Tag: consciousness

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.

About the speciesism of pro-lifers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The benevolent world destroyer objection to suffering-focused ethics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pin prick objection to suffering-focused ethics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • So let’s pick a slightly different scenario.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real value vs. projected value.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This could manifest in many different stereotypes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sensation=intrinsic value.

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

Value realism – feelings are facts about objective reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the inane assumption value relativists are making.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 2: Intentional vs. unintentional harm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On toughening up children.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • See how this would be completely unfair?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is an unhealthy addiction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it brings up the question:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can it be good to create desire?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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