You’re not entitled to get whatever you want, but you’re entitled not to want it.

A hypothetical thought experiment I often like to use to argue for antinatalism is that of desire serum.

Let’s say I had a liquid that contained any random desire you could possibly imagine, some just trivial, like the desire to eat a certain meal, some might be hard/unrealistic to fulfill, like the desire to time-travel or become someone you are not, some might require severely harm others in order to fulfill, like the desire to brutally rape them.

I inject that stuff into someone in their sleep, and the next day they wake up and might find themselves craving whatever it may be, who knows.

Maybe they’ll have an intense craving to live in a different country which causes them distress because they already established a life with other things that they also crave where they currently live, or maybe they won’t be able to get an orgasm anymore unless they torture kittens. Who knows.

I would argue that this is unethical, I should not be allowed to do that, injecting everyone with desire serum, not a good idea. And this is also why I think we should reject procreation, a conscious organism is ultimately nothing but a desire machine, a pleasure addict.

You must obtain pleasure/relief or you suffer, that’s how (conscious) life works. Eat or hunger, drink or thirst, shit or constipate, breathe or suffocate, socialize or become lonely, etc. Pleasure or else suffering. More pleasure of satiation, less suffering of hunger, more suffering of hunger, less pleasure of satiation.

You’re creating a desire machine with no knowledge of how tormenting the desires will be, how long lasting the fulfillment will be, if the desires are even realistic to fulfill, if the desires can only be fulfilled by harming someone else in the process. If that isn’t irresponsible, what is?

And even if one of the victims magically managed to always fulfill all desires just in time before it gets too painful without harming anyone else in the process, they still wouldn’t miss life if you didn’t create them in the first place, so I still don’t think that they justify the existence of the losers that don’t get to fulfill their desires.

Child A is happy getting christmas gifts, child B dies of cancer on christmas. If neither had been created, child A would not sit in some kind of pre-birth torture chamber missing their christmas gifts crying their non-existent eyes out, so I don’t think the existence of child B is justified.

We could also imagine that if I injected someone with the serum and they ended suffering through a desire that necessitates harming someone (like desire to torture people to get an orgasm perhaps), we would not allow them to fulfill that desire, but we would still blame me for injecting them with it in the first place.

And this is kind of the point I’m leading up to here – not all our desires ought to be fulfilled, because sometimes, that causes too much suffering, but it still sucks that that desire exists in the first place, and for that I blame reckless procreators, but that’s what people don’t get, they don’t blame the creator of the desire mechanism.

A good example of this is the debate surrounding incels/involuntary celibacy and feminists.

Whenever someone voices the sentiment that they are dissatisfied with not getting laid or the type of affection they want, they are accused of acting entitled and spoiled, which right away seems a little absurd to me, I wouldn’t do this if someone voiced their dissatisfaction with anything else like not having a parent or a friend either:

”Ah so you’re ”sad” that your siblings died? Huh? See, you’re a piece of shit, you think you have a right to hold a gun to everyone’s head and force them to pretend to be your siblings so you don’t feel lonely anymore, you’re an entitled piece of shit!”.

That seems to be the immediate gut reaction when it’s sex:

”So you think you are allowed to rape everyone because you can’t get laid???”

I’m not saying some incels don’t have an attitude of entitlement, but the point that I’m going to make regardless is that yes, while the fact that someone fails to fulfill their desires doesn’t necessarily mean that we should force everyone to fulfill their desires, it is still bad that their desires were created in the first place, and that some reckless procreator risked that they would end up in a situation where they will find themselves unable to get their pleasure fix, creating pleasure addicts is not a responsible behavior.

You aren’t entitled to sex per se, but I think one is entitled not to crave sex (or anything for that matter), and the only way to avoid insatiable cravings that can’t be quenched is to stop having children.

But are any of these feminists and/or gynocentrists actively pro-abortion?

No, usually they are pro-choice, so they basically think injecting desire serum is just a personal choice.

You made someone addicted to pleasure, they can’t get it, so they suffer – but whatever, just a personal choice they say. Why? If I inject someone with heroin or hypothetical desire serum, that also affects them, not just me. If they don’t get their fix, they’ll suffer, and that is my making.

So we’re not always entitled to fulfill our desires at everyone else’s expense, but we should all be entitled not to have desires in the first place.

Think of it this way: you might not be entitled to people funding your addiction to heroin, but you are entitled to not have someone forcibly inject you with heroin and make you addicted to it.

And the point is that if you reproduce, if you wait until a fetus acquires consciousness instead of doing the responsible thing and killing it, you just caused a lifelong addiction to pleasure, because that is all conscious beings are – crazed pleasure junkies that suffer if they don’t get pleasured.

So of course you can say that no one is entitled to not have for instance all of their sexual desires fulfilled, but if you think that procreation is justified, then you are no different than the asshole forcing people to become addicted to heroin, procreators create cravings.

I inject you with the desire liquid and now you want 10 arms instead of only 2, does that mean you have a right to cut everyone’s arms off and attach them to yourself? No, but I’m still an asshole for injecting you with the desire liquid.

So even if we were talking about a serial rapist and killer, I’d still call them a victim…of procreation, of their desire. Of course, it’s bad to serial rape and kill, but what is also bad is that you feel empty and depressed if you aren’t serial raping and killing, and the only way to be sure to avoid such cravigns is to not create conscious organisms.

Use whatever example you want, another good example of this ignorance towards suffering would be some rich pro-lifer conservatives that don’t want to give the poor any of their wealth.

They think creating desire is perfectly ethical, nothing problematic about it, you are allowed to create someone in poverty who will crave to have a greater quality of life and might feel greatly negatively impacted by their circumstances, and then tell them ”you’re not entitled to get what you desire (a life with luxuries), you are only entitled to desire!”, but you can’t just not create desire by killing the fertilized egg before it’s even conscious, no, that is brutal murder they would say, actual suffering is irrelevant, we only care about life itself that doesn’t even care about itself.

So again, I have the right to inject you with a serum that will make you crave, even if it makes you suffer horrifically because you won’t get what you crave.

You don’t want to help fulfill everyone’s desires, fine, but then I’m going to say you’re still a reckless asshole for injecting someone with desire serum in the first place, you shouldn’t inject someone with a liquid that might make them want something they can’t get and then make fun of how they can’t get it.

So while I agree that not every desire ought to be fulfilled because that might cause too much harm in the process, the desire shouldn’t exist in the first place, you’re an asshole for injecting it into someone, and I think that’s what almost everyone is missing, they don’t see the connection between unresolved needs/wants/desires and reckless producers of conscious lifeforms which are essentially just need/want/desire machines.

You’re not entitled to get whatever you want, great, but then don’t make them want it, abstain from creating the desperate wanter.

Desire serum – a thought experiment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eat or hunger.

Drink or thirst.

Shit or constipate.

Masturbate or become sexually frustrated and tense.

Socialize or get lonely.

Sleep or fatigue.

Breathe or suffocate.

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

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

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

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

No certainty how tormenting the desires will be.

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

No guarantee the desires can even realistically be fulfilled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bullying, rape, serial killings – you name it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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