Tag: delusions

Learning by association – one can have false intuitions about pleasure and harm.

The experience machine is a thought experiment meant to demonstrate that somehow, sentient organisms care about other things except escaping pain/maximizing pleasure, I believe this is fundamentally impossible.

As in, there’s a machine you can get into, and it will create greater pleasure than you get from living your current life with your family, friends, maybe partner, etc, and they would also be well taken care of without you, so it’s no big deal, just get in there and feel even better.

If we chase pleasure, why wouldn’t everyone get into that machine?

I think the answer is simple – because they’re delusional and therefore don’t actually believe the experience machine will give them more pleasure, so I don’t see how this experiment threatens the value theory of hedonism.

Humans learn by association, unless you are very systematic perhaps like some autistic people are, you likely don’t analyze the details of every situation as to what causes more or less suffering, you make rough associations between things, and I believe this explains fixation on deontology and virtue ethics over utilitarianism.

John saw his mom get raped by a guy with a red hat and leather jacket as a child, now he gets a panic attack whenever he sees a guy with a red hat and leather jacket in public because in his mind red hat and leather jacket=rape.

You see lying generally results in harm, so therefore you conclude that lying must always result in harm and tell the nazis the jews are in your basement. See, you did a good job there in your mind, you prevented lying so you prevented harm.

You see that ending human life generally results in harm, so therefore you conclude that ending human life must always result in harm and become a pro-lifer who cares about the non-existent welfare of non-conscious fertilized eggs and support anti-euthanasia laws to make sure that everyone suffers as much as possible from being forced to live and can’t escape.

One can have false intuitions/delusions about what will efficiently reduce suffering/maximize pleasure, the deluded religious terrorist thinks he must bomb the gay pride parade to stop these evil faggots from infesting society with AIDS. See, I’m saving all of you from going to hell by stopping these evil pro-AIDS propagandists from forcing you to have unprotected anal sex, this means we’ll all go to heaven later on, so it is the lesser of two evils.

The answer for the experience machine is no different – we make illogical associations.

You simply don’t associate the experience machine with pleasure, you associate the things you already have in your life with pleasure, like your girlfriend’s pussy or whatever it may be.

And then I come along and say see, I have a fancy experience machine here in my basement, you just have to get into it, and then you’re going to feel even more pleasure jizzing all over yourself all day than when you jizz in your girlfriend’s pussy – watching two hairy fat old men buttfucking all day, your life is going to be perfect.

Do you believe me?

Do you trust me?

Just get in there.

It sounds unrealistic, many simply would not believe me, and that’s the problem.

This doesn’t prove they’re not after more pleasure, this just proves that they don’t believe they will actually get more pleasure from getting into the experience machine.

I think the same reasoning can also explain why people are scared of death, reject negative utilitarian and antinatalist ideas of stopping procreation to stop suffering and don’t accept the epicurean view, i.e death isn’t a big deal because if you’re dead, you don’t notice that you’re dead, so it won’t be a big deal for you.

If someone doesn’t actually conceptualize non-existence as non-existence, but simply as a second existence without all the pleasures one could have in it, then what they are actually picturing is not non-existence but a maximal state of suffering, i.e zero pleasure.

In life, not having pleasures means to suffer.

You don’t eat, you hunger.

You don’t drink, you thirst.

You don’t shit, you constipate.

You don’t breathe, you suffocate.

You don’t jerk off, you get tense and frustrated.

You don’t socialize, you get lonely.

You don’t maximize your pleasure, you start to suffer. But this is only when you exist, not when you don’t exist.

And I find it questionable if people actually even comprehend that, we have a hard time picturing not existing, so what we might end up imagining is not nothingness but simply an existence where you are deprived of all goods, floating around as a disgruntled ghost missing out on all the earthly pleasures you could have had, had you stayed alive.

Pro-lifers and pro-natalists somewhat reveal this thought process all the time when they ridicule the antinatalist’s risk-aversion, they say along the lines of:

”Ah, so we shouldn’t breed children so we don’t risk their suffering, but that’s idiotic, because we gotta take risks in life all the time, life without risk would just be boring! You get in the car, you might get into an accident. You sit in the sun, you might get skin cancer.”

Yes, in life. If you’re actually going to live life and not take any risks in it, what results is a life of boredom, which is suffering, which repels you, so you don’t accept such a life and take some amount of risk, if you avoided driving altogether, you’d suffer from not being able to move effectively through society anymore.

You might be imagining the downsides of not taking any risks in life, which is crushing boredom, and then project this onto non-existence, but non-existence is a different ”scenario” altogether in which absolutely no one is experiencing any level of boredom from not having any risks taken on their behalf, so then in that case, there is no problem, the problem is you delusionally picturing non-existence as a second existence filled with the suffering of boredom.

So just like not getting into the experience machine doesn’t prove you’re not after more pleasure, someone objecting to non-existence doesn’t prove they’re not trying to avoid pain, one can simply have misguided intuitions about still continuing to live in a suffering state after one died like ”But what if death isn’t the end and what comes after is even worse??? How do I know that if I smash my computer (brain) with a sledgehammer, the data (consciousness) isn’t still somehow invisibly floating around in the air?”.

Dying and death are also close to each other, though different, and the dying process is often painful and scary for us, so of course, if we associate death with that, we become irrationally scared of death, which is just a harmless ”state” of non-existence though, and we may then make the connection that what happened before our birth was also non-existence, so we become just as scared of that as of the non-existence after we died, non-existence is scary.

As in, you equate painful dying with death itself, and you equate death (non-existence) with not being born (non-existence), so you end up delusionally imagining that you need to be born in order to avoid the horrible pains of dying, which is just that – delusional, if anything not being born is the only thing rescuing from the process of decaying and dying.

I don’t think it’s possible for any other value theory to be true, everything is about sensation.

If you care about doing anything, it is because you believe it will reduce suffering/maximize pleasure in others or in yourself.

Even if a deontologist still wouldn’t lie in a case where the nazis are ringing on their door and ask them if the jews are in their basement, all that proves is that lying is making this deontologist suffer so intensely that they abstain from it in order to avoid suffering. So in that sense, I don’t even think there is a real deontologist.

You’re authoritarian, because you believe an authoritarian approach reduces suffering in the world, or even if you’re shown evidence it doesn’t, you just personally get off on domination and power play stuff.

You’re libertarian, because you believe a libertarian approach reduces suffering in the world, or even if you’re shown evidence it doesn’t, you just personally get off on being as free as possible.

You’re religious because you’re deluded and really believe heaven and hell exist, or you at least think that having this view integrated into society will give people a morality to follow and thus reduce suffering, or even if you’re shown evidence it doesn’t lead to that, you just personally get off on living this fairytale.

So on and so forth. If you know that following a given morality does not efficiently reduce suffering in the world, what reason could there possibly be for you still following it except that it reduces suffering in you to follow it? I don’t think there is any, everything’s about sensation.

Misguided labellings of things as good and bad/intrinsic vs. instrumental good and bad.

A short list of (I believe) misguided reasons why humans label certain things good and bad.

”Pain and suffering can be good, vaccination is painful but it’s good, working out can be stressful but it’s good, what about masochists? They like pain.”

So then suffering is only good because it helps you to avoid even more of it, which shows that it is not good, because you’re only tolerating to avoid even more of it.

Dying of a painful disease the vaccination protects you against=suffering.

Being weak and unhealthy which the workout protects you against=suffering.

Feeling sexual frustration if you don’t insert a nail into your urethra=suffering.

Suffering can only be a means to avoid to more of it, never the end goal, even the masochist is just inflicting the suffering onto themselves in an effort to avoid another.

Only pleasure but no suffering would get boring? Well, then it’s not pleasure anymore, boredom is obviously suffering.

”Little bit of childhood bullying can be good, makes you tougher, so then you’re able to deal with bullies later on in life.”

So then bullying and harassment is not good, the only reason why you’re saying it’s good is because later on there will also be bullying that you will have to learn to protect yourself against by being bullied earlier on. If bullying did no longer exist, then this would not be a necessity, so you failed to prove that bullying is good for the reason you stated.

”Selfishness can be good, cause otherwise, who’s going to look after you and take care of you if not you yourself?

The reason why no one would take care of you if you were not selfish is exactly because they are selfish, so then selfishness isn’t good, you’re only arguing that selfishness is good because it protects you against the selfishness of others.

It would be better if they derived pleasure from helping others, which of course is deep down also a selfish motivation, you could argue every action is ultimately selfish (you soothe your guilty conscience even when jumping on a grenade), but that’s a different topic, I’m using the definition of selfishness where it simply implies that you don’t derive your satisfaction from helping others.

”Empathy can be bad because it makes you vulnerable to being taken advantage of.”

Taken advantage of by whom? Right, the UN-empathetic, so if they had more empathy, would it not be good as it would prevent them from taking advantage of you?

”You gotta teach kids how to obey authority instead of questioning everything, cause otherwise they’re not gonna have a good time later on if they’re gonna be defiant all the time and question their boss or the police officer.”

And could it maybe be the case that the reason why their boss or the police officer later on will be a totalitarian piece of shit who expects people to bow to their authority without questioning is because they themselves have been raised in a culture that praises blind obedience to authority without questioning?

Could that not be part of the problem? Maybe if the police officer hadn’t been raised by some ”because I said so!” asshole, he wouldn’t be such a ”because I said so!” asshole either.

”Thinking and ruminating about negative/painful happenings in the world is bad cause it makes you depressed and you won’t be able to do anything about it.”

But often the very fact that people have the ability to turn their brains off and ignore reality is what led to the negative/painful event in the first place.

Let’s say I live in Nazi Germany and feel distressed about all the jews being gassed, I cannot blend the horror of what is happening out from my conscious perception into my subconscious perception.

Imagine everyone felt like this about it – then they wouldn’t be able to support the holocaust in the first place, but it is exactly the fact that the nazis are capable of rationalizing and pretending that jews are inanimate objects which makes it possible for them to do what they do.

If they were all incapable of doing this in the first place, the painful event would not be taking place. So why would the capacity for distraction aiding you to blend out that the holocaust is happening be a good thing?

”We have to draw a line somewhere.”

A common argument in the debate about sex between minors and adults is that we just have to draw a line somewhere. Even if we’re being intellectually honest enough to admit that youngsters sometimes want to have sex with someone over the age of consent, it’s still wrong, because it opens the door to the chance of abuse, so we just have to draw a line somewhere, like 16, 17, 18 and treat everyone who had sex with a person under that age as a rapist, even if they’re not, to deter real rapists who would rape people under those ages.

The first problem that should be easy to see with this type of argument is that it can literally be applied to tons of other things that society is not making a big deal out of, so why exactly should we apply this disproportionate amount of worry to sex?

Example 1: Children are allowed to ride bicycles. This carries a certain risk of danger, because it opens the door to parents forcing children to ride their bicycles to school because they’re too lazy to drive, although these children are not yet competent and smart enough to navigate traffic.

Some of these children will get into car accidents and be crippled for life. So what is the solution here, kill everyone who gives a child a bicycle? Does that sound sensible?

Example 2: Young girls are allowed to use make up, the use of beauty products amongst young girls is socially acceptable. This carries a risk of danger, because it opens the door to narcissistic parents manipulating and forcing young girls to partake in beauty contests that they don’t want to partake in, damaging to their self-esteem, causing them eating disorders.

So what is the solution, what should I do whenever I see a young girl wearing make up? Assume that everyone who lets a little girl wear make up is an abuser, beat the shit out of her father?

Example 3: Children are allowed to hear about religion and spirituality. This carries a certain risk of danger, because it opens the door to terrorist organizations trying to lure children into joining a terrorist group like ISIS.

So what is the solution, shoot every more or less harmless religious person taking a willing child to church to sing in a choir, because some ISIS terrorist uses the freedom to talk about religion to try to indoctrinate children?

  • The problem is the same in all these situations.

Yes, sometimes, a freedom is abused to do something bad, but this doesn’t mean it always happens, so it’s not a clear harm in all cases, so it’s unfair to subject the ones who are innocent to consequences that are supposed to protect against harm causers.

Some children also willingly ride a bicycle, some little girls also willingly wear make up, some children also willingly go to a church, and although I think religion is garbage and generally does more harm than good, I still don’t think a peaceful religious person taking a willing child to church should be treated the same way as an ISIS terrorist to uphold some kind of principle of absolute caution, it’s simply not the same.

  • Ultimately, I see sex between children/minors and adults as similar of a topic to drug use, prostitution, gun use, etc. It’s something that needs to be regulated in certain ways, but it shouldn’t be banned.

It’s not a red-light, absolutely harmful activity. Sometimes it has a higher chance of resulting in harm, but it’s unfair to say that it always results in harm, like torturing and/or raping someone.

Manipulating, blackmailing and forcing others, including children obviously should be illegal, unless someone can name a good reason why they had to do it to prevent a greater harm, like self defense for instance, or giving a child or intellectually incompetent adult a vaccination that they need to not contract a painful disease.

Forcing a minor to have sex can still be perfectly illegal regardless of strictly adhering to a certain age of consent, and similarly this should be more taken into consideration when it comes to those over the age of consent as well, e.g. in reality it’s worse to drug and then fuck an 18 year old than to have consensual sex with a 14 year old, but there are some sexists who would want to kill everyone for fucking their 14 year old sister and then being perfectly fine with manipulating/pressuring a hot 18 year old girl into having sex in some way.

That is why close-in-age exceptions are also still an unfair deal, you’re still persecuting an adult for having sex with a willing minor, and you might be less likely to detect abuse between two children because they’re both under 18 or 16 or 14, so it must be fine.

Which isn’t true, forcing someone to have sex is the problem, not sex at any particular given age, there’s nothing that says an 11 year old can’t voluntarily have sex with a 19 year old, but on the other get abused by a 12 year old in their family.

This reasoning can also be applied to everything else, you shouldn’t be allowed to force the child to ride a bicycle when they’re too incompetent to ride it, or a little girl to wear make up, or a child to (non-sexually) hug you just because you feel entitled to it either – all I’m saying is that same standard should be applied to sexuality ultimately.

Then, there are some other risks in practice that might arise, same as with other somewhat risky, but not intrinsically harmful activities like drug use or prostitution, or even just riding a bicycle.

STDs and pregnancy could potentially happen, so children need to receive sex education. If it’s possible that a child can learn traffic rules, how to navigate the road, then I really don’t see why it should be so complicated to teach a child or a mentally retarded person how to use contraception, it is not much more difficult – and again, manipulation, blackmail, force from abusers who want to pressure someone into not having safe sex can be illegal regardless of age of consent, that would still fall under rape/molestation nonetheless.

Some adults might be able to pressure a child into riding the bicycle without a helmet. So what? Does that mean you now think everyone who gives a child a bicycle must be publically castrated and shot for their crimes against children? I don’t think so.

  • More subtle forms of rape like manipulation or blackmail still fall under rape, so they’re no reason to have an age of consent, rape is already banned.

Pedophobes seem to be scared that even though rape is already illegal, children would still be manipulated and blackmailed into sex…but if someone manipulates a child or an adult into having sex by giving the child false information about something, lying to the child/minor to get them to have sex with you, that still falls under rape, so that doesn’t explain why we need an age of consent for that, rape is already perfectly illegal.

In conclusion, I think sex at a young age can sometimes result in harm, but doesn’t have to. Banning it is also guaranteed to cause a lot of harm, so the best thing we can do is to make it safer by social acceptance and regulate it, similar to topics like drug use and prostitution, where harm can be involved, but it’s not inherent to the act, so just banning it for everyone would be unfair, it’s better to make it safer by social acceptance.

Teach children about contraception and safe sex early on, and hammer the idea into people’s heads that they ought to respect a child’s autonomy, unless they can actually legitimately demonstrate that a child is harming themselves by doing a given thing. You can still have the right to give them a vaccination if it’s truly necessary to prevent a greater harm, sure, but you’re not entitled to hug an unwilling child, you’re not entitled to force a child to play the guitar instead of the violin just because it suits your personal preferences more.

If you question it a little, you’ll see that it is frequently the pedophobes who are abusive, and that is what is stopping them from being reasonable about the topic of sex in childhood. It’s exactly the most anti-pedophilia conservatives, puritan bigots who think they have the right to force a child to hug grandma, the child has no right to refuse what the slave owners want, the child only can’t be abused sexually, that’s the only way you can’t abuse a child. Fuck it, even if the child actually wants to hump a pedophile’s leg, it doesn’t matter, it’s still wrong, but forcing the child to do other things that are not even necessary to prevent a greater harm to the child in question is perfectly acceptable, don’t respect children’s autonomy to any degree.

Another ulterior motive that some men have might also be that they don’t actually want rape to be illegal, perhaps they use lies and manipulation to get laid with girls over the age of consent, but if it were actually more about rape rather than age, then you couldn’t do that, you wouldn’t be allowed to tell an 18 year old girl lies in order to get into her pants either, so then they just want an age of consent to protect their younger sisters for a while until they’re hopefully old enough to not fall for any tricks rather than to truly insist that non-consensual sex be illegal.

If you promise a 14 year old girl a relationship in return for anal sex, it’s wrong, if some 18 year old girl is dumb enough to fall for it, you did a good job, her fault she fell for it. All sex must be rape, defiling a girl’s ”innocence” and all we can do is protect our younger sisters from that as long as possible because sex has to be about manipulation…I’m sure if it were up to some men, they would simply only make it illegal to have sex with their female family members and that’s it.

  • I think ”we have to draw a line somewhere” is also just an excuse violent bigots are using to hide their bigotry.

If people really just thought we had to draw a line somewhere, so it’s really unfortunate that a 30 year old is being arrested for fucking a willing 15 year old as a safety measure to ensure that no one manipulates 15 year olds into sex when they don’t want to, they wouldn’t be nearly as outraged about it as they are right now.

Why are they always foaming at the mouth then, regardless of whether or not the child/minor wanted to have sex? Either way, you always see comments from them like:

  • ”ALL PEDOS MUST BE KILLED!!! NO CURE FOR THIS PERVERSION!!!”
  • ”CUT THEIR DICKS OFF NOW!!!!!!!!!!! SUPPORT PEDO GENOCIDE!!!!!”
  • ”I HOPE YOU GO TO JAIL AND GET ASSRAPED BY A NIGGER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
  • ”THERE’S NO EXCUSE! A 15 YEAR OLD CAN NEVER CONSENT!!!!!’

And other such pleasantries. If it’s so crystal clear that this idea of an age of consent just exists to deter a few bad people from doing bad things, why are people so outraged when they are perfectly rational enough to admit that sometimes sex between minors and adults is voluntary, even when you talk about it to them in private sometimes?

I think the answer is clear, they are living in a delusional disney fantasy world where children are supposed to be asexual, and they want to force anyone under the holy age to fit this role of being completely asexual. The idea of your child being sexual is icky, similar to how children also find the idea of their parents being sexual icky, but they don’t have the same amount of power to destroy their parents sexual lives on a whim.

This is clearly revealed in certain arguments the pedophobes make, like the argument about power imbalance. An adult has authority and power over a minor, so if they have sex, it’s abuse of power.

You only need to put this in any other context to see what a failure this argument is: a child voluntarily does garden work for extra pocket money for a parent who has power over them, they could force the child by grounding them if they don’t do the garden work, that is true.

But so what? The child clearly did it voluntarily, so power has not been abused. Same is possible for sex too, a minor could be pressured to have sex by a teacher if they threaten the minor with a worse math grade, but the minor could also just voluntarily have sex with the teacher in spite of the teacher’s power over them. Just because I own a gun and thus have power over you, that doesn’t mean I raped you if you had sex with me…as long as I didn’t use the gun to pressure you and you wanted to have sex with me regardless of my gun.

Power difference does not equal power abuse, pedophobes only assume this in the sexual context, because they likely already made another false assumption – which is that children are fundamentally asexual, so the only reason why a minor would have sex with their teacher is because they have been manipulated into being sexual by some evil pedominati propagandist, because obviously what everyone under 18 really wants is sit in a sandbox and play with barbie dolls, and then this evil pedo whipped out his dick and my daughter thought it was candy and accidentally put it in her mouth!!!!! – in delusional pedophobe disney fantasy land.

So I don’t believe this line drawing argument for a second, religious idiots and sex negative feminists legitimately act as though they believe even a person one second under their holy age is too stupid to tell the difference between cock and candy, they are living in a delusional fantasy world.

Does a society have the right to make a harmless act into a harmful one?

A common disagreement in the discussion about sex in childhood/youth is intrinsic vs. extrinsic harm. Some things are intrinsically harmful, in and of itself harmful, e.g. someone sticking a knife in your eye when you clearly don’t want that, we could argue that is always harmful.

But some things are only extrinsically harmful, e.g. a girl wears a skimpy dress and gets raped, this doesn’t prove that wearing a skimpy dress is in and of itself results in harm. Someone instigated harm in response to it, but it doesn’t in and of itself always result in harm.

Those with philosophical positions accepting of sexual relationships between children/minors and adults generally make the point that sex in childhood/youth is not intrinsically harmful, what can be harmful is when someone is manipulated, blackmailed, forced into sex regardless of age, in which case the coercion is the real harm, not the child sex itself obviously.

Or when society has an overtly harmful, negative reaction to a completely voluntary sex act that was intrinsically harmless, but then society made it extrinsically harmful by reacting in this hysterical fashion, harm caused by social stigma, the child/minor enjoyed the sexual encounter but was shocked to find out how society feels about it.

Those opposed to all such relationships often have an intuition that all such relations are harmful because children and minors are fundamentally asexual (or ”innocent”, whatever that means, sex supposedly makes you guilty) and would never have sex unless someone forced them to, or they believe that for some reason even if some want it, ”we just have to draw a line somewhere” and not even try to distinguish between the harmful and harmless cases in a more detailed manner in court.

Even when you point out to these people that in case a minor simply wanted to have sex with an older person, they weren’t manipulated, it didn’t result in any harm to them, except the negative reaction from society, some of them would still say ”but there are still social consequences to this that the child cannot comprehend yet!” although there is no evidence that these consequences are anything but self-caused, society’s fault and nothing else.

Basically blaming the victim, appealing to a self-created consequence, just like a rapist ironically. Even if dressing like a whore isn’t harmful, who cares? Once I rape you, you’re still harmed, so that proves dressing like a whore is harmful.

Even if having sex with a child/minor isn’t intrinsically harmful, who cares? Once we send you to jail and socially ostracize you for it, you and the minor (by extension) are still harmed by our hysteria, so that proves that sex at a young age is harmful, because we harm you for it.

  • Which raises the question: does a society have the right to make a perfectly harmless act into a harmful one by having an overtly negative, violent reaction to it?

It doesn’t have to be sex, we could pick any other subject for demonization and public hysteria and we would have the same argument, anything can be made extrinsically harmful.

Let’s just say as an example to test for consistency, we had a society that didn’t demonize children receiving orgasms, but children eating broccoli, both can be perfectly healthy if someone is not overtly averse to receiving either.

This society does believes that giving a child broccoli is always child abuse, automatically it is assumed that when a child eats broccoli, it can never be anything but harmful, it must have involved force and coercion – innocent children should not be eating broccoli. Period, end of discussion, if you question this, you’re one of these disgusting assholes who forces children to eat broccoli at knifepoint as well.

If a child finds out that they might like green vegetables by having eaten another one first (similar to how some children find out they would like to have sex by discovering masturbation and porn), and then they voluntarily receive broccoli from an adult, society has an overtly negative reaction to it:

  • The adult is socially ostracized, sent to jail.
  • Everyone is hysterically screeching at the child, asking them about their abuse.
  • People make jokes in front of the child how this evil abuser is now hopefully going to get repeatedly assraped in prison. Don’t drop the soap you piece of shit, HAHA, if you give kids broccoli you get raped in jail, so therefore, broccoli is unhealthy, it’s basic logic!
  • The child repeatedly hears that they now ”lost their innocence”, there’s something indescribably magical about never having eaten broccoli under a certain age, and if you did it before, you ruined your ”innocence” for life, now you are guilty! Oh no! What a travesty!
  • If the child doesn’t admit how horribly abused they were, everyone will assume they are completely mentally defective and just don’t understand how horribly abused they were, so the therapists won’t stop harassing the child, they become a social outcast, the weird victim of broccoli who doesn’t even admit they were victimized, how outragous! The evil broccoli pervert certainly manipulated this child!

After a while, this takes a toll on the child, the child feels confused and bad about it.

Society reaches the inescapable conclusion:

  • Broccoli is bad and unhealthy for children, it’s obvious!

Most humans are socially imitative creatures who don’t have it in them to tell all of society to go fuck itself, so what does the child do? The child grows up to parrot the lies that have been imposed on them by the anti-broccoli cult, the child grows up to associate the negative feelings that were really caused by society with the person who gave them broccoli, and grow to resent that person, when really it would be more reasonable to direct that hatred at society.

Therapists and psychologists who aren’t really deep thinkers but just social status quo enforcers who have similarly just been socially indoctrinated into thinking broccoli is the devil now conduct a study in which people like this, who have eaten broccoli as children partake, even people who did not voluntarily eat it, but have been forced to at knifepoint (which is the same in society’s eyes anyway, since children can NEVER consent to broccoli! NEVER!).

They reach the conclusion that people who have eaten broccoli as children indeed often times grow up to feel very bad. See, this settles the debate, broccoli is bad. A perfect post hoc fallacy, is it not?

Child eats broccoli, child is traumatized at some point after, this proves broccoli traumatizes children.

A happened, then B happened, therefore, A directly caused B. The child left the house, the child was wetted by the rain, therefore, leaving your house causes you to get wet, even when it does not rain outside. Ironclad reasoning right there.

  • Should this society really have the right to insist on their stupid taboo and claim that they have demonstrated that eating broccoli causes harm to children? Or would anyone who has not been indoctrinated into their insanity think of them as primitive barbarians in desperate need of being educated (perhaps even forcibly) in order to change their ways?

I think the answer is obvious, you wouldn’t accept this type of picking a subject and making it into a taboo in any other context unless it were actually legitimately proven to be harmful, so it’s logically inconsistent and hypocritical when you do so when it comes to child sexuality.

I’m sure if they observed this behavior in a cult where something else would be demonized that isn’t sex, like broccoli, they would be perfectly able to observe the fact that these imbeciles have never come up with a reason as to why they think broccoli is inherently harmful to children and point out to them how society isn’t exactly making it easy for the child to enjoy eating broccoli.

  • ”You fucking retard, YOU YOURSELF are creating this negative consequence, children don’t have to be harmed by broccoli, YOU HARM THEM by having this negative bigoted reaction to it! This is no better than saying homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to raise children, it’s harmful, just because you raise your children to bully children of homosexual couples, you’re clearly the asshole here!”.

But when it comes to seeing that they are the ones that create the harm in response to sexual relations between children/minors and adults, they completely fail to recognize that they are the monster and somehow manage to rationalize the harm that they inflict as harm done by the perfectly harmless orgasm.

  • ”My 14 year old daughter voluntarily had sex with a 30 year old man, she got an orgasm and was overall satisfied, so I beat him to a bloody pulp in front of her! She started to scream in panic, see, this proves that orgasms are traumatizing unless you’re exactly the holy age, like 16, 17 or 18 that our religious cult has deemed to be the only correct one!”.

It’s idiotic, come up with a reason for why you think x is harmful, don’t just appeal the to the fact that people who engaged in x as children often grow up to feel traumatized and depressed in the confines of a society that does everything in their power to make children feel bad about x, whatever x may be.

If you don’t accept the ”evidence” of the anti-broccoli cult, then it’d be inconsistent for you to accept the ”evidence” pedophobic bigots lay out for how sex in childhood and youth is harmful, because they’re using the same method: lumping voluntary and in-voluntary sex together and ignoring social pressures and biases.

If an act is only harmful because society reacts badly to it, then the act isn’t really harmful, it’s society that is being harmful. So why not ban the harm caused by society rather than the act that it demonizes based on irrational grounds? Because they’re just irrational, so they just fail to see that they’re being irrational, that’s the most plausible answer here.

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.

Pro-life ideology frequently motivates speciesist behavior.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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