Tag: flawed arguments

How I think bigots convince themselves that all underage/intergenerational sex is harmful.

This is a pattern you’ll see when arguing with them once in a while: all sex under whatever they believe to be the holy age is non-consensual because there is a power imbalance in the relationship, non-consensual sex is rape, rape is very harmful, so all such sex is harmful.

They think that coerced/involuntary sex is harmful, rape by its original definition is harmful, which is indeed true, and then they convince themselves that all sex under their particular magical holy age is coerced/involuntary, so they start to believe that all such sex is harmful.

The idiotic argumentation they use to convince themselves of this is that all sex under the holy age is non-consensual/involuntary because there is a power imbalance between an adult and a minor, and as such the minor is fundamentally incapable of consenting to the sex.

Obviously, this has two consequences logically:

1 – Children/minors cannot consent to anything else either that is not sex.

2 – Adults also can’t consent to sex or anything else either that is not sex, as long as there is a power imbalance involved.

The 8 year old girl cannot consent to ride on the pedophile’s leg for pleasure just like she does to her pillow, because of power imbalance, it is fundamentally a non-consensual/involuntary interaction.

This would mean that the 8 year old girl also cannot consent to be hugged by her big brother or father, because power imbalance. This would also mean that adult females cannot consent to sex with adult males, because they’re weaker, so there’s a power imbalance.

It also means you can’t consent to have sex with me or eat raisin bread with me if I’m a gun owner and you’re not a gun owner, I have a power you don’t have, so you can’t consent to sex or raisin bread, we must pretend that I forced you at gunpoint – even if we have zero evidence I did and you voluntarily put the slice of raisin bread in your mouth.

Giving a minor the opportunity to work in your garden for some extra pocket money, and them facing no punishment for not working in your garden whatsoever would have to be labelled slavery, because the employer is an adult and thus has more power than the minor, therefore the work is by default non-consensual/involuntary, and non-consensual/involuntary work is slavery, just like they reason the sex between them to be rape based on power imbalance supposedly negating any agreement the minor gave to the sex, so we must arrest them for slavery!

In fact, all work is pretty much slavery unless you’re your own employer, because bosses have authority over employees, so employees cannot consent to work for employers.

Obviously a halfway sane person would just acknowledge that whether or not the sex was consensual/voluntary doesn’t just depend on how small the power imbalance is, but whether or not the weaker party actually felt intimidated by the stronger party. It doesn’t matter if I’m carrying a machine gun around, if you trust me not to use my machine gun on you and you simply enjoy eating raising bread in my company, then the ingestion of raisin bread was perfectly consensual/voluntary.

So once they have convinced themselves of this utterly idiotic worldview, it is easy to see why they think sex with children/minors is supposedly always harmful.

Scientists would agree after all that involuntary sex, rape, is indeed harmful. Yes, I’m sure you can find studies that say being held down at knifepoint and raped in the ass is very harmful in many cases.

And since all sex under the magical holy age is non-consensual/involuntary in their delusional minds because power imbalance, all sex under that age is rape, and rape is harmful and traumatizing, so all sex under the magical holy age is harmful and traumatizing.

It would be like I make a study that says ”children who are non-consensually/forcibly hugged often feel harmed/traumatized by it” and then some imbecile comes to the conclusion that children who voluntarily get hugged must also be harmed/traumatized by it, because voluntary hugging is of course involuntary hugging in reality, because between a child and an adult, there is always a power imbalance, so a consensual/voluntary hug between a child and an adult is not even physically possible.

So it is totally fair for me to point to that study that says ”forced-hugging is harmful” to justify why hugging that isn’t forced is also harmful, because hugging that isn’t forced is actually forced in my delusional mind, because power imbalance makes true consent impossible!

On the incest taboo.

I see absolutely no reason why anyone in their right mind could be opposed to all incest outright, it is justified by the same reasoning as conventional heterosexual or homosexual relations.

Even if you’re against sexual relationships between minors and adults, or non-human and human animals, you think sex is only for consenting adults, if you’re not an adult but you consent it doesn’t matter – well, the same reasoning still justifies incest.

Incest can perfectly happen between two consenting adults.

  • One main argument has obviously always been about birth defects, which I think is one of the stupidest points to bring up.

The incestophobe argument roughly goes like this:

P1 – If contraception does not exist, incest results in disabled children, thus is harmful.

P2 – Contraception does not exist.

C – Incest results in disabled children, thus is harmful.

The problem obviously lies in premise 2 here, incestophobes are simply denying the existence of pharmacies that sell condoms and other means of contraception. Of course, if you cum in your mother without a condom, it might result in crippled children.

So what do you do? You buy a condom, you put that condom on your dick, and then you fuck your mother. Maybe she can take the pill too, and if all fails, there’s still abortion. So fact is, there are lots of ways to prevent birth.

  • If you want to say incest is wrong based on your false premise that contraception does not exist, all other sex acts that would result in harm (were they practiced without contraception) would have to be illegal as well.

Two disabled people who have genetic defects in general are having sex with contraception. This is wrong I could just as easily argue, because if they were to have sex without a condom, it could result in impregnation, and thus ultimately children with genetic defects.

So if we just cleverly presuppose the non-existence of any and all contraception methods that exist, then obviously any person who has genetic defects in general must never be allowed to have sex under any circumstances. What if condoms didn’t exist? Then they would make a bunch of crippled kids, so therefore, they should not be allowed to have sex with condoms either, because of what would happen if condoms did not exist.

The point here is obvious – condoms, pills, abortion exist. They don’t really believe there is no way to prevent birth, they’re just making this argument when it comes to incest because they feel personally disgusted by it.

Or do you see any of these people protesting against the legality of people with genetic defects having sex in general, just because it would similarly result in children with genetic defects if condoms, pills, abortion did not exist? No.

It’s just like a homophobe bringing up STDs from anal sex to be against homosexuals. Why exactly don’t they bring it up when it comes to heterosexuals? Yes, if contraception did not exist, heterosexual anal sex might also result in STDs, but so what? Contraception does exist, are they saying that homosexuals are for some reason fundamentally too incompetent to use contraception?

Do children/minors not want sex or is it to dangerous to allow?

We generally allow people (especially children where society tends to be more careful) to do something as long as 1. they want to do it and 2. it poses no risk of danger to them that they might fail to see, which could then obviously result in them later on not wanting it anymore.

These two things are important to check for in order to see if something is harmful or not. If you don’t want something, you’re harmed merely by the fact that it is still done to you – you were forced to do something, it was unpleasant. Sometimes we don’t allow someone to do something they want though, because it might have the chance of later on resulting in harm, something that they don’t want but might fail to see for some reason like decreased intelligence and maturity, like it can happen with a child or severely mentally retarded person.

The only exception to that is usually that it’s allowed to do something to someone, even if they are averse to it, if it will later on eliminate much more pain/harm/suffering for them than it will create.

  • Some examples of this general rule:
  • A child wants to eat broccoli, and broccoli is not going to harm the child in the future, resulting in the child no longer wanting the broccoli? Society allows it.
  • A child wants to drink a bottle of whiskey, but it might result in them later on getting sick from it and going to the hospital? Society doesn’t allow it.
  • A child doesn’t want to get an injection that is vital to preventing a dangerous, painful disease? Society still forces the child to get the somewhat painful vaccination, because it will prevent even more harm long term.
  • A child doesn’t want to have anal sex with their abusive uncle? Society doesn’t force the child to still do it, because they recognize it’s not going to save the child from a worse harm, like the potentially painful but necessary vaccination, so that can’t be compared.

I think that society is inconsistent about how they treat the topic of children/minors and sexuality, by rules that they already accept.

Most people are strongly opposed to the idea of a child/minor having sex, especially with an older person, despite generally allowing children to do things that they want to do, as long as those things are not going to be harmful to them in the future. I would argue some children/minors want to have sex, and sex is not something inherently dangerous.

So let’s analyze this somewhat more in detail:

  • Do children/minors want to have sex?

Yes, sexual impulses exist even in prepubescents and definitely adolescents under the age of 18, there’s nothing that says a child can’t be sexual.

Adults might generally imagine sex in a way that a child wouldn’t, i.e penetration, but sexuality itself is just a sensation, you-know-it-when-you-feel-it type of thing.

A child at a certain age might not think about something like being anally penetrated or pleasuring someone else yet, but they still have sexual urges and compulsions that come on their own, without having to be prompted by someone abusing the child first.

It is definitely possible that a young girl finds out about sexual pleasure by rubbing herself against a pillow or riding on a horse, and then simply does this on a pedophile’s leg one day without expecting the later on quite harsh reaction and negative backlash from society.

Tons of anecdotal experience are enough to refute the idea that universally, a child must be asexual. I masturbated since I was 6 or 7 years old by using objects rather than my hand, I was just not that informed on sex yet, by the time I was 12 or 14 years old I definitely sometimes wanted to fuck much older female teachers in my school. Why not?

So it’s simply unscientific non-sense to say a child can under no circumstance be sexual. If it were true, then of course it’d make sense to conclude whenever a child has sex, it’s abuse, simply because the child doesn’t want it. Children never want to eat chocolate? Well, I guess then whenever a child eats chocolate, it must be the result of abuse.

But this isn’t the case, so what’s the issue?

  • Is sex just too dangerous, even if children want it?

People act apalled about the idea of respecting a child’s/minor’s wants and desires, even the idea that a child could possibly consent to anything, because there are certain situations where they say they have to stop children from doing something they want in order to save them from danger. What they don’t realize is that they only do this though exactly because they have the child’s will in mind.

  • ”What if a child wants to run across the street without looking left and right and there’s a car driving towards the child??? Can’t stop the child???”

Then if the implication is that they’ll get hit by a car, it would be incorrect to say they wanted to cross the street, because it directly entailed getting hit by a car, which they didn’t want. So you actually did what the child wanted, you stopped a car from hitting them.

  • ”What if a child doesn’t want to get a vaccination against a serious illness??? Let the child die of the painful disease???”

Then the child still wants to be immune to illness though and simply fails to see that getting said vaccination is required to become immune, so you’re still giving them something that they will later on want, which is immunity to illness.

  • Now tell me, if you are anti-intergenerational sex, how exactly is sex like this?

Sometimes children want to engage in sex, and sex is not something that necessarily has to result in harm to the child/minor later on. So why doesn’t it fall into the category of things that are acceptable to let a child/minor do? What’s the harm in sex that the child just doesn’t see yet beyond the whole drama imposed by a bigoted society?

Some sex clearly falls into the completely harmless/almost 100% danger free category like eating broccoli, which everyone would allow a child to do. Why is humping someone’s leg or cuddling with someone looked at as dangerous?

Some sex kind of falls into an in between category where it can be but also cannot be harmful, and many times we allow kids to engage in such activities as well, example: bicycle riding, just like penetrative sex with older minors can result in bad consequences. If you’re not careful, you might get hit by a car and are a cripple or you get hit by an STD.

  • So obviously at least sometimes, pedophilic or just older minor + adult relationships can be perfectly harmless, thus I would say permissible, that’s the point.

An 8 year old girl found out about sexual pleasure by rubbing herself against a pillow, now does it to a pedophile’s leg. She wanted it – there is no risk of future harm by STD or pregnancy.

Why is this wrong?

A 12 year old boy jacked off to his hot female teacher multiple times, she’s on pills, sterilized, has no STDs and let’s him cum in her. He wanted it – there is no risk of future harm. Why would anyone still be against that?

Why is this wrong?

It was wanted…and it was not dangerous either, there’s no reason to think it would result in harm in the future, so why don’t we allow this like we would allow a child to choose to do something else that is healthy and won’t harm them, like eating broccoli? Why aren’t you glad the child is doing something entirely healthy for them?

  • The only great risk of future harm left here is again the harsh reaction from the pedophobic society they live in, resulting in intense regret, that’s all, a self-created problem.

And that’s all the most hardline pedophobes will be able to argue when getting to that point in the discussion. Sex under the holy age is still harmful, because society is going to react to this harshly and create a lot of drama that the child is not equipped to deal with, but if that’s the only thing making it harmful, this is a useless argument.

It’s bad. Why? Because we react negatively to it, it makes us very angry!!!

And why do we react negatively to it? Because it’s bad you evil pervert!!!

Society generally already allows the child to do something they want, as long as it doesn’t result in future harm, like allowing a willing child to eat broccoli, because it’s not going to harm them in the future anyway, but putting a limit on alcohol for instance.

Sex can be perfectly healthy, so as long as a child wants to have sex, and you checked that their partner is safe, doesn’t have some kind of weird disease – what’s the problem? I would allow it for the same reason I’d allow a willing child to eat vegetables. They want it, so there’s no harm resulting from them being forced, and secondly there’s nothing dangerous about it in the future either, like allowing them to drink a bottle of whiskey.

The child wants something that is healthy for them, like eating broccoli or getting an orgasm. Why not? Why aren’t parents glad that the child wants to do something that is perfectly healthy? The child wasn’t forced, it’s not something that has a high risk of future harm if the parents of society simply stop making a big deal out of it. Where’s the problem?

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.

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.

Can it be good to create desire?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Right to die.

Simply put, I support the right to make the decision to die based on the same reasons why I think it is wrong to create sentient life in the first place.

  • When you don’t exist, you can’t be harmed, existence on the other hand presents you with constant harms in need of being resolved.

If someone makes the decision to be euthanized, they will avoid whatever suffering that they currently experience, or future suffering that they will experience.

Pro-lifers and pro-natalists object to this that this also robs the future person of future joy, happiness and pleasure, but I’d argue that anyone rational would reject this as a stupid concern, because obviously dead people don’t miss joy, happiness and pleasure.

They clearly don’t care, because they’re dead, you don’t see too many dead people upset about not receiving any more pleasure, show me one dead person that wants to come back to life.

Once you exist as a conscious being, you will have to chase pleasure, relief of suffering, or otherwise you will clearly be subjected to suffering, this is quite a burden to impose on someone, that is what you do when you bring someone into existence.

  • You don’t eat, you get hungry.
  • You don’t drink, you get thirsty.
  • You don’t defecate, you constipate.
  • You don’t orgasm, you get tense.
  • You don’t sleep, you fatigue.
  • You don’t socially interact, you get lonely – use whatever example you like.

So by obtaining any good, happy moment in life, you are always compensating for a state that would otherwise be defined by some form of suffering/dissatisfaction, and you have no absolute guarantee of fairness that you will always get what you need to stop horrific suffering.

Not coming into existence in the first place solves the problem of pain/suffering for the individual, and the absence of future pleasure will not be a problem for the non-exister. Being euthanized solves the problem of pain for the individual, and the absence of future pleasure will likewise not be a problem for the non-exister.

To use an analogy – it’s just like not getting cancer (unfulfilled desire) in the first place solves the problem of cancer (unfulfilled desire) for the individual, and the absence of future chemotherapy treatment (desire fulfillment) will not be a problem for the non-exister.

Having the cancer tumor (unfulfilled desire) excised (receiving assisted suicide) once it exists also solves the problem of cancer (unfulfilled desire) for the individual, and the absence of future chemotherapy treatment (fulfilled desire) will likewise not be a problem for the person that no longer has cancer (unfulfilled desire).

You could also use the example of having a knife stuck in you, the knife=unfulfilled desire, painkiller=desire fulfillment, pulling the knife out=death.

Unfulfilled desire is a constant problem, and there is really no rational reason why someone shouldn’t be allowed to rid themselves of it permanently – it would only start to make sense to me if you could prove that dead people can actually be negatively affected by being dead, still in a state of unfulfilled desire.

If you actually showed me an example of a dead person who regrets having died and desperately wants to come back, then you could argue death is a harm, but the reality is that death is prevention of all future harm, conscious life on the other hand entails constant trivial harms with the possibility of falling victim to greater harms at any moment.

Why exactly is everyone expected to keep living? Society allows people to make decisions that they can regret, but not a decision that can never be regretted, which is being dead.

Possible life apologist objections and points:

  • If you wanna kill yourself, you’re by default irrational.

This one is usually just circular. No one is saying that you can’t believe you want to die because you have another delusional belief prompting you to do so, i.e I believe a demon is threatening to rape me, so all I can do is kill myself before it happens.

But viviocentrist fascists are circularly arguing that one is always irrational for wanting to end your life, because you want to end your life, so you’re irrational.

And why are you irrational? Because you want to end your life. And why do you want to end your life? Because you’re irrational.

It’s like saying your tastebuds are obviously deficient for not liking chocolate ice cream, and the reason why you don’t like chocolate ice cream is obviously because your tastebuds are deficient, so we need to force feed you chocolate ice cream in order to make you healthy again.

  • ”But you hurt your family and loved ones by killing yourself!”

But you could similarly hurt them by making any other decision in your life that they disagree with, for example leaving the country permanently and never coming back.

The family will miss the person just like they could miss them if they knew this person left the country forever and is never going to return or call them again, and for the dead person, we can agree that being dead is not going to be a problem.

Also, they are of course also causing immense suffering by enslaving someone to their desire to see them continue living, if they really respected them, they should be glad that this person was freed from suffering. Similarly, not all people have friends or family either.

You could make this argument in specific cases where someone is directly dependent on the suicider, i.e child and a parent, but if the child is able to live independently there’d be little to no reason to deny the parent the right to die, it would be the same as saying ”I’m offended” by any other choice someone could make in their life.

  • ”But someone could be talked into dying when they don’t want to!”

Same issue, someone could really be talked into anything, but we don’t just outright ban an option to do something simply because some people are easily manipulated.

I could be manipulated into doing x – playing lottery, joining a football team, going to church, etc. So ban everything because sometimes it is the result of coercion and force? No, that just means we should ban coercion and force, not the activity itself.

There’s also more reason to worry more about literally any other subject where someone is being manipulated into doing something they don’t want to do, because at least dead people never regret not being alive anymore. It’s still an issue, but no more of an argument for banning the right to die than to ban other rights to do things that one could, but doesn’t have to be manipulated into, the list of said things is pretty much endless.

  • ”But if you really want to die, you can just kill yourself on your own!”

But if you really want a certain cosmetic surgery, you could theoretically learn how to perform it on your own. If you really want to get gay married, you can just have a homosexual ceremony in the comfort of your own home and call it marriage on your own.

Of course you could theoretically do many things on your own, but why deny someone the right to do them in a safe and consensual manner when there are more than enough people who would offer the service? Why is the fact that they could do it on their own a justification for criminalization? Should people who want to get cosmetic surgeries be criminalized because if they really wanted to, they could just learn to do it on their own somehow?

  • ”Well, whatever, but I’m never going to support right to die for perfectly healthy people that should be glad to be alive, I might support right to die for terminally ill and chronic pain, but that’s it!”

All pain is the same in a sense – it’s all created by the brain, this mental and physical distinction is ultimately non-sensical. Pain is not caused by cancer itself, obviously a braindead body could have a cancer tumor and it would not cause any pain, the pain is still created by the central nervous system, by a conscious brain.

Similarly feelings of aversion, pain are created when it comes to someone feeling traumatized, depressed, tortured by something other than a cancer tumor, something directly observable. There is no ”false pain”, if you feel it then you feel it, doesn’t matter if it’s caused by something that would not cause someone else the same amount of pain.

  • ”But maybe we could still improve their life, we can get them treatment and all that and palliative care, why throw it all away?”

Being dead terminates the need for improvement, no dead person craves to improve anything. If you have a cancer tumor we can still cut out, we can give you chemotherapy and let it in, or we can cut it out. If you have a knife stuck in you, we can keep feeding you painkillers, or we can pull the knife out. If you have unfulfilled desires, you can work on (maybe) fulfilling those desires in the future, or you can terminate the desires permanently by getting euthanized.

Why insist on suffering existing just for the chance of in the future converting some of that dissatisfaction into satisfaction, when you could just take away the need for any and all satisfaction by killing yourself as painlessly as possible?

And it is inconsistent to only show this attitude in this one context. When someone has an old shitty car they want to throw away, yes, we could still fix some parts on that old shitty car, maybe we can fix the tires and it’ll still drive.

But it is questionable, why should someone be so focused and forced to repair their old car? What if they simply don’t want it anymore? What if they will be better off throwing it away? Why does some third party have the right to tell me when I’m allowed to throw my car away, especially if someone else bought it for me (just like life) and I never had any say in it?

In conclusion, I think dying can be a perfectly reasonable decision. It prevents all future pain, and the missing pleasure won’t be a problem for the dead person who won’t miss anything that could have happened in the future because they’ll be dead anyway.

I could even argue anyone is done a favor by being painlessly euthanized in their sleep in that sense, and giving people the right choose euthanasia on demand is simply a bare minimum requirement the pro-lifers are failing to meet.

No one consented to receiving the life gift, so if a gift is really making you miserable, you should be allowed to give it up again. Buying something random for someone when you have no idea if they’re going to like is already a dumb idea, forcing them to keep it even worse.