Ingroup favoritism and the capacity to suffer.

What all forms of discrimination like racism or sexism, but also speciesism and nepotism have in common is that they are just different forms of irrational ingroup favoritism that deny that the reason as to why it’s bad to be discriminated against is the capacity to experience suffering itself, not membership of the particular group, it’s discrimination based on an irrelevant factor.

Adherents to more socially acceptable forms of ingroup favoritism, like speciesists like to claim that comparisons to the holocaust, racism and sexism are unfair when one is talking about what is done to non-human animals, because that’s unfair to humans that have been dehumanized by the racists and nazis, not understanding that this is just another irrational ingroup bias on their part, assuming that if something is not human, it is fine to harm it anyway without needing further explanation.

Speciesism is bad for the exact same reason that racism and sexism are bad.

A simple enough question to ask, what is the characteristic that makes it important for you to be put into the category of things that have rights (e.g. a right not to get randomly assraped with a chainsaw)?

  • Is it your skin color?
  • Is it your genitalia?
  • Is it your particular family origin?
  • Is it your country?
  • Is it your species?

The answer is no to all of these, the reason why you want to avoid getting anally raped with a chainsaw randomly is because you are sentient, that is the characteristic that makes it important to be put into the category of things that have rights, sentience, the capacity to feel things, not skin color, not gender, not species.

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.[1] Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as “qualia“).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
  • P1: Sentience is what makes it possible and bad to be harmed.
  • P2: Most non-human animals are sentient.
  • C: It is bad when said non-human animals experience harm.

If one is sentient, one can produce sensations, and sensations are of different qualities. They can be better/less bad, e.g. I’m in a blanket and this feels good because it protects me against the cold, or worse/less good, e.g. I poured gasoline all over myself and set myself on fire, this is a little too warm.

On the other hand, if you were a completely braindead human vegetable on the same level as literal vegetables like carrots or broccoli emotionally, you wouldn’t care if I set you on fire even though you would still contain human DNA and be alive, that’s because you wouldn’t be sentient, so it doesn’t feel bad anymore, it doesn’t feel like anything, so this proves that it’s not the possession of human DNA that makes the avoidance of harm an important priority.

A speciesist ignores this and downplays the suffering, just like a racist slave owner ignores the capacity to suffer of the black slaves. Like the other ingroup favoritists, they pretend that the characteristic that makes it a really important priority to avoid being harmed is membership of their ingroup, when obviously the characteristic that in reality makes it an important priority to avoid being harmed is simply the capacity to experience harm itself.

  • ”You can’t call it rape!”

That is something that speciesists sometimes insist when it comes to cows getting restrained and forcefully impregnated, because it’s a human concept supposedly.

How so, why exactly do they think that is a sensible definition? Rape at its core describes having your preference not to engage in a sexual activity or especially to be penetrated violated, particularly the unwanted penetration of your sexual organs, otherwise it can also be referred to as a molestation.

Human DNA is not the enabling function of a preference, sentience is the enabling function of a preference, that is what creates preferences that can either be alleviated or frustrated.

Can I rape a braindead person that has absolutely no preference not to get raped? Is it not rape if I were to restrain a dog in a rack and stick my arm up its asshole? I’m sure if any of these speciesist bigots walked in on someone violently fistfucking their cat, they would be perfectly comfortable saying ”that guy raped my cat”.

You could dishonestly refer to what dairy farmers do as ”just artificial insemination”, but if they have to be restrained because they don’t want to be artificially inseminated, that entirely fails to capture the aspect of forcing yourself on someone else, it’s not as though the cow is consensually making a doctor’s appointment to be artificially inseminated.

These ingroup favoritists that proclaim to be against against racism and sexism but get offended when one discusses the non-human animal holocaust have learned nothing from past mistakes of humanity, they foolishly think racism and sexism were only bad because it harmed other humans, how horrible, as if that is somehow a relevant factor.

Smashing a braindead human with a sledgehammer is by itself not any worse than doing it to a car or a computer, it could only produce some amount of badness in the sense that it affects sentient organisms that care about said braindead human, if the family of said braindead human cared more about their plasma TV than the braindead human, it would be worse to smash that plasma TV with a sledgehammer.

That’s the only reason why it could ever possibly be bad to destroy a braindead human, if some other sentient organism, like their family were to be negatively affected by it in some way, human DNA in and of itself is absolutely worthless, just like skin color or genitalia.

In reality the reason why black slavery was bad was also only because blacks were sentient, not because they contained human DNA, if really all the blacks had been braindead it wouldn’t have mattered that whites enslaved them, and that’s why it’s also bad to enslave pigs, because they are generally not braindead.

In fact, it wouldn’t have even been slavery anymore of course, because again, in that instant, if there is no sentience, there exists no preference/desire not to be enslaved either, you cannot enslave a rock, this entire concept of raping or enslaving something that has no will is absurd.

It’s absurd how those humanist bigots that criticize racism and sexism are offended by the racist and sexist analogies because they feel that it downplays the suffering blacks and women go through, when in reality it’s the exact other way around if anything, comparing what they go through in the first world downplays the suffering of non-human animals.

The last time I checked black men aren’t getting castrated without anesthesia, immigrant children aren’t being thrown in a meatgrinder, women aren’t being kept in a cage and repeatedly forcefully impregnated, then have their offspring ripped away and slaughtered.

This doesn’t mean they can’t face any problems, but certain non-human animals have not and are not even considered as subjects under the law for the greatest part of history, blacks and/or women are generally not considered property under the law anymore, it’s fair to say their sensibilities are almost always considered less important, by default.

They make it out to be like someone getting called a fat cunt or receiving an unwanted sexual compliment whilst walking down the street is simply inherently worse than getting raped multiple times, then having your offspring ripped away and slaughtered, then having your throat slit open once you can’t produce any more milk, because one happens to a lifeform that contains human DNA and the other one doesn’t, as if that actually means anything to how much suffering is being produced any more than which skin color or set of genitalia you have.

Completely distorted priorities stemming from a psychology that is ironically no better than that of the racists and sexists they like to criticize, it’s the manifestation of their ingroup bias, they are acting no better than the nazis and fascists they take issue with.

Of course, some animals may have a lower capacity to suffer than humans, so if you were forced to throw either an animal of lower sentience or one of higher sentience in a meatgrinder, it would be more rational to throw the animal of lower sentience into it, but this is not an irrational discrimination based on species membership alone.

It’s not more important to protect a human than a cockroach because the human is part of the human species, it’s only more important in the sense that the human has a higher capacity to experience suffering upon being thrown into the meatgrinder, so you throw the cockroach instead of the human infant.

In fact, were the human entirely braindead, or were we talking about a human embryo that is likewise not sentient, some variation of human that is less sentient than cockroach, then at that point it would become the more sensible option to throw said human vegetable in a meatgrinder than the cockroach, it would generate less suffering, better squash a thousand human embryos than one cockroach, it would cause less negative sensation to be produced.

You don’t want to avoid suffering because you have human DNA, just like you don’t want to avoid suffering because you have white skin color, you want to avoid it because suffering is simply an inherently negative experience, that’s why you put on the seatbelt and get anesthesia during a surgery, that’s why both speciesism and racism are a failure, you fully know you wouldn’t want to be that thing you discriminate against when it’s experiencing harm.

Same principle applies to nepotism as well, another more socially acceptable form of bigotry, which is all it ultimately is as well – bigotry, this tendency already starts with your family, because I know that some bigots are so deep into their bigotry that they would answer the typical vegan question of:

  • ”Why pet the dog but eat pigs?”

with simply more narrow-minded bigoted rhetoric like:

  • ”But, I also treat my child better than every other child, nothing hypocritical about that at all.”

Is the fact that someone’s child is someone’s child really what makes it important for the child to avoid harm though? No.

It is not the fact that your child is your child that makes it bad for the child to suffer, it is bad simply because suffering itself is bad just like water is watery, even if it happens in a different vessel that is not your child, water in a different bucket is still just as wet and watery.

You don’t want whether or not you have a right not to be tortured based on whether or not others are positively biased towards you, so it’s still hypocritical to say that the dog’s value is dependent on you being positively biased towards it.

Or did you only care about avoiding harm as a child because you were of some use to some nepotistic bigot, is that what determined your value? No, of course not, even if your parents died when you were 5 years old, you would’ve still tried to avoid it if someone tried to set you on fire, you wouldn’t have volunteered to be burned alive, saying:

  • ”Well, I’m given no extrinsic value by my parents, so therefore, I’m but a worthless object, go ahead and set me on fire all you want!”

As if the whether or not an experience is bad is dependent on how someone else (in this case parents) feel about it, so if the parents think that the child feeling bad is good, then the negative sensation the child experiences is somehow simultaneously positive (a direct contradiction).

The experience generated by an orphan child about which no one cares being burned alive is bad regardless of whether or not some nepotistic bigot thinks it is bad, if someone tried to set you on fire when you were 5 years old, you would have still tried to run away, even if you didn’t have any parents that cared about you.

You should ideally care about your child only because it is a sentient organism capable of suffering, not because it crawled out of your vagina in particular – caring about it only because it crawled out of your vagina is bigotry just like speciesism, which is bigotry, just like racism.

And if you were faced with the meatgrinder scenario again, and your child or 50 other children would have to be thrown into it, then it would be more rational to throw your child into the meatgrinder, because harm to your child is bad because it is harm itself that is bad, not because it is your child, but if 50 were thrown in a meatgrinder instead, it would generate more harm, so if you throw your child in there, it’s less harm, less bad, it would be less bad in that scenario if one of the two things had to happen either way, no matter how offensive to common human intuition that is.

Ultimately any kind of narrow focus on the rights of a subset of sentient organisms is delusional – black, white, men, women, human, animal, etc rights, what makes it an important priority to have rights to be protected from suffering is never being part of those particular ingroups, it’s the capacity to experience suffering itself, once you make it about the group in particular, it becomes non-sensical.

All that matters is that you’re part of the sentient group so to speak, if you’re not, we can’t possibly even harm ”you” by treating ”you” a certain way, you wouldn’t want to face the discrimination farm animals face unless the trait sentience/consciousness/suffering-capacity would be absent in you, it’s not about being human or not human or how attached others are to you.

Children/minors can consent.

A frequent argument in all sorts of discussions about sexual ethics, whether that is about having sex with children/minors, or also non-human animals or the mentally handicapped is that they are too unintelligent and immature to give consent, thus it is unethical to have sex with them, it tends to be the main focus of the discussion leading to a lot of confusion.

Consenting to something for the most part ultimately just implies willingness, being fine with something or not. When we talk about whether or not you consented in a sexual context, what is meant is usually just whether you wanted it to happen or not.

You can’t consent to get raped or be a slave for instance, it’s an oxymoron, if you wanted it it wouldn’t be rape or slavery anymore, what may be meant by ”wanting/consenting to get raped” is that you want someone to fuck you who doesn’t care whether or not you want to get fucked, but you still wanted it either way.

Children/minors are capable of agreement, they agree or don’t agree to do things every single day. Agree to eat food or not, agree to ride a bicycle or not, agree to be hugged or not.

A child can be willing, consenting to sexual pleasure too, I think that if we were to really steelman (as in, opposite of strawman, lay their view out as robust and coherent as possible) the pedophobes, what they really mean most of the time when they’re talking about consent is the child’s intelligence and maturity, foresight, i.e ability to plan and think ahead, understand consequences and ramifications of actions, this is something children are less capable of until a certain age, sometimes their foresight will be impaired.

Unless the pedophobe is some religious fanatic who thinks children don’t have erogenous zones and are innately asexual, what they are really saying is probably that a child may be willing, consenting to receive sexual pleasure, but that there are certain, potentially harmful consequences to that sexual pleasure that the child would not understand yet, in their disgust they automatically equate all sex in childhood with certain harms like anal rape, STDs, early pregnancy, etc.

That’s why even when you point out to them that the minor wanted to engage in some sort of sexual act with the older person, they act outraged and say it’s no excuse, even when the child supposedly wanted it, as if there is something innately harmful about sex that this poor child would just never agree to if they only knew about it.

These harmful consequences they automatically think of are not inherently connected to all sexual acts between children/minors and pedophiles/adults, so it doesn’t logically follow that just because someone isn’t intelligent or mature, they can’t consent to the sex act.

  • Whether or not you need a great future concept/advanced foresight depends on the future consequences of that act.

A greater foresight, intelligence and maturity are only important factors if there are potential negative consequences to your actions that you may fail to appreciate, if the act is harmless anyway, you don’t need high intelligence or maturity to process it.

If the sexual pleasure is indeed the only consequence of the sex act and there is no secondary unwanted consequence that the child didn’t want, then yes, all that can be objectively stated is that said child indeed consented to be sexually stimulated.

  • Example:

Let’s say a young child that doesn’t understand traffic rules yet and/or is too immature to take them seriously, this child wants to ride a bicycle.

  • Should we allow this child to consent to riding a bicycle?

The answer is that that entirely depends on the environment and its consequences. On the freeway with many cars driving around rapidly? No. In a largely safe and harmless environment with no cars driving or definitely slow enough to notice the child? Yes.

Whether or not the child has a great concept of the future, can think ahead is completely irrelevant in this scenario, because it is a harmless environment with no cars driving anyway, so the child doesn’t need to be able to think ahead because there’s about zero chance that they’ll get hit by a car anyway, all that matters is that the child wants to ride the bicycle, wasn’t forced to do so at gunpoint.

And the same consistently applies to sex, if a child found out about sexual pleasure by rubbing their private parts against things, but doesn’t understand possible risks of sex like STDs or different sexual practices like anal sex yet, that doesn’t automatically mean they can’t consent to any sexual act.

That means that they should not be engaging in the type of sex that has these risks they are unable to understand, but that is simply not all sex.

If the child for instance just wants to rub themselves against a pedophile’s leg for the exact same pleasurable sensation they received from rubbing themselves against a pillow, where none of these potential complications (like STDs, pregnancy, penetrative sex, etc) could even possibly exist, then indeed, all that can be objectively stated is that by all evidence the child consented to be sexually stimulated. It was wanted, and there was no future consequence to it that was unwanted either.

  • If the child wanted to ride the bicycle, and there was no consequence to riding the bicycle that the child did not want – the child consented to ride the bicycle.
  • If the child wanted to have the sex, and there was no consequence to having the sex that the child did not want – the child consented to have the sex.

The fact that children may not understand the consequences of their actions as much as adults yet is only a problem if those consequences are actually present, if the negative consequences don’t exist in a given scenario, there’s no problem. And just like in other scenarios, the responsibility should be on the adults, including the pedophile of course to make sure there are no negative consequences for the child (like STDs or pregnancy), instead of just forbidding the child to have sex. You don’t forbid the child to ride the bicycle at all, you just make sure it’s as safe as possible.

There’s no age restriction for children eating broccoli for instance, and that is because if the child consents to eat broccoli, it’s unlikely that there is any long term consequence to eating broccoli that the child will later on not consent to, so there’s no reason to stop this child from consenting to eat broccoli.

There’s an age restriction for alcohol and cigarettes on the other hand, and the idea there is that although the child may agree to drink a bottle of whiskey, they may not consent to the future consequences that could have on their body, but is not aware of that to the same degree as someone with a more mature understanding of future consequences, then able to weigh the pros and cons.

This argument similarly applies to humans that are perhaps on the same intellectual level as children, some intellectually handicapped individuals perhaps go their entire lives engaging in all sorts of recreational activities without fully understanding them to the same degree as someone who isn’t severely intellectually disabled, does that mean they cannot express their preferences to any degree? No, it simply means we sometimes have to take extra cautionary measures to ensure their safety, we can use a similar example here.

  • Another example:

Let’s say there’s a mentally handicapped person that likes to collect blue marbles, but they have a tendency to swallow said marbles sometimes and are too handicapped to understand that that’s bad, they can only say ”blue marble me feel good good”.

  • Does that mean that they just per se can’t consent to play with blue marbles?

No. Under the supervision of someone who makes sure they don’t swallow them and choke on it, there would be no problem with it. Completely alone in the house, probably a bad idea.

Same exact standard can then again consistently be applied to sex, so let’s say there’s a mentally retarded female on the intelligence level of a 5 year old, interested in sex but unaware of what STDs are.

Whether or not it would be responsible to allow her to consent again depends entirely on the consequences. If her partner has no STDs and takes care of the contraception process and all that the sexual encounter thus consists of is the desired exchange of sexual pleasure, there’s no problem, no reason to say she couldn’t consent.

Now if her partner has AIDS and doesn’t use protection, she doesn’t consent to get the AIDS but isn’t aware of that, so at that point it’d be sensible to intervene for us to prevent her from receiving the AIDS from the other irresponsible party.

  • Sex is not such a complicated act that always results in harm no matter what, so there’s no reason to assume one necessarily has to have a great future concept/advanced foresight to engage in it.

So if a child actually wants to receive sexual pleasure from rubbing herself against a pedophile’s leg instead of a pillow, wasn’t manipulated in some way to do so and there is absolutely nothing in that scenario the pedophile does that the child would later on not want, like anal rape or whatever pedophobes imagine to always happen, the question really becomes:

  • What is the supposed future consequence in sex that this child fails to take into account due to their childishness, that they need to be protected against at all costs, that they simply can never understand until the child is no longer a child?

The child cannot give consent they would claim. Why not, where is the harmful future consequence in leg humping as opposed to pillow humping that the child subject simply fails to take into account due to their childishness? What is it?

What is this magical consequence that supposedly exists for everyone under the holy age of consent when they have sex with someone over the holy age of consent that the child would need to be informed about for consent to be possible, but simply can’t because the child is not an adult yet?

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

Utilitarianism:

Utilitarianism is a family of consequentialist ethical theories that promotes actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the majority of a population.[1] Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different characterizations, the basic idea behind all of them is to in some sense maximize utility, which is often defined in terms of well-being or related concepts.

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

Deontology:

In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, “obligation, duty”) is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules, rather than based on the consequences of the action.[1]

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

I would argue all deontology is ultimately a waste of time because if you keep questioning long enough, the motivation for the deontology/rights based position is always of an inherently consequentialist nature to begin with.

No deontologist can explain why they ultimately care about upholding any rule without having to appeal to the sensations guiding our behavior: suffering and pleasure.

  • Don’t murder, murder is bad!

Ok, why is murder bad?

  • Because it’s against the law!

Ok, and why is that bad?

  • Because it destabilizes our society!

Ok, and why is that bad?

At some point, you’ll have to admit:

  • because it simply results in suffering – negative sensation.

There is no other way to explain why something is bad. What is bad is simply bad sensation itself, there’s no great way to describe it any other way, if something is bad, then it’s better for it not to exist, unless it prevents an even more intense bad.

We value different things and ideas, but only because they are or we believe them to be conducive to the reduction of our suffering in some way. If you’re sentient, you try to avoid bad, if you don’t avoid bad anymore, you’re no longer sentient.

  • You value the chocolate cake you say. Fine, but why? Would you still value the chocolate cake if whenever you ate it, you would feel like someone just stuck a knife in your eye?

We make rules to avoid suffering, we don’t avoid suffering to avoid breaking rules.

If consequences didn’t exist, we wouldn’t make rules to mitigate against them, the reason why some rules are then good is simply because they have utility, if they are no longer useful, the rules become worthless, rules are a result of the existence of consequences. There are no real deontologists, just delusional consequentialists.

  • Suffering is always bad and the core motivator of all our actions, it’s universally the goal of every sentient organism to avoid suffering.

Sometimes, you may be forced to decide between a lesser suffering and a greater suffering, but that doesn’t make the experience desirable, e.g. the vaccination is painful, but dying of a disease is worse, so you get the injection even if the needle hurts. This doesn’t mean suffering can be good, just that it is the lesser of two sufferings, two evils in this case. If you could snap your fingers to grant yourself immunity to illness, you’d probably do that instead.

Even those that inflict pain onto themselves intentionally aren’t enjoying pain, they are just using the pain to eliminate a greater pain. A masochist is already sexually frustrated when inflicting pain on himself, a depressed person is already in emotional turmoil when cutting their arm, if suffering didn’t motivate them, they wouldn’t hurt themselves to blend it out with another suffering.

If I were a magician and could make it so that someone who has absolutely zero masochistic desires right now won’t be able to have an orgasm anymore unless they cut their eyeballs out, they wouldn’t want me to do that (unless they already had a desire to obtain such a desire they had to fulfill to avoid more suffering, of course), you’d rather be able to get an orgasm without having to inflict intense, excruciating pain onto yourself.

Badness really exists, it’s a sensation and not only up to one’s personal interpretation, if a gang rape is taking place in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it still generates badness in the rape victim, no one has to point their finger at it and deem it bad first for negative sensations to start being generated in the rape victim, likewise, the negative sensations do not become positive by you randomly walking by, deeming it a good event and starting to jerk off to it.

That is what badness is, it is produced in a brain, and that brain is real, and the sensation is really being generated by it, and that is not just in someone’s opinion. You may not be able to put the badness in a petri dish and analyze it in a laboratory, but it can be experienced.

It may be produced by different objects in different subjects, but the sensation is the same, i.e the almond itself isn’t good or bad, it generates negative or positive sensation in the subject, in someone with an almond allergy, it generates a negative reaction, but the sensation itself is of negative quality, and in someone else with a peanut allergy it’s caused by peanuts, but the experience is equally bad, and the peanut, just like the almond, is neither good or bad by itself.

With that knowledge, we can in theory basically determine what the best and worst outcome would be in all situations objectively. I cannot necessarily compel someone to stop doing something bad, but it remains a fact that what they are doing leads to the production of badness, and that is not just so in my opinion.

  • ”Anally raping an infant with a jackhammer results in badness” is an objectively correct statement to make.

It may also be a correct statement that stopping said rapist from engaging in this activity of anally raping infants with jackhammers will generate negative sensations in him too, sexual frustration, but if it’s a simple either or question, then chances are very likely that not raping is a better option than raping, being forced to not rape an infant with a jackhammer very likely causes less suffering than being raped.

Or, the infant rapist could demonstrate evidence to the contrary, let’s say hypothetically satan existed and said that if our infant rapist in question doesn’t rape this one infant with a jackhammer, then 10.000 other infants will get raped with a jackhammer in hell and there is absolutely no other way to prevent it, then in that case anally raping one infant with a jackhammer would lead to the better outcome indeed.

Humans have plethora of false beliefs about where badness is located and where badness is not located, that is what essentially makes up all deontology, but that is all it is, a false belief about where badness is manifested, because it’s obviously easier to just think one holy moral standard saves everything than to painfully evaluate the utility of each action in each situation, it requires more analytical thought processes.

All sentient organisms share the same goal, it is universal that they try to avoid badness. There is no difference of opinion, they simply all tend to have various false beliefs about where it is and where it is not. We are all enslaved, getting whipped, punished with suffering, it’s just that sometimes different tasks have to be done to avoid suffering, and then we often generalize and falsely to come to the conclusion that it’s only one specific moral standard, that’s the deontologist mindset.

We believe in things because they either help us to reduce our suffering, or we’re under the delusion that they do, as in, a religious person believes in following god because they believe we’ll go to heaven for it which liberates them from all suffering or be rewarded for it in some other way, libertarians want freedom because being locked in a cage causes suffering, authoritarians want the law to never be broken because they believe it’ll result in a chaotic society with more suffering.

A girl got raped by a man in a position of authority over her once, now she associates authority with suffering, and abolition of authority with abolition of suffering, even when she sees a consensual relationship between two people where one has more power than the other, she falsely assumes a brutal rape is taking place.

Her little brother saw the police arrest the rapist, so now he associates law with reduction of suffering, becomes a police officer and violently harasses people for minor crimes that don’t really harm anyone like smoking a joint and pissing against a tree in public because law=always good! Law saved my sister after all!

They all believe in their specific rules because they believe it is conducive to the goal of reducing suffering in some way, but if I told anyone that I’m just going to push their hand onto the stove top for an extended period of time for no financial or other benefit of their’s or anyone else’s, they wouldn’t want that, unless they’re the unfortunate ones in a 1000 that can only have an orgasm if they burn their hand on the stove top, in which case there’d be a benefit again, the orgasm.

The avoidance of the suffering is ultimately the only goal, it’s just that because it’s simple, sometimes humans make strict rules out of intellectual laziness to not have to evaluate the utility of every action in each situation, like ”don’t lie” and then wrongly believe they did something good when they told the nazis they’re hiding jews in their basement.

Even if in a situation where you’d have to lie to save us all from going to hell for all eternity, and you didn’t lie, you’d still be acting as a consequentialist. For some reason, lying makes you hugely uncomfortable, so by resorting to your ”never lie” deontology, you are preventing your discomfort of coming to terms with a utilitarian solution.

Deontology is an intuitive, rather than strictly analytical way of processing the situation. Take the typical trolley problem for instance, two individuals tied to the left track, one to the right, the trolley is rolling down the left track, you can pull a lever to switch to the right track and hit the one instead of the two.

Because generally you learned that taking away someone’s right to life will result in suffering, you may shudder at the thought and say it’s bad to pull the lever, but the only reason why taking someone’s right to life away could be bad is obviously because it could result in suffering, badness, otherwise it couldn’t possibly be it.

No one gives a shit about the absence of a right to life in a culture of bacteria because bacteria has no suffering-capacity, so unless you’re actually psychotic enough to think bacteria is sentient, you wouldn’t worry about a bacteria being eaten by another, having its life destroyed.

In this situation, not taking the person’s right to life away will result in more suffering though, so obviously it’s better to do it, less badness is better than more badness.

It doesn’t take as much cognitive effort as to evaluate in detail to adhere to a strict law based, dogmatic morality, that’s all, but with deontology you end up with wrong calculations about how to avoid the greatest amount of harm all the time.

Sometimes, you may be offended by the utilitarian calculation, but that does not prove it to be wrong. For example, it’s a fact that some rapes in theory do not cause harm, we could hypothetically make up a case where a rape is not bad.

Let’s say:

  • The person consented to being anesthethized and sedated before a surgery.
  • They are sufficiently unconscious.
  • The doctor performing the rape has a micropenis.
  • We are not talking about the act of legalizing this act of rape, just the act itself.
  • This doctor is not some psychopath who would rape anyone that could notice it.

Then in that case, that rape is pretty much harmless, it doesn’t produce any badness.

You might be offended by the fact that that rape is not harmful, but are you by being offended by the fact that that rape is harmless proving it to be harmful?

No, you are not, you are just proving yourself to be offended by the fact that that rape is not harmful. That is all, doesn’t mean that the calculation ”this rape does not generate harm in the raped person” is somehow incorrect, just that you are offended by this fact.

I would argue it cannot even be called rape anymore, just giving it the benefit of the doubt. This is because rape implies a violation of desire not to engage in the proposed sex act, if that desire is in that moment not even being generated by a consciousness by a brain, then it cannot be violated because it is not currently even being generated anymore. If rape is just defined as absence of consent rather than direct violation of consent, it would also be rape to fuck a sex doll.

So whenever the calculation makes you uncomfortable like that, you may feel the urge to resort to deontology again and say:

  • ”But it’s still bad to rape in that case because you shouldn’t exploit someone for your own selfish pleasure!”

But then inevitably, if I ask you again why it is bad to exploit someone for your pleasure, you will either be able to demonstrate that it generates bad sensations in the person or you will not be able to do so, and if you are not able to do so, then it is objectively incorrect to claim that it is inherently bad to rape them.

Rape, like anything, is bad because it causes suffering. If rape were something that did not cause suffering, then rape would not be a problem. Reality and its value facts exist regardless of your opinion on it, if something does not cause suffering, badness, is therefore not bad, and you say:

  • ”To me it’s still bad!”

that doesn’t change anything, it still doesn’t generate negative sensations where you located them (only in you, because your threat detection is working wrongly). And likewise if something does cause suffering, badness, is therefore bad, and you say:

  • ”To me personally it’s not bad!”

that doesn’t change anything, it still generates negative sensations in the victim of the act we are discussing.

  • ”But what if I think suffering is only bad if it happens to me but I don’t care about the suffering of others?”

Then you are being irrational, suffering is not only bad when it happens to you, if negative sensations were only negative because they happen to you, then it would also be bad if pleasure happened to you, by virtue of it happening to you.

You try to avoid it because it’s bad, that is what qualifies it as worth preventing, so if harm happens to someone else, you are logically inconsistent in not thinking of it as just as worth preventing, if you only thought it is worth preventing because harm is happening to you, you’d try to avoid the pleasant orgasm as well, because it’s in the same category – ”things that happen to you”.

Suffering in meat suit A is bad and so is suffering in meat suit b, just like trash in trashbin A is trashy and so is trash in trashbin B.

It’s like you’re a toilet cleaner and the argument is that when you see excrement in toilet A, you flush it down because it is so shitty, so you press the button. If that is the reason why it’s worthy of being flushed down the toilet though, why shit is being put into the category ”worthy of being flushed down”, then obviously it’s just as worthy of being flushed down when you see excrement in toilet B, because it is also shitty – same category.

If you see excrement in toilet B and suddenly say ”no, that isn’t real shit, or even if, somehow I shouldn’t flush it down like in toilet A, I should just let it sit there”, you’re irrational.

If you want to say that excrement in toilet A is only worthy of being flushed down because it sits in toilet A (the ”suffering only matters because it happens to me”– approach), then you would flush down your credit card, one billion dollar lottery ticket and jewelry if it fell into toilet A too, but you’re saying it’s worthy flushing shit down toilet A because it is shit, so if shit is in toilet B, it is just as worthy of being flushed down. It’s about the content of the toilet, not about in which toilet it’s sitting in.

”You” are just one of many qualia containing toilets, the product, which is suffering, is the same. If suffering is worthy of prevention when it happens because it feels bad, then it’s just as worthy of prevention when it happens to anyone else, because it feels the same way, i.e bad.

When suffering is in a different vessel, it is bad for the exact same reason why it is bad when it happens in the ”you” vessel, the sensation itself is negative, so it’s going to be negative regardless of where we put it in. To explain why exactly this bad sensation is created we’d have to go deeper into biology, but the quality of the sensation simply remains negative and you cannot change it, whether it happens in vessel A or vessel B is irrelevant to that fact.

Take an example you are more disconnected from to see the absurdity to see value in preventing only your suffering, not suffering in general.

Let’s say we have two bugs, bug A and bug B, one of the two has to be squashed in order to prevent the entirety of all other organisms on planet earth from going to hell and being tormented for all eternity, squash bug A or bug B, the harm experienced by either will be roughly the same, they have the same suffering capacity.

Which should you squash and what would be the rationale for favoring one bug over the other? You could say if we squash bug A it’s different because bug A will personally feel it, but if we squash bug B then bug B will personally feel it, but the feeling it the same, so what’s the difference? All you can really do is flip a coin here.

A negative sensation is negative no matter where it is manifested and the motivator of all our actions, we make rules because they help us to or we believe they’ll help us to reduce our suffering, and if we label the sensation as worth preventing when it happens to us because it’s bad, then it’s logically inconsistent to not see it as just as worth preventing when it happens to anyone else.

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

A detailed refutation of common pro-natalist arguments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zero desire > fulfilled desire > unfulfilled desire.

No AIDS > cured AIDS > uncured AIDS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the inefficient, dishonest usage of the word pedophilia.

In many cases, delusional idiots use the word pedophilia in a completely incoherent fashion which complicates any discussion on topics dealing with pedophilia, as they don’t even know how to use the word efficiently.

Pedophilia best describes sexual or romantic attraction to the stage of prepubescence, it isn’t useful to describe attraction to fertile teenage females under the age of what your local bigot committee deems acceptable (by that logic you could also change whether or not you’re a pedophile by what country you are currently in) because someone who is attracted to secondary sexual characteristics is not necessarily attracted to prepubescents, the average 14 year old is way too old for an exclusive pedophile, and neither does pedophilia, attraction to children, mean rape.

The media however constantly uses the word pedophile to describe rapists or ”rapists” of children or ”children”, which creates a conflation between pedophilia and rape in the minds of most as they already instinctively feel disgusted by the notion of children being sexual in any way anyway.

  • To call a child rapist a pedophile as a description of his crime is idiotic, it is like calling a mass murderer a gun owner.

It’s true that he may own a gun, but the possession of the gun itself is not what caused the damage, the damage was caused by the gun having been utilized to shoot his victims. Similarly, the erection in response to a child itself is not what caused the damage, if a child was raped at all and the media is not lying as they’ll automatically say anything under the particular holy age of their country is rape no matter if the ”victim” wanted to have sex, the fact that the child has been held down and had said erection forced inside their anus is what caused the damage.

In fact, even to the raped child, if really raped, it is kind of extremely insulting, it’s like you’re saying that the only issue with the rape of that child is that the rapist had an erection (because he is a pedophile, sexually aroused by the child) whilst raping it, if he just raped it with a flaccid dick instead, less pedophilically so, it would have been much better.

  • A gun owner or anyone can kill a person, but gun ownership itself does not equate to the shooting of a person.
  • A pedophile or anyone can rape a child, but pedophilia itself does not equate to the raping of a child.

Not to mention, a child rapist doesn’t even necessarily have to be motivated by pedophilic desires, he could just get off on a different aspect of raping the child than the child’s childishness, e.g. an extreme sadist could get off on destroying a newborn infant’s anus instead of the fact that the infant is prepubescent, but he would find it equally arousing to destroy an adult’s anus with a sharp object like a jackhammer or screwdriver.

  • ”Convicted of gun ownership.”

How idiotic does that sound when it is supposed to mean someone was convicted of shooting 10 people? Exactly how idiotic it sounds to any rational mind to say ”convicted of pedophilia” when someone raped a child.

  • ”Convicted pedophile.”

Convicted of what, arson, driving over the speed limit, tax evasion? Am I just supposed to assume that a pedophile can only be convicted of one crime? Pedophilia just tells that they are attracted to children, how am I to know that this means this person has been convicted of child rape?

If a man is a ”convicted homosexual” am I automatically to assume that this person has been convicted of raping other men? It’s just one of many characteristics this person possesses, he could also just be convicted of driving over the local speed limit.

  • ”OMG you can’t seriously compare homosexuals to pedophiles, how insulting! This is bigotry and slander, homosexuals are NOT pedophiles!”

Depends entirely on which aspect we are comparing, the attribute roundness in apple is the same as roundness in orange, just like the attribute ”not being a rapist for simply having a slightly less normal sexual fantasy” is the same in homosexual as in pedophile, even if you believe that a pedophile could only have sex with the someone they are attracted to by causing harm to them, which there isn’t any great evidence for, but whatever.

Also, why would it be shameful to be a pedophile in particular? It just implies that you are attracted by children, this means you probably fantasize about them in a sexual context sometimes, the implication here is often times that the pedophile in question already somehow harmed children by thinking about them, particularly if they looked at pictures of children, although no one would go to jail even for jerking off to pictures of children being stabbed or run over by cars.

Do you by sexually fantasizing about children (even if you imagine something that would actually harm them, like anally raping infants) somehow telepathically injure an infant whenever you ejaculate? You’re the bigot for thinking that pedophile is an insult in the first place.

Some homosexuals are also pedophiles, it just means that you are of one sex, and you are attracted to prepubescents of that same sex, a male attracted to prepubescent males is a homosexual pedophile/pedophilic homosexual, a female attracted to prepubescent females is a homosexual pedophile/pedophilic homosexual.

Assuming that pedophiles are automatically rapists is an absurd conflation, a considerable amount of idiots are ignorant to the point that they essentially subconsciously believe:

  • being attracted to fertile adolescents=being attracted to prepubescents
  • being attracted to prepubescents=being a rapist

The most intellectually impaired pedophobes of all believe if you are attracted to a 14 year old girl for the same reason you are attracted to an 18 year one, i.e because she has secondary sexual characteristics in the form of tits and ass, you must be a pedophile who is attracted to 4 year old girls as well, and if you are attracted to 4 year old girls, well, then that must obviously mean that you rape infants, so we should publically castrate and shoot you right away! Attracted to adolescents=attracted to prepubescents=rapist of prepubescents, it’s obvious!

Now we’re in the mood for ruining someone’s life, this disgusting fuck is attracted to secondary sexual characteristics, what an infant raper! Don’t let this guy that is attracted to 14 year old girls for the same reason he is attracted to 18 year old girls around your newborn, he’ll rape it in the ass when you’re not looking!

  • Kill all pedophiles, because they rape children!
  • Kill all gun owners, because they shoot people!
  • Kill all knife owners, because they stab people!
  • Kill all straight men, because they rape women!

Even though these moronic bigots would of course never admit it that boldly, those are the subconscious assumptions that are instinctively made by them, and they hate being educated about how ignorant they are. If you try to educate them, many of them essentially respond as any other religious bigot would, they assume you must just be a sinner against their religion.

They’ll say they don’t care, it’s all pedophile scum, you’re justifying pedophilia you pedo/nonce, which is their little buzzword to immediately spiral themselves into hysteria over, similar to how islamists have infidel, christians have sinner, the nazis had untermensch and the slave owners had nigger. If someone’s a ”pedo”, every uncivilized, inefficient, backward behavior is justifiable.

Just like some religious retard will accuse anyone who doesn’t pander to their retardation as just wanting to sin against god and ”make excuses” for it, just like some extreme racist might demonstrate themself to be completely unwilling to acknowledge the difference between a black thief, an impoverished black person and a Mexican, when you could just conveniently like the ignorant simpleton you are throw them all into category ”nigger scum”.

This harmless black person shares one characteristic with a black bank robber, and because I find the attribute ”black” disgusting, I will simply put them into the same category, they’re both nigger scum, period. Why not?

It’s simply an inefficient usage of the word resulting out of your bigoted assumptions about all individuals of one big group, (real, not make-believe) child rape is bad, not pedophilia, just like stabbing someone to death is bad, not the possession of a knife, or like strangling someone is bad, not the possession of a skipping rope, or shooting someone is bad, not the possession of a gun.

It is instrumental to strangle someone to be in possession of the skipping rope, but it’d be non-sensical to try to ruin the life of everyone who owns a skipping rope just because some stranglers use their skipping ropes to strangle children, because it simply doesn’t prove all skipping rope possessors to be child stranglers.

Similarly, it is instrumental to rape a child to get an erection in response to it, but it’d be non-sensical to try to ruin the life of everyone who gets an erection in response to children just because some child rapists use their erections to rape children, because it simply doesn’t prove all pedophiles to be child rapists either.

On child sexuality.

While there are many different non-sensical arguments used to justify the sexual deprivation and repression of children, I think the most important thing to point out in discussions/debates about the topic of pedophiles and children having sex is that there is no actual evidence that child sex is intrinsically harmful.

There are some things that are inherently harmful, such as getting slowly tortured to death, getting violently gang raped with a baseball bat, burning kittens alive, etc, no matter what your surrounding culture opines on it, some things are simply guaranteed to cause harm.

Sex in childhood is not such an activity, it’s a fact that children have genitals through which they can theoretically find out about the existence of sexual pleasure on their own, without having to be manipulated or violently forced into it by anyone.

So if let’s say a little girl actually wants to obtain the same pleasurable sensation from rubbing herself against a pillow by rubbing herself against a pedophile’s leg, there’s no logical reason or evidence to assume this would be harmful outside of the social consequences that the pedophobes themselves are creating in response to such encounters, no evidence for intrinsic harm, only evidence for children feeling harmed once they see how negatively society reacts to it.

The theory that sex in childhood is inherently harmful is based on wrongful implicit assumptions, pedophobes immediately think of all kinds of different factors that are not inherent to the act of having sex with a child or minor when they even hear the word pedophilia, such as:

  • an unwilling, innately asexual, ”innocent” (sex=guilt) child
  • force
  • manipulation
  • blackmail
  • anal penetration
  • STD exchange
  • pregnancy
  • social consequences (that the pedophobes themselves are creating)
  • violent abduction, rape, murder

without ever demonstrating an intrinsic harm to the activity of having sex with a child/minor itself.

Then, they lump both the 8 year old girl voluntarily humping the leg of a pedophile into the same category as the 8 year old girl getting violently raped by some psychopath, their disgust inhibits any trace amount of rational and critical thought they had left.

They never prove the sex itself to be harmful, just that sometimes it can be made harmful, so that then they can use that as an excuse to lump all child and underage sex into one category because they feel equally disgusted by it, thus failing to draw a distinction between harmful and harmless cases of child sex – there is no proof that child sex itself causes harm, the pedophobe just foolishly confuses their disgust for evidence of harm like any other bigot would do.

They’re employing post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning – B happened after A, therefore, B was definitely caused by A. Person left the house while it was raining, got wet from the rain, therefore, leaving your house causes you to be wet, even when it’s not raining.

Children have sex, are traumatized, therefore, the trauma must have been caused by the sex, despite us having absolutely no objective explanation or evidence that children even in societies where it was more acceptable felt traumatized by witnessing sex, and not taking into account the harsh social reaction that we have to such encounters.

A child may be more likely to be manipulated into having sex, but this doesn’t mean that just because a child has sex, it must be the result of manipulation.

Just as a child may be more likely to be manipulated into anything else as well, but it’d be bad to therefore just ban adults from interacting with children, because obviously not all interactions between children and adults are automatically the result of abuse, this doesn’t suddenly change when it comes to sex just because you find it disgusting.

For example, just because some narcissistic, abusive parents force their children to participate in beauty contests, that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable for me to assume that whenever a little girl is wearing make-up, it must be the result of abuse, so I go up to the person that gave them the make up and decapitate them, because little girls can never under any circumstance consent to wearing make-up you sick fucks.

It’s better put a ban on the abuse element, not on harmless acts, you don’t arrest every person teaching children about religion just because some radical islamists try to use the freedom to teach children about religion to manipulate children into joining terrorist organizations like ISIS, that would be unfair to all the peaceful ones, and arresting all adults that have sex with willing minors because some manipulate and/or abuse minors is just as stupid of a concept.

I believe the pedophobes that there are probably many studies that show some kind of vague correlation between sex in childhood and various malaise, but that’s it, a strong case of correlation not implying causation. You could say children of gay couples are more likely to be depressed in a society where homophobes raise their children to harass children of homosexual couples, but this doesn’t prove that they’re depressed just because their parents are homosexuals.

They never demonstrate any conclusive proof that children even in societies were pedosexuality was acceptable felt traumatized after having had some sort of sexual experience, or scientifically explain in any way why we should assume that children would automatically be traumatized by sex itself, what is this mechanism of how wanted sexual encounters traumatize children.

Just like we can demonstrate that alcohol destroyed livers in the past as well as present, can you show us any piece of evidence that children have always been traumatized as a result of having had sex that they voluntarily engaged in, even in societies where it was more acceptable?

  • How, why and when does trauma magically poof into existence out of the great nowhere for no tangible, explicable reason whatsoever?

They just assume that correlation equals causation because they feel disgusted by it, similar to how homophobes in a society where they frown upon homosexuals would in their bigotry assume that children of homosexual couples are depressed because sex=evil, then may even ask you to disprove their theory that sex in childhood is intrinsically harmful, a theory that they’ve never proven to begin with, like a christian fundamentalist would ask you to prove that god doesn’t exist without demonstrating any proof for god first.

  • You can potentially raise children to feel bad about anything, humans had moral panics about all sorts of trivial things such as certain cutlery like forks in the past.

Your social delusions are more malleable than you likely think they are, with enough social indoctrination, there’s a possibility we could also create a cult in which giving children tomato sauce on their spaghetti would be seen as the ultimate crime against humanity, and children that have been given tomato sauce by an older friend would most likely grow up to feel quite bad about it.

Certainly, you could equally set up a study demonstrating a correlation between having been given tomato sauce by an older friend as a child and feeling traumatized, but would that in any way prove that tomato sauce is in any way inherently damaging to children no matter what, even if they wanted to have the tomato sauce on their spaghetti?

No, it would not. We simply know that it is not, we could show in an unbiased laboratory setting that if a child willingly consumes tomato sauce, it would have the overall same positively stimulating effect on said child as it would on the person over the socially acceptable age for tomato sauce consumption of their primitive tribe, so if the child wanted to have the meal, wasn’t forced to eat it, there should be no intrinsic harm element to tomato sauce itself.

And the same goes for orgasms. In an unbiased laboratory setting, we could demonstrate that if a child willingly receives a sexually pleasurable sensation, it has the same exact positively stimulating effect on them as on the person over the holy age of their primitive tribe, so if the child wanted to have the pleasurable sensation of relief from sexual frustration, wasn’t forced to receive it, there should be no intrinsic harm element to sexual pleasure itself.

So if the child wanted to have the harmless pleasurable sensation, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that the only thing making sex harmful for the child is the consequences bestowed by the bigoted, pedophobic society they live in, that’s the only thing left that we could realistically point to.

When pushed to this point in the conversation, the pedophobes then sometimes like to commit the argumentum ad baculum fallacy immediately and say it doesn’t matter by what the harm is caused.

  • ”But we still live in that society then and even if it’s just the social consequences that traumatize the child, well, then there are still consequences either way, so no excuses!”.

It is a cheap appeal to a self-created consequence, just because someone harms you or someone else in response to doing something, that doesn’t actually demonstrate the act itself you committed to be inherently harmful, the pedophobes are simply appealing to consequences they themselves are creating at this point like any other bigot althroughout history, it’s an extrinsic harm, not an intrinsic harm.

  • Don’t be a whore or else I’ll rape you for it, therefore, being a whore is bad.
  • Don’t be a faggot or else I’ll beat you for it, therefore, being a faggot is bad.
  • Don’t have sex with the child or else I’ll traumatize the child by beating you in front of it for it, therefore, child sex is bad.

Example, let’s say a child consents to buy chocolate ice cream, now some insane person escaped from the madhouse comes around the corner and castrates and shoots the iceman in front of said child because he believes that children are terribly harmed by eating chocolate ice cream without having studied every single ingredient in it first.

Consenting to taste ice cream requires rocket scientist level intelligence in this person’s distorted view of reality, obviously the problem here is the deranged person, not the act of selling ice cream itself.

On the other hand, when it comes to a pedophile giving a child a pleasurable sensation in the form of an orgasm rather than chocolate ice cream, society mistreats the pedophile in front of the child for it, for example:

  • An angry father may beat the shit out of the pedophile in front of the child.
  • In general, the parents may act hysterically towards the child.
  • The child is sent to a therapy indoctrination center where they receive strong social pressure to ”accept their rape”, the child feels social pressure to go along with this narrative for social acceptance.
  • They may feel responsible that their partner that gave them a harmless pleasurable sensation is sent to jail.
  • They hear others joking how said partner is now going to get raped in the ass in said jail by a big black cock upon dropping the soap.

As that then indeed upsets the child, they then falsely attribute that trauma to the entirely harmless pleasurable sensation rather than their primitive, uncivilized conduct towards the pedophile, when the real problem is them and no one else, just like in the example of the person castrating and shooting the iceman in front of the child, concluding that icecream is harmful because the child was traumatized by seeing him castrate and shoot the iceman.

We have at best proof of a correlation between sex in childhood and trauma in a society where sex between children and pedophiles is systematically demonized and violently interferred with, that’s all, the compilation of actual evidence of voluntarily received orgasms harming children is zero.

Or, the pedophobe simply resorts to denying that children could be sexual, that can also happen and is frequently a snuck in premise that the pedophobe presupposes to be the case, they deny that such children as the 8 year old girl that would voluntarily hump said pedophile’s leg even exist, so if child sex is happening it must always be the result of some kind of manipulation or scheme by an evil pedophile, but that is all that it is, a denial of objective reality.

Again, children have genitals, and through said genitals they can find out about the existence of sexual pleasure, this is a fact, whether or not that conflicts with the worldview of some delusional parent who wants to think of children as innately asexual. Many simply imagine all sex as being stereotypically penetrative rather than a sensation, so when they hear sex they already start to make all kinds of implicit assumptions again, imagining someone anally raping an infant.

If it were true that children are purely asexual and could never want to have sex for any reason at any point in the first place, then it would of course be reasonable to assume that whenever they are having sex, it must be the result of some sort of prior manipulation, that they’re being violated – fair enough, then that would be the problem.

But this is not the case in objective reality, the pedophobe simply frequently has a delusional fairytale narrative where children aren’t sexual beings and all sexual impulses in children are said to be caused by some kind of external manipulation, i.e the pedominati on disney channel told children they must have sex and unfortunately they ended up believing it, they’re putting something in the water to make everyone gay and also sexualize children although children would obviously never be sexual on their own.

It is like someone finds children too cute to admit that they are also capable of something dirty, like defecation, so they opt to completely degrade their children’s welfare by forcing them to shit into their pants until 18 (masturbation/abstinence) instead of giving them a toilet to shit in (the more exciting sexual experience with someone else).

The pedophobe insists the 12 year old boy is only allowed to jerk off to a hot pornstar fucking, not stick his dick inside her much softer, pleasant vagina if he were given the chance as that would supposedly then traumatize him for life to have the more efficient sexual outlet. Somehow soft vagina is traumatizing, bony hand whilst staring at the exact same vagina on a screen is not.

Children masturbate, I masturbated as a child and definitely under 18 purely for the harmless pleasurable sensations of relief from sexual frustration this generated inside my penis and so do many other children and minors in this day and age as well, there is absolutely zero reason to assume that if I as a child simply got this relief from humping an older girl’s ass as opposed to a pillow or some other object, I would have somehow been horribly devastated by it.

The problem is the pedophobes, sex is not an intrinsically harmful activity, so if they are legitimately interested in it with another child or even with a pedophile, there is zero reason to assume that this would be harmful outside of the confines of the social consequences the pedophobes bestow on children and their partners, they are creating this very problem they lament by acting like deranged chimpanzees in front of their children upon discovering that the child is not the asexual cute little accessory that they in their delusional fantasy worlds have made it out to be.

As such, it’s more sensible to simply remove the child sex taboo rather than trying to eliminate pedosexuality, just like it’d also be more sensible to remove the anti-gay taboo in Saudi Arabia rather than homosexuality, or any other taboo so as long as the act it demonizes is not legitimately harmful like burning puppies and kittens alive for example, something that is guaranteed, in principle, to always cause harm, suffering, negative sensations.

If the only bad thing about an activity is that irrational bigots will act negatively in response to it, the problem is of course the irrational bigots, not the act itself, and that is the point here, there’s no evidence for the intrinsic harmfulness of child sex.

Don’t socially transform a non-problem into a problem, it is no better than demonizing any other intrinsically harmless act, like giving children a certain type of food, like spaghetti with tomato sauce, and then pretending that the food itself is harmful just because society harmed someone in response to giving it to children. In the same way, a rational agent judging from outside, with no indoctrinated pre-existing bias from your society would look at your idiotic pedophile hysteria.

Wildlife suffering.

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

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

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

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

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

So on and so forth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antinatalism, family obligations and parental delusions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • ‘Life is not fair”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On life and reproduction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but

  • zero suffering > perfectly alleviated suffering.

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

On abortion.

  • What does it mean to create life?

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

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

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

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

So on and so forth.

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

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

  • Benatar’s asymmetry:

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

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

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

  • Sentience is the only important characteristic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomato isolated on white background

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

  • The fetus could become sentient in the future.

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

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

  • The effect is the same – no suffering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • What if the fetus is already sentient though?

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

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

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

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

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

  • The general utility of the right to bodily autonomy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE:

What if the fetus is already sentient?

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

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

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

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