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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you believe me?

Do you trust me?

Just get in there.

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

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

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

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

In life, not having pleasures means to suffer.

You don’t eat, you hunger.

You don’t drink, you thirst.

You don’t shit, you constipate.

You don’t breathe, you suffocate.

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

You don’t socialize, you get lonely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My disagreements with vegans.

In and of itself, if veganism is just a subset of sentiocentrism, i.e the idea that rights should be granted based on suffering-capacity, sentience, then I’m vegan by that definition.

I think suffering-capacity is the only important characteristic, it’s certainly not my human DNA that makes it bad for someone to stick a knife in my eye. I have human DNA right now, my body would contain human DNA when I’m completely braindead as well, but I’d certainly say that sticking a knife in my eye right now is much worse than to do it when I’m braindead.

I wouldn’t just flip a coin and say ”doesn’t matter, the problem is the destruction of human DNA, not the triggering of pain” – speciesism, just like racism is a misguided way of looking at the world where you ignore the suffering-capacity of all the organisms that aren’t in your particular ingroup.

Be it skin color, genitalia, nationality, family membership or species, it makes you a danger and a blight, similar to if I decided my brown eyes are the only reason why it’s bad to torture me, anyone else is less important because they don’t have brown eyes.

Yes, animals, unlike different groups of humans, are generally less intelligent than humans, but intelligence still doesn’t inherently change your capacity to suffer. More intelligent beings might suffer from different things, i.e a human female can suffer from not receiving a right to vote and go to college, so we give her one, but a cow does not, so the cow doesn’t need that right.

But when it comes to raping and confining someone in a cage, there’s no great difference in terms of suffering, so if you’re in a burning building and can only save twenty pigs or one human child, it still makes much more sense to save twenty pigs from being burned alive, their lack of intelligence doesn’t suddenly make being burned alive painless.

That’s my position on it, so we could say I’m anti-speciesist and (negative) utilitarian, but there are vegans who say they don’t only care about consequences of actions, but more about the idea that humans should never interfere with other animals, human=bad, animal=good, similar to how some feminists aren’t rationally looking at consequences, they just think woman=good, woman=always victim, man=bad, man=always rapist.

List of disagreements to follow.

1: Reproductive ethics (antinatalism vs. non-antinatalism).

I’m against creating new sentient life, because it always results in suffering. By preventing all conscious life, we prevent all suffering. We also prevent the chance of any happiness, but that is irrelevant, because there is no unborn purgatory where anyone is suffering from a lack of happiness.

In (conscious) life, we are forced into a position of having to chase satisfaction in order to avoid the otherwise resulting dissatisfaction. Eat or hunger, drink or thirst, shit or constipate, cum or get tense, socialize or get lonely, whatever example you want to use. But when martians and plutonians do not exist, while they are not enjoying great food, drinking refreshing water, taking a great big shit or getting an orgasm – they also never suffer hunger, thirst, constipation or sexual frustration.

So it’s no problem, so no one seriously mourns the non-existence of martians and plutonians, and all life on earth is just as irrelevant, not doing anything except constantly suffering, experiencing needs, wants, desires and then trying to get back to a zero point again of not suffering anymore, not experiencing any needs, wants, desires.

All downsides are avoided by not having said life in the universe, and the lack of happiness isn’t an issue because no one exists. No wound, no need for the bandaid. No dissatisfaction, no need for the satisfaction. Complaining about the lack of pleasure in a world where no one is there to crave it is like complaining about not having a bandaid when you have no wound.

Of course, the argument also applies to other animals, any sentient life, so that would mean humans would have to help other animals towards extinction as painlessly as possible instead of preserving nature, which leads us to our next points.

2: Wildlife suffering.

Even when the suffering is quite severe, vegans frequently don’t want any humans to interfere with wild animals harming each other, the reasons given for that I think are completely non-sensical.

1 – Other animals don’t have moral agency, they don’t understand what they are doing as much as humans, so they can’t be held accountable, they don’t know any better.

While it is true that a hyena doesn’t know any better than to eat a zebra alive, I could also argue that a severely mentally disabled rapist doesn’t know any better than to rape people. He’s not doing it to hurt anyone, he’s just trying to get off, so we can’t arrest him.

The idea that suffering is only bad if it’s caused intentionally or by someone that understands that they’re causing it is ludicrous, all this is is an emotional bias where we are more offended by someone intentionally causing us suffering than unintentionally doing it, but this doesn’t mean the pain is suddenly no longer painful.

You prevent yourself from getting viruses or falling into a meatgrinder, right? Although these things have no intention to harm or understanding of harm, but you still figure that the harm is harmful and try to avoid it either way.

Especially for an animal with lower intelligence and doesn’t have as many thoughts about the intents of others as humans, it’s completely irrelevant whether or not some sociopathic factory farm worker is hitting them or they’re getting eaten by a hyena, they’re just trying to get away from suffering, a wildebeast laying in the grass with its entrails ripped out by a hyena doesn’t pray to god, hoping no human comes to euthanize it because that would violate its religious beliefs that you must endure suffering to go to heaven.

2 – These other animals need nutrients in meat to survive.

True, but why do these animals need to be here to survive in the first place? Let’s say I’m a mad scientist, in my laboratory, I make a new alien species, they have to eat the intestines of human children in order to thrive.

What, are you going to tell me I can’t do that, I should euthanize my alien breed again? SO YOU’RE PRO-GENOCIDE? These aliens need meat to survive, and you have to agree they need to survive, otherwise you’re not vegan, we need these aliens to exist.

We don’t even have to go as far as to use an alien hypothetical, just in and of itself, if you are claiming that the animal’s need to eat flesh to survive justifies the harm, you also have to accept someone feeding a human child to a hyena, otherwise you’re already being speciesist, i.e inconsistent.

P1. The fact that the hyena needs meat justifies the harm they cause P2. The hyena needs any meat, doesn’t matter if it’s zebra or human child C. It’s justified to feed human children to hyenas. Why not? If ”the hyena needs meat” is in and of itself your justification, there’s no reason why the hyena can’t be sustained on human flesh.

So when the hyena eats a zebra, you wouldn’t pull the trigger, but when it’s a human child, you suddenly would? Why? That’s just speciesism, that’s like saying it’s justified for the rapist to rape women because he has an urge to rape, but then when he rapes a man you’re outraged, although you just said that the urge to rape in and of itself justifies rape. It’s like saying it’s justified for me to commit random acts of violence against group A because I have brown hair, but then when I do it to group B you’re suddenly outraged…although I still have the same brown hair.

If you say that the fact that the hyena needs to eat meat to thrive justifies the harm they cause to zebras, then you also have to accept it when the hyena eats a human child, because the nutritional needs of the hyena don’t suddenly change when you throw them a human child, hyenas don’t suddenly transform into herbivorous animals thriving on lettuce when they see a human child.

3: ”You can’t humanely kill someone who doesn’t want to die, animals want to live!”

I don’t accept the view that death itself is a harm, because when you’re dead you cannot feel hurt by anything, it is essentially the same ”experience” you ”had” before you were born.

If not being born isn’t a big deal, then why is being dead a big deal? You might fear being dead, but then that fear before being dead is the problem, the emotional harm, not being dead itself. I think you can only come up with practical reasons as to why it is bad, such as people’s anticipation to be killed, discomfort from knowing it could happen to them, pain felt in the dying process, preventing productive people from preventing more suffering in the world if you kill them.

With non-human animals, the biggest problem would simply be fear, pain, suffering in the dying process or during their lives (which still exists in many cases even on so called ”humane” farms) – but in practice I want to point out that I behave the same anyway and do not buy meat, dairy or eggs, not necessarily because of death anymore, but more because of breeding, as mentioned before, I’m against breeding because that does indeed always cause suffering/lifelong dependency on pleasure/relief, which is not guaranteed.

Many animals have been domesticated/raised to be fatter and sicker as well by humans (they were definitely different before they domesticated them), which another aspect one can bring up other than death as to why even the people who say they would support some kind of humane farming are probably wrong. Also, if you used the most painless way to kill someone, like injecting them, euthanasia, people would eat those chemicals in the animal, I think we should just stop breeding animals altogether but I’m not totally opposed to putting an animal down like some seem to be.

4: Beastiality, can animals consent?

Vegans often say an animal cannot consent like we as humans can, by speaking in the same language or signing contracts, so therefore, beastiality is wrong, even if the sexual encounter doesn’t harm the animal.

What they are completely hypocritically ignoring in that is that that would lead to the abolition of all social contacts between humans and other animals.

P1: It’s wrong to have sex with an animal because the animal can never consent like us humans.
P2: Animals can never consent to anything else like us humans either.
C: It’s wrong to socially interact with animals at all.

That’s where their argument leads.

P1: It’s wrong to have sex with an animal, even if it doesn’t harm the animal, because the animal can never consent like a human.
P2: An animal can never consent like a human to anything else either.
C: It’s wrong to cuddle with a dog in a non-sexual manner or pat the dog on the head, because the dog can never consent like a human, even if being patted on the head doesn’t harm the dog.

The most common retorts you’ll then receive will either be that animals are actually able to consent by using their body language to indicate whether or not they want to be patted on the head or go for a walk outside, or they will accept the position that even if an animal cannot consent, it’s still fine to socially interact with the animal as long as you’re not harming the animal, but both of these positions still fail to establish the beastiality taboo.

Again, let’s point out the premises and conclusions.

P1: Animals can actually consent by using their body language to show us whether or not they are fine with something.
P2: Sex is an activity that you can show whether or not you are fine with it by using your body language.
C: Animals can consent to have sex.

Or for the harm argument:

P1: It’s fine to interact with an animal, even if animals cannot consent like us, as long as we do not harm the animal by doing so.
P2: Not all beastiality is harmful though.
C: So not all beastiality is unethical.

So to sum up, if it’s wrong to have sex with an animal because the animal cannot consent like a human by speaking human language or signing a contract, then it’s also wrong to do anything else with an animal, like pat the animal on the head or go for a walk outside, because the animal cannot consent like a human in that situation either.

If you accept it though, on the basis that the animal can consent by using body language, then there is no reason to say the animal can’t also consent to sex by body language, and if you accept it on the basis that even if an animal can’t consent like us, it’s still fine to interact with animal as long as the interaction is not harmful, then all I need to do is point to an example of beastiality that didn’t harm an animal, and you’d have to accept that too.

Some people also think beastiality is bad in the sense that animals don’t really have any sexual feelings like humans, so you’re exploiting an animal’s drive to reproduce for your sick perverted desires, when the animal is trying to mate with another animal, but this is just kind of ignorant, similar to how when pedophobes want to pretend that children are purely asexual and ”innocent” (sex=guilt?).

Fact is, if we hypothetically have two chimpanzees here, let’s call one chimp A and the other one chimp B, and we let chimp A jizz inside another chimp and make another chimp, but then never let chimp A jizz inside another chimp again, but we give chimp B a vasectomy and then let chimp B jizz inside as many other chimps as possible, chimp B is ultimately going to be much happier than chimp A, I think that’s undeniable.

It’s not about making babies, sex drive is just a torture method nature accidentally and unintentionally invented to get things to shoot their semen and make babies, but that doesn’t mean that making babies is necessarily the goal of the semen shooter.

Taking a risk in existence vs. taking a risk by making a new existence.

One point natalists/pro-lifers sometimes bring up against antinatalism is this idea that 100% risk aversion is stupid, it is ridiculous to never take risks.

So when you say you shouldn’t create life because you risk creating extreme suffering, they might say something along the lines of:

”But so what, everything in life involves risks. You get in the car, you might get into an accident. You sit in the sun, you might get skin cancer.”

In life – that’s the important distinction here in my view that they are not taking into account.

There’s a difference between the scenario of 1. no one exists, so no downside can be endured by them and 2. someone exists and a downside can be endured by them.

We think of 100% risk aversion as absurd in most cases because it results in exactly what you are trying to prevent – pain/harm/suffering.

You don’t cross the street to get to the supermarket and doctor’s office to avoid the harm of being hit by a car? Then you experience the harm of not having the groceries you need for your meal this evening and your medical problem goes unfixed – that’s a problem.

So you avoided taking a risk, but you still ended up suffering as a result of it, so we take some risks in life in order to avoid that fate.

But the thing is, people that don’t exist don’t have any needs, they don’t need to go to the supermarket, they don’t need a doctor’s appointment.

If you don’t take the risk that your child will die of cancer by bringing them into existence, the child will not be trapped in some other place, like some kind of unborn purgatory where they miss their life and are frustrated by the fact that you didn’t take a risk for them.

So there is a difference between taking a risk once in existence and presumably detrermined to keep living vs. taking a risk by making a new existence from scratch.

So in that case, absolutist risk aversion makes perfect sense. Why not? There would be no harm/downside to not taking the risk for the non-exister, non-existers don’t exist, they don’t need to risk anything to gain anything that would then alleviate their suffering.

It’s hard to find an example for this, but let’s say you would actually not be disadvantaged at all by no longer using a car/vehicle of any kind.

There would be absolutely zero reduction in your pleasure, you would not suffer any more than you are now as a result of never driving a car again.

Yes, at that point I would say it’s just unnecessary risk taking. You risk hitting someone with that car, and we know that you wouldn’t suffer any more without the car. Why don’t you do something else then that doesn’t endanger everyone?

Organisms that don’t exist yet have no needs to be alleviated, so they don’t need to take risks in order to avoid suffering. You might need to take the risk of getting hit by a car to get to the doctor’s appointment to avoid a medical problem on the other hand, if you are actually going to live your life, but the unborn certainly don’t need that, so no need to take any risks for them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desire serum – a thought experiment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eat or hunger.

Drink or thirst.

Shit or constipate.

Masturbate or become sexually frustrated and tense.

Socialize or get lonely.

Sleep or fatigue.

Breathe or suffocate.

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

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

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

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

No certainty how tormenting the desires will be.

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

No guarantee the desires can even realistically be fulfilled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bullying, rape, serial killings – you name it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benatar’s asymmetry – some thought experiments.

Benatar’s asymmetry states that when one exists:

The presence of pain is bad.

The presence of pleasure is good.

Whereas when one does not exist:

The absence of pain is good.

The absence of pleasure is not bad.

The first few ones pain=bad, pleasure=good should be obvious. In and of itself, negative sensation is always negative, never positive.

Sometimes there might be situations in life where you have to tolerate one negative to avoid a greater negative, i.e get an injection to avoid the negative of a worse illness in the long run, but if you could just snap your fingers instead and be immune, you would do that, and if I only assaulted you with a needle for no benefit in return, you would decline the offer as well.

Similarly, that a rapist is gaining pleasure from raping is good, the bad thing is that he’s causing harm to the victim, but if we could just connect him to a machine that gave him intense pleasure from living in a virtual reality fantasy scenario where he’s raping people all day, that’d be good.

More confusing tends to be the idea that the absence of pain is good but the absence of pleasure is on the other hand not a bad thing.

I think the asymmetry can simply be seen as an acknowledgement that the whole point of obtaining pleasure is largely to avoid being in pain.

That pain is a default state of sentient existence that we are constantly seeking distraction/relief from, metaphorically kind of like a knife in your chest, and you have to take painkillers all your life to alleviate it, whereas if you are never born in the first place, there is no knife in your chest, the absence of the painkiller is only a problem when you have the knife in your chest.

Benatar also uses such an example in his book where person S (sick) has a capacity for a quick recovery, which is important, because person S is sick, person H (healthy) on the other hand has no capacity for a quick recovery, but this is irrelevant, because person H is not sick.

We have needs/wants/desires, that is a guarantee. We try to fulfill those needs/wants/desires our entire lives, and if we fulfill them, either a new set of fresh needs/wants/desires pops up (you already ate, now your appetite increases for dessert) or the old ones simply come back in time (you go back to being hungry again), rinse and repeat.

As though I’m on a treadmill, suffering behind me, relief in front of me. If I stop running, the direction I’m being pulled into is suffering. In case I reach relief, the treadmill simply extends further and now there’s relief in front of me again, and the relief I just reached will soon convert into suffering again. Or, if I wait long enough, I’ll just be pulled back into the other suffering that was behind me previously.

If the whole point of obtaining pleasure is to avoid being in pain, then we have an explanation for some our common intuitions and assumptions about reproduction, so let’s get into some of these examples.

One example Benatar also frequently uses is the one of preventing a bad life vs. preventing a good life. If you know you’re going to bring a severely disabled child into existence that will do nothing except to be in chronic pain for 3 years and die, you would likely consider it good to abort such a child before this happens, or if you’re a hardcore pro-lifer who thinks even killing a freshly fertilized egg is wrong, you’d think I’m an asshole if I knew my cum contained such a child and I deliberately used it to produce a child instead of flushing it.

On the other hand though, you’d have a hard time finding even some of the most insane pro-lifers who would argue that I’m doing something horrible by flushing semen that contains potentially very happy future persons down the toilet, how dare I deny the cum their happiness?

So although the severely disabled, pained child that never comes to be will not be able to appreciate that their horrible pain has been prevented, we consider it good that their pain has been prevented (absence of pain=good, even if there’s no one to feel good about it), but unless I prove that my sperm suffered as a result of being flushed down the toilet because it wanted to become a conscious child in the future, we wouldn’t think flushing it is a harm (absence of pleasure=not bad, unless there is someone to feel deprived of that pleasure).

I also like to use the example/experiment of making a dissatisfied population satisfied vs. creating a new satisfied population (of more individuals than the other one).

We have two planets, planet A and planet B.

On planet A, there are 1000 miserable aliens. On planet B, there is no conscious life.

We have two buttons, button A and button B.

If you press button A, the 1000 miserable aliens will receive the resources needed to satisfy them.

If you press button B, 2000 satisfied aliens will be put on planet B, while the aliens on planet A will remain in their miserable, tormented state, living lives of abject misery.

Which button should we press? By pushing button B, you would ultimately create more pleasure, but is it really important to create that pleasure when there is no one on planet B who even craves to feel said pleasure? I would say no, you should press button A.

If I could either 1. make every suffering organism on earth happy right now or 2. create a higher number (than all inhabitants of earth combined) of happy aliens on a different planet like mars, we’d have to go for the second option if we accept pleasure maximization rather than suffering elimination as the most important priority, it would create more happiness.

Even the topic of reproduction vs. adoption could be brought up here although that is somewhat of a different topic – there are already millions of need machines on this planet to be satiated, but instead you just create a new need machine. Why?

Pain is more painful than pleasure is pleasurable. If pleasure and pain were symmetrical, why wouldn’t you tolerate a high amount of pain for an even higher amount of pleasure? Heaven and hell scenarios.

Another important and strong point to establish the asymmetry.

Let’s say heaven and hell existed, and the deal would be that after we die, we can just choose between 1. eternal nothingness or 2. going to hell for 100, 1000, at the highest 10.000 years of the worst imaginable tortures, but then going to heaven to experience the best imaginable pleasure for all eternity afterwards.

I’m willing to bet that if we actually had this possibility in front of us that no one would with honest conviction say that they could bear going to hell first and then go to heaven afterwards, we would all choose nothingness.

But the question is why? If pain and pleasure are perfectly symmetrical, it shouldn’t be this way, even if I said it’s a million years in hell. What is a mere million years in hell measured against an eternity of the best imaginable pleasures in heaven? If you’re really convinced that pleasure is just as pleasurable as pain is painful, that we should symmetrically, rather than asymmetrically consider these things, then why not take the deal? An eternity should make up for that pain.

Over your lifetime, you’ll be subjected to two scenarios, one is 10 years of being unconscious vs. 10 years of being in hell and the other one is 10 years of being unconscious vs. 10 years of being in heaven. The deal is you can only make a clear choice in one scenario (hell or nothingness, heaven or nothingness), but in one scenario of your choosing, you’ll have to leave it up to luck and flip a coin. In which scenario will you feel more comfortable flipping a coin, will you flip a coin over which scenario you will flip a coin in?

No, you’ll be certain that not experiencing pleasure when you’re not feeling deprived of it is not that big of a deal (absence of pleasure=not bad unless it is a deprivation for someone) and you’ll be certain that avoiding hell is important even though whilst you’re unconscious, you won’t appreciate the prevention of your suffering in hell (absence of pain=good, even when there’s no one to enjoy it).

If we assume that the whole point of obtaining pleasure is to avoid pain, then we can easily make sense of all these intuitions – it’s good that the bad life has been prevented because the goal is pain avoidance, it’s not bad that the happy life has been prevented because no one is suffering as a result of not having a happy life in some kind of pre-birth deprivation chamber, unborn purgatory, so there’s no problem with that happiness not existing.

Giving your victim the option to commit suicide doesn’t justify their victimization.

The general argument for sentiocentric (all sentient life) antinatalism is that suffering is bad, by creating life we cause a certain amount of suffering in all cases, we may also cause pleasure/relief, but you will not miss any of that pleasure/relief if you are never created in the first place, there is no unborn purgatory where anyone is trapped, suffering from a lack of pleasure.

Is the absence of pleasure in and of itself a problem? Think of a planet like mars, there’s no pleasure whatsoever going on there, but there’s also absolutely no suffering from a lack of it going on there, so I fail to see how it could be a legitimate problem.

Or similarly, imagine we had two planets, one filled with tormented, dissatisfied aliens living a life of abject misery, but the other one empty of conscious life. You could either A. Choose to give the miserable ones the resources needed to become satisfied or B. Create a higher number of happy aliens and put them on the empty planet.

I think the absence of pleasure is only a problem in so far as it causes suffering, once you’re here, you have a constant deprivation/desire problem that needs to be mended, fire could be used as a metaphor. By procreating, we give someone the problem of now having to constantly chase pleasure in order to avoid being subjected to suffering (eat or get hungry, drink or thirst, shit or constipate), some desire fires are temporarily extinguished while others are not.

If you wouldn’t accept the idea that a fireman did good by setting people’s houses on fire and extinguishing only some of them, why would you think creating desire and fulfilling only some of it is good? All our lives, we’re trying to suffer as little as possible, when the only way to truly avoid suffering is to not come into life in the first place.

So a question that is common in discussions about this topic is:

”If life is so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself immediately?”

Often implying that there’s some kind of hypocrisy on part of the ones opposing life creation.

And the proper answer to that would be that if everyone who comes to these conclusions just commits suicide, there would be no one to talk about it, simple.

If you are thrown in a war and you are staunchly anti-war, it isn’t necessarily clear that the best move is to shoot yourself in the head, maybe you can convince other soldiers that the war is bad and minimize cruelty along the way, stop them from inflicting rape/torture here and there, maybe you can go home again and write a book about why you disagree with the war you were thrown in, maybe other soldiers can even do the same thing, so on and so forth.

It isn’t necessarily clear that if you disagree with x, you would necessarily free yourself from x immediately, because perhaps by staying in x you have a chance to reduce x, another example would be let’s say I wanted to convince everyone to live in a forest with me without technology.

Perhaps buying a computer and phone and using said technology to argue that point would ultimately further my goal of getting more people to give up technology and live in the forest with me, but then ultimately we’d abandon technology.

(Sentiocentric) antinatalism is against all life propagating, that problem is not stopped by just ending one life. It ends that particular suffering and all potential future suffering, yes, but not all the potential future suffering of all other organisms, so it’s not a solution.

But there’s also another important aspect to this, which is that giving someone the option to kill themselves doesn’t justify imposing harm on them in the first place.

It’s often said with this implication that as long as we all have the option to opt out, that somehow makes life creation a fair game, because you can just opt out at any point.

”Doesn’t matter if some people have a torturous life, there are also many happy lives, and the ones that don’t like it can just kill themselves, fair deal, you can always opt out at any time, so don’t complain!”

The problem with this is that once somebody is planning to commit suicide, they have already been harmed, so unless you believe that it is justifiable to harm someone because they have the option to later on end that harm by committing suicide, you are being logically inconsistent in using this justification for breeding.

I didn’t know I was going to put you in extreme debt by taking your money to the gambling house and losing everything. If you don’t like it, you can kill yourself.

I didn’t know she didn’t want surprise anal sex, if this slut is now traumatized, she can just commit suicide, so what’s the big deal? Some like surprise anal sex.

I drove over your legs when I was drunk and now you’re a cripple, but so what? If you really don’t like it, you can always end it, life is not supposed to be fair.

If it were only bad to harm someone if you deny them the option to commit suicide, then it should not be possible to prosecute a rapist who locked a girl into his basement and raped her every day, as long as he also threw her a rope to hang herself with.

”But your honor, my client gave the girl in his basement a rope to commit suicide with, she didn’t do it, so that proves that she secretly enjoyed getting raped, it was consensual for sure. What’s the objection here?’

”Forcing others to suck your dick at gunpoint is fine because they can just choose to die if they really don’t want to, free the offender!”

”It’s a fair deal, I lock you in my basement and rape you, and if you really don’t like it, you can kill yourself, I put a rope in your room.”

Here many procreation supporters will say that this is an unfair example because you know fully well that people don’t like being abducted into basements and raped, but with creating life it is not as clear that the person will have a horrible experience.

But that’s irrelevant if their excuse for it is that if severe harm takes place, the victim can commit suicide, if harm is justified on the basis that the victim can still commit suicide if they don’t like it, then this point applies.

Furthermore, it of course also exposes another of their double standards, ”you don’t know the outcome beforehand, so that justifies breeding” – so taking a risk like this at someone else’s expense is fine as long as you don’t know the outcome? Isn’t that exactly what we think makes it wrong in almost all other cases? I went to the casino with your money, but that is perfectly fine, because I didn’t know that I was about to lose all of it, it’s only wrong to gamble with someone else’s money if you know the outcome is that you’ll lose, if you don’t know the outcome, it’s fine.

Another problem on top of this is that the ones who are making this brilliant ”you can always kill yourself after we already harmed you” point is that they are also frequently exactly the ones opposing the right to die.

Pro-life ideology/viviocentrism often times doesn’t stop at just being perfectly fine with the reckless creation of consciousness and suffering, many of these pro-lifers don’t want the victim to be able to leave life either after having been severely harmed already, which they base usually on entirely circular reasoning, as in ”you are irrational if you want to leave life, and you want to leave life because you are irrational” – A because B, B because A.

In many places althroughout history and to this day, you can be arrested if someone suspects you are about to commit suicide.

A suicidal person must always think that the game of working to fulfill your needs/wants/desires is worth it even when there are little to no prospects of doing so, you can’t just realize that your needs/wants/desires not being fulfilled wouldn’t be a problem anymore if you’re dead, because you won’t have them anymore so once the desire wound is gone the fulfillment bandaid loses its value, no, we have to re-addict you to life and force you to think that not fulfilling a non-existent need/want/desire is a big problem – stay addicted.

So let’s go back to the rapist metaphor.

It’s not like this rapist locks you in his basement with a rope you could potentially use to kill yourself, you also have to do it when he’s not home, otherwise, he has a little door in his rape dungeon he’ll lock you behind, and then you won’t be released again until you admit how irrational you are for rejecting his cock, his gift to you.

You must admit you don’t want his cock because you’re irrational and you’re irrational because you don’t want his cock (A because B, B because A), but you promise to worship his cock from now on, you admit you are diseased.

And of course, you see that some of his victims also don’t have the same fair chance as others to kill themselves because he amputated them (an analogy to people who are in a position where they have a hard time killing themselves on their own and aren’t being granted the right to assisted suicide), so they can’t just pick up a rope.

They have to plead with him to help them commit suicide, but often he decides that they must still stay here to worship his cock (just like the absolute pro-life religious nutjobs will force someone to live until the end because anything else goes against their idiotic delusional religious beliefs), maybe they’ll get some better painkillers and that’s it.

So this whole argument that ”they can just kill themselves” has lots of problems as we can see.

Antinatalists killing themselves doesn’t solve the overall problem of suffering, even here we can make an analogy to the rape dungeon. If one somehow manages to escape the rape dungeon but comes back to it in order to save the other victims from the rapist, would you say the rapist is right to conclude that this means you secretly want to live in his rape dungeon and are just denying it, otherwise you wouldn’t be coming back to it?

Giving your victim the option to commit suicide doesn’t justify imposing the harm on them, otherwise I might as well also start drunk driving over people’s legs to gambling houses where I lose the money of people I stole from, and then when I lose I angrily rape a bitch, but that’s all good because if they don’t like it they can just jump off a building together.

Some victims are not even in a position where they can easily kill themselves and the most insane pro-lifers still aren’t for allowing them to exit, they wouldn’t even allow a paralyzed patient to die so what’s their point anyway?

In conclusion, the best way to prevent a problem is still to not make it, it’s better if someone never ends up in a position where they have to kill themselves to escape suffering in the first place, and while you are also abstaining from creating happy future people, you have to keep in mind that they are not trapped in some kind of pre-birth deprivation chamber, unborn purgatory where they are horrifically tormented over not receiving life’s pleasures.

About the speciesism of pro-lifers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The benevolent world destroyer objection to suffering-focused ethics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pin prick objection to suffering-focused ethics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let’s pick a slightly different scenario.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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