STDs or pregnancy involved, then there’s no logically detectable problem, if the child does something that exposes them to STDs despite not even properly understanding what STDs are yet, like having unprotected anal sex with strangers, that would be bad.

  • P1: Dangerous activities require foresight (ability to understand future consequences).
  • P2: Sex is not necessarily a dangerous activity.
  • C: Sex does not necessarily require foresight.

And of course again, pedophobes will sometimes appeal to the social consequences that they themselves are creating in response to such sexual encounters, i.e ”children can’t consent because there are just social risks amd consequences the child isn’t able to deal with yet!” – but obviously the answer to this is simply to abolish those social consequences, rather than to abolish a harmless sex act, again, it’d be like saying children can never consent to buy ice cream because I’m an anti-ice cream bigot who’ll burn you alive in front of a child for selling them ice cream.

”They could regret having sex later on!” might also be a concern, but that isn’t a fair risk to name, because that can literally be applied to every single interaction anyone ever has, so by that standard no social interactions should be allowed at all.

The reason why pedophobes think children need to be intelligent and mature to consent to sex is because they believe sex to be harmful (based on their irrational feelings of disgust) so in order for children to consent to it, they expect them to be rocket scientists first, even when the sex act in question is completely non-dangerous like leg humping.

It is equally ridiculous as not allowing a child to ride a bicycle in a safe and harmless environment just because the child isn’t competent to drive a car on the freeway yet, intelligence and maturity are not per se required for it to be possible for a child/minor to be agreeable.

We generally allow children to do what they want, as long as it has no secondary consequence that they may later on not want, resulting in harm to them, such as eating broccoli but not drinking alcohol. Pedophobes falsely believe that sex is one of those things that will later on always turn out to be harmful, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when they react negatively to it.

  • POWER DIFFERENCE DOES NOT EQUAL POWER ABUSE.

It is true that in certain areas, depending on what we are measuring, adults are more powerful than children, though it does not even apply to all areas of life.

It is irrelevant if adults are more powerful than children, because the existence of power in and of itself does not equal abuse. If a child voluntarily does garden work for an adult for a little extra pocket money and someone comes around the corner and accuses that adult of blackmailing a child into slave labor in his garden, they need evidence for that claim, the fact alone that this adult has authority does not mean that the child was forced to work.

When it comes to sex however, these critical evaluation skills shut down, and pedophobes see the fact that a given adult, be it a teacher or not has power over the minor as evidence that if sex happened between the adult and the minor, it must be the result of power abuse, no doubt about it.

  • Adult has authority over 15 year old, 15 year old however completely voluntarily does garden work for extra pocket money – not abusive.
  • Adult has authority over 15 year old, 15 year old however completely voluntarily sticks penis in them – somehow abusive.
  • Father has physical strength advantage over 6 year old daughter, 6 year old daughter consents to be lifted up by him – not abusive.
  • Pedophile has physical strength advantage over 6 year old girl as well, 6 year old girl consents to ride on his leg – somehow abusive.

This is a case of hypocrisy we are dealing with here, ”power imbalance simultaneously does and does not make an interaction abusive.”

The existence of power does not equate to abuse of that power, and in most other contexts, pedophobes are perfectly capable of recognizing that the possession of power is not the same thing as the abuse of power.

They only fail to recognize it in the sexual context, and this is because they most likely live in a delusional disney fantasy world where they want to believe that their 15 year old daughter is an asexual, innocent princess whose sexual impulses are all triggered by some kind of malicious pedominati propagandist fooling her into thinking that orgasms are totally not harmful, when in reality they obviously cause PTSD for life when you receive them under 18, 17, 16 or whatever may be the holy age they have been indoctrinated into thinking is the only correct one.

They already made another false assumption, which is that children are asexual, innocent (sex=guilt) angels that would never possibly want sex (that’s too icky of a truth to accept, OMG children can perform basic biological functions like producing excrement just like adults, this is unacceptable!), and they base their assumption that if sex between a minor and an authority figure happens on that first fundamentally false assumption that manipulation must be used to get a minor to have sex.

Someone can have sex with you in spite of their power, e.g. although I have a gun and have power over you, you want to suck my dick completely regardless of the fact that I own a gun.

Or, someone can also feel aroused by the power, but not abused by it, this can apply in cases where young girls might look up to an idolized musician or someone like that, but this doesn’t mean that 12 year old girls only want to suck Justin Bieber’s dick because they’re scared he’s going to kill them, so you could also suck my dick because you are aroused by guns, not intimidated by them.

Both are possible, so the power itself does not equate to abuse. If it does, then any interaction where there’s a power imbalance involved, not only sexual ones, are by default abusive.

  • In conclusion:

I don’t think there is any rational reason for upkeeping this backward taboo against sex in childhood and/or youth, or sexual relations between children/minors and pedophiles/adults, it is in the end just like all other bigotries a result of disgust and fear of the unknown, not truly rational thought.

It is barbaric pro-suffering non-sense, no better than having some kind of other non-sensical taboo, pick any other object and make it into a taboo, like candy.

Anyone who gives anyone under 18 candy will be violently harassed by society for the child that received candy to see, the child will be sent to a therapist and socially pressured to say they were forced to eat candy at knifepoint by the evil candy distributing monster.

Fetuses and future value.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • What about coma patients though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prevention of future suffering and pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eating animals because they’re less intelligent.

The argument for humans rights is the same argument for animal rights, other animals possess the characteristic that makes it important to be put into the category of organisms that have rights, which is sentience – the capacity to feel things.

It is not my white skin color that makes it important for me to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat, as I could be braindead, still contain white skin color, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not the white skin color that makes avoidance of a knife in my throat into an important priority.

It is not my penis that makes it important for me to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat, as I could be braindead, still contain a penis, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not penis that makes avoidance of knife in my throat into an important priority.

And finally, it is not my human DNA that makes it an important priority to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat either, as I could be braindead, still contain human DNA, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not human DNA that makes avoidance of knife in my throat into an important priority.

There is absolutely no reason why it would be in any way worse to pull the plug on a braindead person, any more than to pull the plug on a computer, the only reason why it could ever possibly be bad to do so is because it affects another sentient organism, like a family member or friend of their’s that has some kind of emotional attachment to the braindead body, but if that family would indeed be more upset by someone destroying their computer than the braindead human, then it would be worse to destroy the computer in fact.

Speciesists are under ingroup favoritism/bias, just like racists and sexists, i.e I am important because I can feel things, that is understood, but this other creature is not important despite being able to feel things just like me, because it doesn’t share group membership with me, you’re not in team white, team penis or team human, so we can torture you.

An other difference that exists between humans and animals, that does not as severely exist between whites and blacks, or men and women, is the different level of intelligence, it is true that pigs, cows, chicken are much less intellectually capable than humans, whereas there’s no such extreme difference between blacks and whites, or men and women.

  • However, then we run into the mental retardation problem.

There are of course severely mentally disabled humans that aren’t much more intelligent than pigs, cows, chicken, definitely not chimpanzees, so would any of these speciesists sign me a contract that states that if they were to get into a car accident tomorrow and end up on the same level of intelligence as a pig, cow or chicken, I am allowed to treat them as a pig, cow or chicken?

Let’s say you are no longer able to add 50 plus 50, and cannot read books, so now I can cut your nuts off with no anesthesia, stick my arm up your asshole and throw you into a meatgrinder once you are of no more use for me to rape and exploit? Is that perfectly fine? I couldn’t get any more milk out of that retarded bitch’s tits, so I beat her to death with a sledgehammer. Why not?

  • ”BUT THEY’RE STILL HUMANS!!!!!”

Saying that such disabled humans are still human though, even if they’re not as intelligent, so they’re still granted rights unlike the other animals is nothing but a cheap cop-out, because if the speciesist specifically states intelligence to be the reason why humans have rights unlike animals, and we already established that human DNA in and of itself is worthless (braindead vegetables contain human DNA but can’t feel shit), then obviously if there’s a human that does not possess such a level of intelligence, they don’t deserve rights, plain and simple, it’s logical consistency.

It would be analogous a sexist saying men are granted rights because they’re stronger than women, but then, when we find these sexists a man that is just as weak as the average woman, they say ”but he still has a peepee!” to justify why this man has rights, but women don’t, because the very reason they stated as to why penis havers deserve rights is because they’re stronger than women, this man is not, so he doesn’t deserve rights according to said sexist.

They basically want to attempt to say that even if this retarded person is no more intelligent than a pig that they justify eating based on said pig’s lack of intelligence, they should still be treated the same as other humans, because they share one characteristic with them, which is being human.

This is completely irrational and arbitrary, by that sort of rule (treat the minority the same as the majority based on sharing one characteristic with them), I could say most people are not rapists, Ted Bundy is a serial rapist but also a person, so therefore, we shouldn’t arrest Ted Bundy, because he shares the characteristic, which is personhood with non-rapists.

Speciesists don’t really have any coherent excuse for this, here they frequently just try to make it sound more complex than it is, by appealing to extrinsic factors that may in practice, not in principle be different about causing harm to an unintelligent creature, or use other concepts to describe intelligence and say that animals lack these capacities, like rationality, reason, the ability to reciprocate morals and social contracts, etc.

So they might say if you assault the retarded person, the family of the retarded person would be upset, if you assault the cow, no one would be upset, except the cow of course.

Great, then just rape a retarded orphan child that no one knows on an abandoned island, or in a society of psychopaths that all join in and rape the retarded orphan child too. You’d sign the contract then that says if you end up retarded, we can treat you like that? No.

The pig on the other hand was just bred for meat, the retard wasn’t! Great, then let’s just explicitly breed pig IQ humans for the purpose of turning them into mince meat then, that surely makes it a lot better, as long as you breed someone for the sole purpose of exploiting them it’s alright, slavery is only a problem if you weren’t bred for it and your IQ is over 70.

Of course, they’d mock even the idea of a cow being assaulted or raped, because the cow is supposedly not intelligent enough to understand the concept of assault and rape (i.e in our differently verbalized language, they still feel what is happening), the cow cannot spell the words assault or rape. So therefore, supposedly you can’t assault or rape them because they’re too dumb.

Although, they would of course be completely fine with calling the assaulting and raping of a human female on the IQ level of a cow assault and rape, it’s hypocritical on every level, perhaps they’d even say ”OH MY GOD THIS IS RAPE” if they walked in on some guy inserting his arm into their tied up pet dog’s anus, that is no more significantly intelligent than a cow either.

Or speciesists may dress it up in other abilities that are related to intelligence to make their bigot argument sound more complex, some examples would include:

  • ”Ability to understand morals and reciprocate the social contract.”

Same problem applies, some humans cannot adequately reciprocate ethics, here a favorite dishonest weasel tactic is of course to appeal to violent mentally handicapped humans that have been locked away for the sake of public safety to demonstrate how these individuals lost their right to freedom as well, but we’re not talking about their violence, just their retardation, and there are harmless retarded individuals that don’t need to be locked away, just like pigs, cows, chicken are harmless.

  • ”Ability to understand and speak in our language.”

Hilarious one too, that retarded mute cunt couldn’t talk back, so I just kept raping her.

  • ”Ability to write poems, philosophize and make scientific discoveries.”

Even average humans often can’t do that, so turn them into mince meat?

  • ”Ability to do math.”

So a calculator or a computer has more rights than an average human child?

  • ”Ability to think and plan ahead for the future.”

Same problem, not to mention that many animals can do this, but that’s a less important point.

And so on and so forth, ultimately it all boils down to the same concept – intelligence, and very obviously, intelligence is not why you want to avoid pain, if you legitimately believe that, you are delusional, psychotic, fundamentally disconnected from objective reality.

A butthurt attempt at downplaying the suffering of animals is then often times also that because these other animals are less intelligent, therefore can’t comprehend how to act rationally towards one another, we’re somehow allowed to be just as retarded, even when we know better.

  • ”Ha! Silly vegans, you all try to save the animals, but the fact is, these animals would eat you too if they got the chance!!! Look at nature, dog eat dog world, the lion is eating the zebra too so why shouldn’t we do the same???”

You are appealing to what retarded creatures that don’t know any better are doing, to justify you doing the same, even though you know better.

Imagine the following scenario, I work in a facility for mentally retarded humans, sometimes these disabled individuals are sexually assaulting and beating each other, because they lack the ability to think about and contemplate the ethical implications of their actions.

What would be the ethically responsible thing to do here?

  • 1 – Prevent them from sexually assaulting and beating each other.

Or:

  • 2 – Joining in and brutally raping a mentally disabled girl too because they did too.

Look, these retards don’t know any better, they would sexually assault you as well, so you might as well just join in and sexually assault them too. No problem.

Not to mention, other animals are largely completely harmless to you as well, pigs, cows, chicken generally don’t assault humans in some kind of dangerous manner, so that makes it even worse.

It’s not as though we’re talking about a lion attacking you, which we could analogize to a big, strong retarded person sexually assaulting you, we’re talking about a chicken that can’t seriously harm you, so this is pretty much like some sociopathic rapist saying you are under no obligation to not violently assrape a 3 year old with your fist because a 3 year old kicked you in the nuts once.

The 3 year old has no obligation not to punch me, so I don’t have an obligation not to punch the 3 year old either, checkmate you anti-child abuse idiots. You don’t punch 3 year olds? Well guess what, they would punch you because they don’t know any better, so I should do the same!

You get the point, ultimately supporting animal abuse because animals have a lower IQ is not a rational stance, it’s an irrational stance, and none of the dishonest tactics that speciesists use to justify this stand up to scrutiny in any way.

Are children sexual beings?

Somewhat important question I guess, some people who are against sexual relations between children/minors and adults, or even just between children/minors and other children/minors will kind of rely on that outdated notion.

Basically they’ll try to pretend that children/minors are completely asexual, so of course they have a reason to be upset when they find out their kid had sex, because that means that they must have been manipulated into said sex, because a child would never engage in sex voluntarily just on their own!

They never want to admit the sexuality came from the child itself, so they will blame anything else for ”sexualizing the child” which is not necessary, because the child is already sexual, so that wording is just dumb.

”Disney sexualized my child, there’s subliminal messaging in their movies, and it’s also the bad music kids are listening to nowadays making them want to fuck!”

Because parents probably feel disgusted by the thought of offspring being sexual, it feels like incest to think of your offspring as sexual beings.

Well, it’s simply wrong I would say though, it’s delusional, as if they have completely forgotten about their childhood/adolescence.

Yeah of course kids can be sexual, I humped balloons as a child and I started using my hand to jerk off by the time I was 12 or something. There you go, many more people with such anecdotes exist, I’m not the only one.

Also, I’d say some adults probably project their version of what their sexuality is onto kids and that’s why the thought of pedophilic/underage sex makes them so angry, so some traditionally dominant man might think of sex as penetrating a woman as hard as possible whilst beating her, so they are offended because they think that’s what pedophiles will do with little girls.

Sex can obviously be more than just penetration, I’m also putting touching or cuddling into the sex category, clearly those can be sexualized acts.

We all share the same motivation.

Something that inevitably comes up in most ethical discussions, especially when you point out to someone that they are supporting suffering, or that they are irrationally opposed to something that doesn’t result in suffering, is that they simply have a different ethic, so they can’t be criticized or held accountable for anything.

  • ”But I simply value something other than suffering, so I don’t have to care about anything you say, everything is relative, everyone just has a different opinion, I don’t care about suffering, and I’m entitled to my opinion, so now I’m gonna gass some jews and you can’t stop me!”.

I think this intellectually lazy type of argumentation misses a very fundamental point about the behavior of sentient organisms – we all share the same goal of avoiding harm, pain, suffering, negative sensation and the rules we make are just extensions of that first fundamental interest in avoiding negative sensations.

A deontologist is just a deluded consequentialist, who believes their particular moral rule/law to be conducive to the achievement of better consequences, i.e less suffering, if said deontologist did legitimately not believe the rule to be conducive to ultimately creating better consequences, they would not believe in their rule.

Take for example a religious terrorist, who believes he has to self-detonate in the middle of a gay pride parade, if you point out to someone like that that this is bad, because it will cause a lot of unnecessary (to prevent any greater sort of) suffering, he’ll likely say so what, suffering is not always bad or the main issue to be concerned with here, there are certain rules you just don’t break, and it’s simply against god’s rules to take a dick up your ass, full stop bro.

But that still doesn’t answer why he thinks he has to do the terrorist attack, a law/rule just doesn’t come out of nowhere, if you dig deep enough, chances are you’ll find that the terrorist is still motivated by a wrongly perceived threat of suffering.

He might think that if he doesn’t do the terrorist attack and eradicate the sinners, he’ll go to hell, which is a place of suffering, and if he does the terrorist attack, he’ll go to heaven, which is a place absent of all suffering. He might think that the sinners he’s about to attack are a threat of suffering, and if we accepted homosexuals, society would be infested with AIDS and rape.

So ultimately, he’s still acting based on (wrongly perceived) consequences, he’s not a real deontologist who believes in a moral rule for the sake of believing in said moral rule at all, he’s just a delusional consequentialist who made a false calculation about what will most efficiently eliminate suffering, because he believes in something unrealistic, a fable story with no evidence behind it and likely received wrong information about homosexuals his entire life.

Even if he would proclaim to be perfectly rational and wanting to kill the homosexuals because being gay is ”just wrong”, then he’s still motivated by suffering reduction, this feeling of ”just wrongness” is a form of suffering, and he tries to prevent it by doing what feels ”just right”.

Even if he’s just a sadistic sociopath who wants to cause suffering to others and uses his religion as an excuse for doing so, then he’s still motivated by the goal of suffering reduction, i.e he suffers from an urge to inflict suffering onto others for his pleasure, and the suffering of this urge is alleviated by inflicting suffering onto others, so then he’d still be motivated by the goal of reducing suffering, just also logically inconsistent in not thinking of suffering in the other organisms as just as worth preventing, because it’s the same thing – suffering.

It’d be like saying water from water bucket A should be used to water plants because it’s so perfectly wet and watery, but water from water bucket B should not be used to water plants, although it’s just as wet and watery. If suffering in meat suit A is worth preventing because it has the property ”it feels bad”, then so is suffering in meat suit B worth preventing, because it has the same property. If our terrorist thinks suffering is worth preventing when it happens to him because it feels bad, he should think the same way when it happens to everyone else, because it feels just as bad.

It’s bad when suffering is happening to you because suffering itself is bad, not because it’s happening to you in particular and you’re somehow more important than everyone else, if suffering were only bad when it happened to you, then so would pleasure be bad if it happened to you, because it’s in the same exact category – ”things that happen to you”.

  • If someone really believed that a rule had no utility, then they would not believe in said rule, we believe in rules because 1. they are or 2. we falsely believe them to be conducive to the reduction of our suffering in some way.

Pro-lifers, pro-choicers, authoritarians, libertarians, theists, antitheists all have the same goal, they all want to avoid suffering, it just happens to be the case that they all have different ideas about what will most efficiently achieve the goal of preventing more suffering in the grand scheme of things, authoritarians believe strict hierarchy will lead to a less chaotic society that will produce less suffering, libertarians believe in maximizing freedom because being locked in a cage causes suffering, the motivation is the same.

But once we’ve established that preventing suffering is the goal, it is possible to draw correct and incorrect conclusions about what will achieve the goal, and then we can definitively tell a pro-lifer that aborting a living, but non-sentient fetus doesn’t create any more suffering in the fetus than in living, but non-sentient vegetables when you chop them up and turn them into salad, their threat detection system is simply deficient, they just have to understand that if they were aborted, they would have never missed out on being alive from the unborn purgatory.

If I really abducted anyone of any religious or political orientation, locked them into my basement, tortured them for an extended period of time by putting their hands on the stove top until their hands are disfigured, beat them with a sledgehammer repeatedly, put nails up their asses, etc, and I made it crystal clear to them that this is for absolutely no compensation, no greater good or payment whatsoever for anyone at any point, they wouldn’t want that.

So to be clear, the game is not called ”push your hand onto the stove top until it’s disfigured for 5$ an hour to be donated to starving kids in Africa”, it’s just ”push your hand onto the stove top until it’s disfigured for no reason whatsoever”, they would universally try to escape, no doubt about it.

Unless they’re the one in a thousand extreme, Albert Fish-type masochists that get off on having nails shoved in their asses, in which case, there’d be a benefit and utility to be derived again – to reaching an orgasm, the relief of tension. So it’d still be an attempt to avoid suffering, no way around it.

So the point is, everyone acts based on suffering, we believe in rules because we believe these rules to be conducive to the reduction of our suffering, if we didn’t believe that to be the case, we wouldn’t believe in them anymore, rules are a mere result of consequences, an attempt at avoiding harms/pains/sufferings. No consequences – no need for rules.

And because thinking and calculating utility of actions requires more brain power than sticking to a simplistic, dogmatic rule, many stick to a dogmatic rule, going against the actual goal without noticing it in due time, e.g.

  • The pro-lifer may observe that generally taking human life results in suffering, so they’re against taking human life, even when it causes no suffering in a non-sentient fetus.
  • The jew-hider may observe that lying generally results in suffering, so they’re telling the nazis they’re hiding jews in their basement, even when it causes more suffering to happen than it prevents.
  • The conservative police officer may observe that breaking the law often results in suffering, so he thinks he’d doing something good by harassing someone for smoking marijuana, even when it causes more suffering to happen than it prevents.

It is delusional behavior. Imagine a hypothetical alien species that could also feel pain, and what they had to do in order to alleviate pain and achieve pleasure, relief, alleviation is wank their left tentacle, every action that they take could be boiled down to the masturbation of a left tentacle somewhere and somehow, or ultimately even, just the reduction of suffering as well of course, but let’s say jerking the left tentacle is instrumental to achieving that – without exception.

These aliens would also self-unawarely say things like:

  • ”I don’t only want to jerk off my left tentacle, you think I’m a mere pain and pleasure vessel??? You vulgar idiot, I’m but a very sophisticated alien, I also value watching plasma TV, taking a great long walk on the beach and buying a great, high quality block of swiss cheese. I have civilization, I have class. You think I’m just some dumb animal!?”.

But then when you observe this creature, all that it is doing is wanking its left tentacle in front of the plasma TV, digging a hole at the beach to stick their left tentacle in, and the swiss cheese, it also just sticks its left tentacle in its holes to shoot its alien jizz inside it.

The conclusion is obvious – these aliens are completely deluded about what the underlying motivation of their actions is, they have deluded themselves into believing that all sorts of different things have value, when the only value is in the experience itself, they’re just trying to jerk off and overcomplicating it.

And this is exactly how humans behave, they’re for some reason desperate to believe they’re not just simplistic organisms feeling pain, trying to avoid feeling pain, they are somehow much more sophisticated for valuing all sorts of different non-sense that the other primitive animals can’t understand, when in reality, they only value it because it in some way helps or they believe that it helps to achieve the goal of reducing pain.

  • What is value without suffering even supposed to mean?

What is ”I value x” even supposed to mean? When I say, ”I value eating potatoes” for example, all that that really means is that for some reason, eating potatoes reduces some sort of condition of suffering in me, maybe it is hunger, maybe it is appetite out of boredom, and eating the potato is conducive to reducing this condition of suffering, but obviously the potato itself is not valuable, the potato cannot create value as it simply doesn’t have a brain that can produce a sentient experience like I do, the good is the reduction of my suffering, not the potato itself.

I value the potato=I suffer if I don’t eat it.

I need/want/desire the potato=I suffer if I don’t eat it.

I have a personal preference for the potato=I suffer if I don’t eat it.

The objects themselves have no value, so to speak. An almong is neither good or bad, it might produce negative sensations in someone with an almond allergy, and in someone without an almond allergy but with a peanut allergy, almonds might cause pleasure, relief of suffering, whereas peanuts would cause the negative sensations, but the negative sensation is the same, it’s negative. So these objects, almonds and peanuts are neither good or bad, they only have extrinsic value to something else, i.e our experience, our experience is the only real value event happening.

  • The potato has no real value.
  • The almond has no real value.
  • The garbage truck has no real value.
  • The lamborghini has no real value.
  • The money has no real value.
  • Gold has no real value.
  • Platinum has no real value.

They only have extrinsic value to your experience, no real value. So if someone says something like ”you might value reducing animal suffering, but I value eating bacon much more!” – we can analyze and point out their mistake.

They only value eating bacon because eating bacon reduces the suffering of an urge to eat bacon inside them, the bacon itself is not a good because it doesn’t have a brain that can produce sensations with labels like good and bad, it’s the reduction of their suffering from an urge to eat it that is the real good, but if the reduction of the suffering itself is the good, and buying bacon obviously causes more suffering to pigs than it causes reduction in suffering in yourself, then obviously the better option for you would be to stop buying it to reduce even more suffering.

In conclusion, as stated before, a deontologist is just a deluded consequentialist, no one acts based on rules alone, rules are a result of the existence of consequences, if the problem of suffering did not exist, we wouldn’t have to make rules to mitigate against it and prevent it from happening.

If you have some kind of strict moral rule, like ”never fuck a corpse”, chances are you only believe in that rule because you believe the fucking of corpses to result in harm somewhere along the way, imagining someone fucking your dead mother right in front of you or something, then feeling offended by witnessing that incident, you don’t just believe it to be ”just wrong” without perceiving a threat to welfare first to motivate this feeling of ”just-wrongness”.

Things can be ethically wrong only according to a certain set of rules, and the only reason why rules are made is because there are consequences – suffering, and that is why we use the rules as a tool to try to avoid it, if the rule doesn’t serve that purpose anymore, then the rule is wrong, it fails to achieve the only pre-established purpose that it could possibly ever have.

That’s why it’s absurd when someone uses whatever right or rule they established as an excuse to not care about the harm they cause to others – ”it’s legal to rape my wife so it’s no problem”.

The reason why we crave laws in the first place is because suffering exists, so we make laws to protect ourselves and mitigate against it, if the law does not even achieve that goal though, then it’s essentially worthless, it doesn’t achieve the only goal that a sentient organism is even capable of having anymore.

Non-sentient bacteria have no laws but that is also completely irrelevant, because bacteria is not sentient, so the absence of laws and rights in a culture of bacteria not to be cannibalized by another bacteria is not a problem. The reduction of suffering is good, not the law itself.

Suffering, badness itself is the only bad thing in the universe, sentient experience is the only value creating thing in the entire universe, the objects, rights and entitlements on a piece of paper by themselves have no value, you eat the chocolate cake because it reduces your suffering, your urge to eat it, not because the chocolate cake itself is somehow a good, because it doesn’t have a brain.

If all sentient organisms went extinct tomorrow, chocolate cake would have absolutely zero (extrinsic) value, all chocolate cake can be liquidated forever, it would not matter, thinking otherwise would be completely delusional.

There is no goal for any sentient organism on this planet except to avoid harm, and if it no longer wants to avoid harm, it is no longer a sentient organism. You don’t have a different opinion at the core than any other organism, the nature of our disagreement lies in having different strategies to go on about our established goal of preventing suffering, and in this game, it is possible to judge your actions as correct or incorrect, you are bound by it, there is no way for you to escape the game.

Age, sex and maturity.

One of the favorite arguments that people make against sex between adults and children and minors is obviously that children/minors can’t give consent.

My basic response to this is that that’s an absurd claim, consent mostly just means agreement, willingness and any conscious, sentient organism can be agreeable or disagreeable, children agree to do things or disagree every single day.

Almost everyone has seen a child reject food they didn’t like before, even a dog can simplistically consent to eat food or go for a walk outside. If you are conscious, you can agree and disagree.

What they really should say is children lack intelligence and maturity, a greater foresight, i.e ability to plan and think ahead, understand consequences and ramifications of actions, this is true of children until a certain age at least.

But that wouldn’t necessarily be an argument against having sex with children/minors, because a greater future concept is only required dependent on the future consequences of the action we’re discussing, you don’t need to be able to think ahead when you’re partaking in an act that is pretty much harmless/negative consequence-free anyway, so all that’d need to happen would be for the risks of harm in the sex act between the child/minor and the pedophile/adult to be eliminated.

So an example I use is often even if a child doesn’t understand traffic rules yet, that doesn’t mean they can’t consent to ride a bicycle – it depends on the environment, in a safe and harmless environment it would be irrelevant how great their maturation and ability to think ahead is, on the freeway on the other hand, it would become a problem that the child is acting immaturely, the child could get hit by a car.

So it’d be rational to forbid said child to ride their bicycle on the freeway, but it’d be irrational to forbid it in a safe and harmless environment where it has about zero chance of being hit by a car anyway.

Similarly, there would be no reason to say that just because a child isn’t able to plan ahead or even understand much sex education yet, they couldn’t consent to sex.

So let’s say a child does find out about sexual pleasure through the exploration of their genitalia, then reach the conclusion that if it’s fun to rub themselves against a pillow, it would also be fun to rub themselves against someone’s leg, but this child is not too intelligent or mature yet, they don’t really understand much about sexual education and future risks of different sex acts yet.

Is this a problem? No, because in that situation, these risks that the child doesn’t understand don’t even exist, so there’s no need to understand them, you don’t get pregnant from leg-humping, the activity is low-risk to risk-free essentially.

So what’s to take away from this is that whether or not you need a great future concept is highly dependent on the consequences of your actions, lack of foresight is irrelevant if there’s no risk of harm, pedophobes misguidedly expect children to be able to give ”informed consent”, even when there is absolutely no particular negative risk in that situation to be informed about to begin with.

It’s just as ignorant as not allowing the child to ride the bicycle in a safe environment just because it couldn’t drive a car on the freeway yet, they’re overcomplicating the act, so they think you need to be a rocket scientist to participate in it.

Intelligence and maturity are required when there is a clear, foreseeable risk of harm to the activity you want to engage in, sex does not necessarily have such a risk of harm, so you don’t always need to be intelligent and mature in order to have safe sex.

This should be simple enough to grasp, but often times this is not enough, it seems as though the person has some kind of strict puritanical standard and starts to argue that consequences don’t even matter anymore, they keep insisting that it’s just PER SE, always wrong to have sex with the child/minor because the child/minor doesn’t have the ”right” degree of intelligence and maturity yet, so they can never consent by their twisted definition of consent.

  • ”They can’t consent!”
  • ”The brain develops until 25!”,
  • ”Children are NOT fully developed!”

These are standard phrases they just regurgitate ad nauseam without putting any real critical thought into it, because it would lead to a pretty absurd conclusion, which is that ultimately all interactions between children and adults are bad.

If:

  • P1: It’s wrong to have sex with the child/minor because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature.
  • P2: The child/minor is arguably just as unintelligent, undeveloped, immature when they do anything other than sex.
  • C: All interaction between adults and children/minors is wrong.

Or:

  • P1: It’s wrong to have sex with children/minors because they can’t consent to it because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature.
  • P2: Children/minors can’t consent because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature.
  • C: All interaction between adults and children/minors is wrong.

If it’s just fundamentally wrong to have sex with the child as the child supposedly can never consent to anything due to its undeveloped brain and immaturity, then obviously there’s no reason why this can’t just as easily be applied to anything else a child could ever do.

It is proposing a general standard, as they’re saying that the reason why it’s wrong to have sex with the child is exactly because it isn’t fully developed yet:

  • P1: Interaction requires a fully matured brain.
  • P2: Children don’t have one.
  • C: It’s wrong to interact with children.

Saying it’s only wrong to have sex with children due to their undeveloped brains and emotional immaturity but it’s ok to go and eat ice cream with them in spite of their undeveloped brains and emotional immaturity just sounds like special pleading to me.

It’s like saying if you smoke marijuana, you should be arrested because it’s against the law, but when I drive a little too fast, I shouldn’t be arrested although it’s against the law too, if it being against the law is the characteristic stated to make the act wrong, then obviously both are wrong.

If it’s wrong to have sex with children because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature, then it’s wrong to do anything else, like go eat ice cream with children as well because they are just as unintelligent, undeveloped, immature when they ingest ice cream.

Whether or not sex and ice cream are the same thing is completely irrelevant, it’s called logical consistency, we’re just discussing the attribute you put on the table as a justification, which is lack of emotional maturity in this scenario, that supposedly matters, even if it’s a danger-free sex act like leg humping where you don’t need to be intelligent to protect yourself against some kind of risk.

This would lead to an actual violation of children’s consent and interests in the real world, because what are we to do if we can’t interact with the child if it’s fundamentally bad because it doesn’t have a fully developed brain yet, what option is left?

  • ”The brain isn’t fully matured until 25!!!”

Ah, so what are we to do, lock the child into a basement until 25, keep it chained up there until its brain is fully developed to the point where it can perform consent, to prevent it from being horrifically violated by every single social interaction it ever partakes in?

Or in the context of beastiality or sex with the mentally handicapped (as they use that same argument in that context as well) exile all non-human animals and mentally handicapped humans on their IQ level into a forest somewhere to prevent them from being similarly horrifically violated by participating in social interactions with agents of a higher capacity to process information and sign contracts? They can’t sign a contract in human language so every interaction with them is therefore equivalent to rape!

By this sort of argumentation, if having sex with a child/minor is simply innately wrong because they don’t have the ”right” degree of maturity, we have essentially two choices:

  1. Lock the child away until the child is fully matured. Absence of consent makes an interaction wrong, and the child cannot consent ever, because the child is immature.
  2. Reject their notion that one needs to be fully matured to engage in an interaction.

This would be the outcome of their delusional belief system, which would ironically result in a massive violation of children’s consent (as in, their real interests, their will) in the real world that they don’t even have any logical consistency with anyway, they just likely don’t even think about it, there would effectively be no way to not violate them by everyday interaction, every interaction with a child is a violation by that standard.

If they reject the notion that full maturation is per se required for an interaction, then we’re just back to the first issue, why do they think that full maturation is required for sex in particular as opposed to other activities that are roughly equally risky, like riding a bicycle?

They might try to cop out of this again afterwards by saying that even if children can’t consent and aren’t mature yet, we still have to make decisions in their interest and it’s ok as long as it doesn’t harm them, this rule about maturity and consent doesn’t truly apply to everything.

But obviously, then they also simply forced themselves back into the position of having to explain why they think that having sex fundamentally goes against the child’s interest and harms them, so that doesn’t work out too well for them either.

So even if someone wants to argue that consent is completely impossible, the fact of the matter is that we still socially interact with children, so they think that it is acceptable to socially interact with children despite them being unable to give consent, as long as we act in their best interest, and then they have to explain why they think that every single sex act a child could ever partake in is harmful, i.e goes against their best interest.

If they say that it goes against their best interest and harms them because they can’t consent again, that obviously can’t be the case, since they already said that children can’t consent to other things either but it’s still acceptable to interact with them in non-sexual manners.

This has the potential to become circular, if they just want to insist that it is harmful because the child is not able to consent, and therefore it is harmful, and it is harmful, because the child is not able to give consent but cannot explain why, the pedophobe is simply guilty of employing circular reasoning at that point.

The child can’t consent to sex! Why? Because sex with children is harmful! And why is having sex with children harmful? Because the child can’t consent, so it’s harmful!

I think it’s obvious that their delusional point that you need to be a rocket scientist before you engage in any sort of sex act is deep down based on some kind of intuition that sex is simply in some way intrinsically dangerous and harmful (as almost none of them would really argue we should keep a child in the basement until it’s matured), which they utterly fail to demonstrate.

No one would argue that a child shouldn’t be allowed to eat broccoli because the child isn’t fully matured yet so that must mean they cannot consent to eat broccoli, that’s because they recognize that the ingestion of broccoli is likely not going to have some kind of harmful consequence in the future for the child, so there’d be no reason to prevent the child from consenting to eat broccoli. But they would prevent the child from agreeing to sex, because they falsely believe that sex in childhood is intrinsically harmful.

It goes back to the fundamental first issue, they are just disgusted by the topic of children having sex, so they think of all the bad things that could happen and that they subconsciously associate with sex in childhood – manipulation, blackmail, force, anal penetration, STD exchange, impregnation, and then project that prejudiced version (of what they think a sexual relation between a child/minor and an adult would look like) onto every case of sex in childhood they see, failing to draw a distinction between harmful and harmless cases of sexual experience in childhood.

Intelligence and maturity are only important factors if there’s some kind of risk of harm to the act that you may fail to understand, if it’s a harmless act, which sex can perfectly be, then it’s completely irrelevant that the child is not a rocket scientist.

But pedophobes falsely, intuitively believe that sex in childhood is a harmful act, so of course they think the child needs to be a rocket scientist to partake in such highly dangerous activity that is in reality probably even less dangerous than many other things we already allow children to do, like riding a bicycle or playing certain sports.

And if you want to claim that it is simply always wrong to have sex with a child/minor due to their lack of maturity regardless of the future consequences of the act we are discussing, just literally because they are unintelligent and immature, then this of course has to be applied to all other activities as well or it just becomes a special pleading fallacy, lock the child in a basement until the brain is matured, because the child is certainly just as undeveloped and immature when they are eating ice cream as when they are having sex, so you should be just as concerned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Not to forget the imposition aspect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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