Free will is impossible.

If we assume we live in a cause and effect universe, the concept of having free will should seem absurd right on its face. If every action has a cause of some sort, why would you assume your individual brain, or brains are somehow disconnected from this law?

Most people are able to understand this to some degree when it’s overtly visible, like with a brain tumor causing someone to act a certain way. They already understand that this person had no choice to act the way they did when they committed a crime because of how the brain was being effected, so they wouldn’t say they had a choice in the matter.

But they do suddenly see it as different when someone has a different brain configuration that makes them act a certain way right from the start or developed in a way that was less visible/observable to the average person, like a sadistic psychopath who presumably also 1. didn’t choose to be aroused by inflicting pain on others and 2. didn’t choose to be incapable of feeling empathy for others.

It’s incorrect to assume we ”have brains” we can control, it’s more like we are brains that are being caused to act up in certain ways by our environment, or we are the emotions and thoughts produced by that thing called a brain, that has a certain structure from the start and is also being influenced by the environment to create what we call ”us”, just like any other organ.

We make decisions, but these decisions are always preceded by factors ultimately out of our control, so it wouldn’t be fair to consider them truly free.

A similar example I’ve heard before that I think is good is let’s say you’re currently sitting in your living room, then you go to the kitchen to make food.

Was that a free choice? Not really, in order to be motivated to do so, you need to either be 1. hungry or 2. have appetite (for example). These are two things out of our control, it is fair to say we don’t choose to be organisms that feel hunger and appetite, it just happens.

If the discomfort of hunger and appetite is more intense than the comfort you derive from sitting on the couch, then you will likely stand up and go make some food, but if the comfort you derive from resting on the couch is more intense than the discomfort of hunger and appetite, then you will likely keep sitting on the couch.

Perhaps you’d say ”no, I can choose not to eat even though I’m hungry to prove you wrong!”.

But then the only reason why you’d do that is because I’ve triggered you into to wanting to prove to me that you can choose not to eat despite being hungry. Did this urge to disprove me not arise in you as a result of me telling you this, you wouldn’t keep stubbornly sitting in the living room.

Now the discomfort of losing an argument against me is stronger than the discomfort of the hunger, so you choose to keep sitting there on the couch.

Perhaps some people would still choose to get up to make food.

But that’s only because they don’t have the same psychological tendency that you have, which is wanting to desperately disprove me on this matter, they did not feel provoked to try to disprove me, and they didn’t choose to be unable to feel provoked by me into trying to disprove me, some people are just more apathetic.

And if you take the time to search long enough, you’ll find that there is no true freedom in any choice anyone ever made at any point.

You buy chocolate ice cream at the store. Is that a 100% free choice? I don’t think you chose to like the taste of chocolate. Perhaps you want to stop at some point because you’re getting fatter and fatter, fine, but did you choose to feel uncomfortable about getting fat? I don’t think so.

Likewise, if someone is getting fatter and doesn’t stop buying all that ice cream, did they choose to feel less discomfort than you at the thought of getting fatter than they feel from no longer eating all that chocolate ice cream, was that a conscious choice they made, did they sit down one evening and say ”I wish to feel that the discomfort I get from abstaining from eating chocolate ice cream is much more intense than the discomfort of becoming obese” – and abracadabra, magically, suddenly they were wired that way to be someone who’ll become fat?

And even if they did that, that just brings up another question, which is did they choose to want to want to feel more discomfort from abstaining than from becoming obese? How did they choose to want to want that?

And even if they did that, that just brings up another question, which is did they choose to want to want to want to feel more discomfort from abstaining than from becoming obese? How did they choose to want to want to want that?

Let’s use a more intense example where most people would be quick to judge since it involves harm/violence.

Let’s say two guys like Ted Bundy have a fetish for brutally raping and killing people. Did they choose that fetish? I don’t think so, seems highly inconvenient.

Person A rapes and kills people, person B doesn’t.

So you might say they have that fetish, but they can choose not to do it.

Sure – depending on different factors ultimately out of their control.

Person A could have chosen not to rape and kill people, perhaps, if he:

Had higher capacity to empathize with others like person B.
Didn’t grow up with abusive parents acting as bad role models.
Felt more discomfort from the idea of going to prison than from not raping.
Were less easily triggered into arousal.
Were less temperamental and angry.

So just another set of factors that we ultimately didn’t choose either. Do you think serial killers like that sat down with a magic wand one evening and decided to not be able to feel empathy so that they can be able to fulfill their fetish? And if they did have the ability to blend out feelings of empathy, at what point in time did they choose to acquire the ability to blend out empathy?

And if they did supposedly choose this ability and became emotionally colder when they had a traumatic event in their life when their mother exposed them in public for being a bed wetter in front of all the hot girls, did they choose that this event made them feel so uncomfortable that they were triggered into blocking out feelings of empathy for the female gender they now like to attack, starting to see them more as objects? Did they choose that it made them severely uncomfortable?

So on and so forth, so on and so forth. If you question long enough, you’ll find that not only some things are out of our control, ultimately all are out of our control, we are being motivated or we’re not being motivated to do certain things that will then directly affect how we later on do other things, nothing more to it it seems.

Some also like to say some acts are ”just random”, so that escapes the notion that it is all just cause and effect.

But even then of course, that still wouldn’t prove determinism wrong, that would just mean that it’s randomness effecting the outcome of our actions, so then randomness would become the deterministic factor for certain actions.

All in all, I don’t think there is any great evidence for the idea of free will in a cause and effect universe, we’re brains caused to act by factors we didn’t ourselves create, and the only way we can sustain the illusion that there’s some kernel of freedom is because we can’t directly observe which chain of events led to which chain of events – unlike with the brain tumor example at the beginning.

Brain tumor is easy to explain, that’s why this guy snapped and attacked everyone with a knife, it gets more complicated to grasp when you don’t have a clear example like that where multiple factors come into play as to why someone ultimately snapped and attacked someone with a knife.

This also doesn’t mean that therefore there is no point in ethics, I understand all ethics to be simply about sensation (consequentialism/utilitarianism), good and bad, pleasure and pain exist regardless of how free our will is – pain is still bad, even if you didn’t choose to cause it freely.

So of course, I wouldn’t say a serial rapist and murderer necessarily chose to commit serial rape and murder, so I wouldn’t think that a vengeful notion of going to hell for eternity as it is often preached by the religious would make any sense, but we can still argue that it is better to stop and arrest said rapist, just like it would be better to stop other harm-causing phenomena that didn’t choose to cause harm, like a cancer tumor or a tornado.

Sentient life is useless.

Antifrustrationism is an axiological position proposed by German philosopher Christoph Fehige,^[1] which states that “we don’t do any good by creating satisfied extra preferences. What matters about preferences is not that they have a satisfied existence, but that they don’t have a frustrated existence.”^[2] According to Fehige, “maximizers of preference satisfaction should instead call themselves minimizers of preference frustration.”^[2]
What makes the world better is “not its amount of preference satisfaction, but the avoided preference frustration.”^[3] In the words of Fehige, “we have obligations to make preferrers satisfied, but no obligations to make satisfied preferrers.”^[2]
The position stands in contrast to classical utilitarianism, among other ethical theories, which holds that creating “satisfied preferrers” is, or can be, a good in itself.
The moral philosopher Peter Singer has in the past endorsed a position similar to antifrustrationism (negative preference utilitarianism), writing:
The creation of preferences which we then satisfy gains us nothing. We can think of the creation of the unsatisfied preferences as putting a debit in the moral ledger which satisfying them merely cancels out… Preference Utilitarians have grounds for seeking to satisfy their wishes, but they cannot say that the universe would have been a worse place if we had never come into existence at all.^[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifrustrationism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fetuses and future value.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about coma patients though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why exactly reproduction is a harmful act, explained step by step.

Suffering is bad.

Unpleasant sensation is not pleasant, sometimes in life we are forced to endure suffering to avoid even greater suffering, but that doesn’t mean that suffering itself is good which is a misconception many then seem to come up with to justify it, it just means that it is the lesser of two evils, i.e if you have to torture one person to prevent a million from being tortured just as intensely, it’s arguably the lesser of two evils, but it’s still going to feel bad regardless.

The vaccination is painful, but dying of the illness it grants you immunity to is more painful, or going to school might be painfully boring, but being homeless and without money in the future would cause you even more suffering, or standing in a traffic jam might be a suffering-inducing experience, but not arriving at the amusement park would cause you even more suffering.

So to prevent the greater pain, you take the stabbing sensation of the needle as the lesser of two evils, this doesn’t mean that the stabbing of the needle no longer produces negative sensation. If you could snap your fingers and grant yourself immunity to illness, you’d probably do that instead.

Even those that inflict pain onto themselves are still trying actively to avoid harm. If the masochist didn’t already experience sexual frustration leading to him feeling more tense and pressurized in the long run, he wouldn’t pour the hot sauce into his pisshole to alleviate that tension, if the bipolar person didn’t already experience emotional pain and depression, they wouldn’t slice their arms to alleviate that pain.

If I told you right now that I’m a magician and could by waving my magic wand make it so that you won’t be able to have an orgasm anymore unless you cut your eyeballs out, you likely wouldn’t want me to do that, maybe you’d even use violence to stop me, as you’d rather be able to ejaculate in a less harmful manner. And even if you’d want me to wave my magic wand, you’d just be a transmasochist who is suffering as a result of not being turned into a masochist similar to how a trans-person can suffer from not having a different set of genitals, so then by waving my magic wand I’d be alleviating your desire to turn into a masochist.

Suffering can at best be instrumentally required to avoiding an even greater suffering in the future sometimes, but suffering in and of itself is always a bad thing, the good thing about the painful injection is not the pain of the needle being stuck into your arm, but the avoidance of the illness.

Humans experience suffering and as a delusional mechanism to deal with it mistake the fact that they sometimes have to tolerate one suffering to avoid an even greater one to mean that bad now somehow is equivalent to good, wet is equivalent to dry, cold is equivalent to hot, so that they can rationalize all the suffering they experience or inflict on others as some sort of greater good. Good suffering is an oxymoron, similar to dried wetness, or cold hotness.

By creating (sentient) life, you cause suffering.

The deal of sentient life is always the same, suffering is created, if a state of deprivation is not alleviated, the suffering will intensify, if it is alleviated, two things could happen:

Option A: Another deprivation pops up, e.g. after hunger has already been alleviated, appetite, aching for taste satisfaction becomes more insatiable, now the subject has to eat just not to suffer an increase in boredom.

Built to chase satisfaction, not to be satisfied, imagine the desire as an irreparably broken pipe, when you fix one hole, another spot bursts open and it starts to leak out of that new hole.

Option B: The initial deprivation, hunger, will return in time and you will have to eat again to prevent greater suffering.

You experience unfulfilled desire, and if you fulfill it, another one pops up that will have to be fulfilled as well to avoid suffering, or the other one will simply go back to unfulfilled, then you’ll have to fulfill that initial desire again to avoid suffering.

We lock you into a factory where you receive a tank and you get whipped, you have to fill it up with water or you’ll get whipped more intensely. If you fill it up, you get another tank and get whipped less intensely. But if you don’t fill that new tank up in due time, the older tank will be emptied and you’ll get whipped more intensely again.

You can keep filling the tanks and the whipping will get less intense, but it never fully stops, at some point you just don’t receive a new tank and the last one you filled up will slowly be re-emptied. You can also stop filling the tanks, but then the whipping will get unbearably intense in a short period of time. Itch, then scratch itch, then new itch comes up or old itch comes back in time, rinse and repeat.

There are probably various suffering prevention measures you constantly take in your everyday life that you don’t even acknowledge as such anymore, like breathing air to avoid suffocation, eating food to avoid starving, drinking water to avoid dehydration, working a job for certain resources to avoid poverty, having house, bed and clothes to avoid freezing.

There is no pleasure disconnected from relieving/eliminating suffering.

You are constantly itched by different urges and compulsions, the pleasures in life consist of fixing said conditions of suffering again and again, so the idea that suffering is not necessarily guaranteed would be non-sensical, it is intrinsic to life that you constantly experience needs/wants/desire you have to fulfill.

If you don’t eat (good), you experience hunger (bad).
If you don’t drink (good), you experience thirst (bad).
If you don’t defecate (good), you experience constipation (bad).
If you don’t orgasm (good), you experience tension, pressure, stress (bad).
If you don’t socialize (good), you experience loneliness (bad).
If you don’t sleep (good), you experience fatigue (bad).
If you don’t breathe (good), you experience suffocation (bad).

There are just some examples, it doesn’t have to be just hunger that is relieved when you eat food, as some will say here that if eating is just good because it prevents the suffering of hunger, then they’d only eat old, hard bread or something rather tasteless to avoid hunger, I’m being too reductive in my description.

But, if we locked that person in a prison cell, gave them only old, hard bread for the rest of their lives, forced them to abstain from ever eating their favorite foods again, they would experience suffering as a result of that, appetite – when it actually goes unalleviated for a while and you can’t obtain a partial relief from fantasizing about grabbing another snack, because you know it’s unrealistic, you’re sitting in prison, easily it’d turn into non-trivial suffering.

And if we starved the subject long enough of course, then indeed just flour mixed with water would start to taste good, the more suffering we add, the better the subtraction is going to feel, water tastes best when you’re just about to die from dehydration, but once we’re back to 0% suffering which pretty much never happens in life, there will be no more pleasure to derive either.

A metaphor similar to the previous tank metaphor that I sometimes like to use for this would be you being on a treadmill with suffering always behind, whereas pleasure is in front of you. When you fulfill a need/want/desire/reach pleasure, the treadmill either extends further and now there is pleasure in front of you again while the pleasure you just reached will slowly turn to suffering, or the treadmill doesn’t extend and you’ll simply be pulled back into the suffering behind you if you don’t keep running.

So I would argue that it’s fair to say you’re harming someone by bringing them into existence.

You initiate a constant source of harm/suffering so to speak, the mechanism is simply that pleasure/relief will always have to be chased after, or else the victim will be subjected to more suffering than before.

More pleasure=less suffering, just like more bright=less dark, more wet=less dry.

So you create this suffering organism, make it addicted to pleasure/happiness and if it doesn’t obtain it it will suffer worse, it is similar to making someone addicted to a drug without guarantee that they’ll be able to obtain the drug, the object of their addiction, causing them severe suffering.

Yes, if you don’t create the organism, then the organism will not experience any pleasure/happiness, but the organism also won’t be addicted to pleasure/happiness in the first place, because it won’t exist.

So to bemoan that ”state” of non-existence would be like saying ”if we don’t make you addicted to heroin you won’t be able to enjoy the rush when you satisfy your addiction to heroin with a new injection” – though even worse arguably, because a person that already exists could at least already be depressed and thus benefit temporarily from taking drugs, they might already be dissatisfied and in need of some form of alleviation.

But when you don’t exist, you don’t need/want/desire any improvement whatsoever, not being born is experientially just like being a rock or being a chair, you won’t feel anything, neither pleasure nor suffering.

Similarly I would say that a rock or a chair not experiencing pleasure is not a big deal, but I would advise people against making a rock or a chair suffer if it were somehow possible, i.e if we had both hypothetical pleasure liquid and torture liquid that we could inject into inanimate objects in order to make them feel either intense pleasure or intense suffering, I would also say that injecting the torture liquid into things is a bad thing to do, but simply not injecting pleasure liquid into things is not a problem, if the object never becomes sentient it won’t be able to miss pleasure.