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.

Nature is a shithole, but that’s not an excuse.

A frequent excuse that speciesists use to mistreat non-human animals is that animals in the wild, e.g. lions, hyenas, tigers, etc are doing the same thing in nature. In nature, all kinds of bad things happen, animals are worse off than on farms, so that justifies the way they treat animals.

Why is it acceptable for a lion to harm a zebra for its flesh, but not for us to harm a pig for its flesh?

And I think if anyone really questions it, there is no good excuse for that either, which many vegans like to gloss over, the most common excuses you’ll hear for wildlife suffering are that:

1 – Other animals don’t have moral agency, i.e they cannot think about their actions philosophically and recognize they are harming others, these animals, or nature itself lack the intent to do bad things, unlike humans who intentionally do bad, which is evil.

While this is true, this ultimately doesn’t make the suffering caused by a given object or subject any better. A mentally retarded rapist might have little to no ability to contemplate the consequences of his actions, but this still doesn’t make the end result of the rape, harm, any better, the harm is still just as harmful.

If the harm was no longer bad just because it was caused by someone who had no ability to understand that he’s causing it, we wouldn’t prevent severely retarded rapists from raping.

Of course, the same applies to other animals too in that sense, if you really thought that the pain caused by a hyena ripping the entrails out of a wildebeasts anus was somehow not bad, just because the hyena lacks the ability to contemplate how it’s harming others, you shouldn’t at all mind if we fed you to the hyena instead, pain is only bad if its caused intentionally after all.

We can even apply this to completely non-sentient phenomena.

Viruses, cancers and meatgrinders certainly have no intent to cause anyone harm, a meatgrinder cannot contemplate that its harming others by grinding them up, but you still wouldn’t therefore intentionally throw yourself into a meatgrinder because you figured that if something has no intent to harm you, the harm caused by it is somehow no longer bad.

You would remove cancer from your body, even though the cancer didn’t mean to harm you, plain and simple. Similarly you could name situations where intent to harm exists, but it doesn’t result in any harm, so it’s not something to be distressed about anymore.

If a serial child rapist and murderer in a high security prison cell is intending to rape and kill children, it’s not a problem just because he’s intending to do so, because his intending to do so is not resulting in any actual harm to anyone anymore.

It’s the pain itself that is the problem, not the intent to cause it, if the intent to cause pain never actually resulted in it for some reason, we wouldn’t care about it, we only care about the intent to cause pain because it frequently results in pain being caused, but it’s certainly still just as painful of a pain, even if it is caused by something that did not intend to cause said pain.

2 – Other animals are doing it for a necessity, they need the (nutrients in) flesh of other animals in order to survive, humans don’t.

The same problem applies, if the fact that the carnivorous animal is deriving nutrients from their victim somehow makes the suffering being caused no longer a problem, then nature apologists shouldn’t mind being fed to the hyena either. The hyena needs (nutrients in) meat to survive, and these nutrients can also be derived from humans.

So why do they wish to interfere whenever there is a human being attacked by a bear or lion, but when it’s happening to another animal, it’s somehow justified? The characteristic that makes harm to both bad and even possible in the first place, which is sentience/consciousness, is present in both humans and other animals, it’s just speciesism.

One could also use alien hypotheticals to demonstrate this point. Let’s say there were carnivorous aliens, much stronger than us, impossible to be reasoned with, just violent killing machines that rip our entrails out of our anuses. Would any of the nature apologists accept being brutalized by such an alien, just because the alien is also deriving some nutrients from our flesh? I don’t think so.

If these aliens could only survive on human flesh for some reason, we’d still have a problem with it, at that point we would just ask the question whether or not these creatures have a right to reproduce more aliens in the first place.

Pain is pain, no matter by what it’s caused.

I think ultimately all animals should go extinct to be saved from suffering.

Pain exists, that’s a bad thing in and of itself, sometimes in life we may tolerate one pain to avoid a greater one, like a painful vaccination to avoid a disease, but in and of itself, pain is bad, if you could snap a disease away with your fingers you’d do that.

So all else held constant, it is good to prevent it from happening. You prevented a broken leg before it happened? Good. We can ultimately prevent pain, by simply stopping the production of pain machines, which is any conscious being – humans, other mammals, insects.

All we lose is all pleasures, which bothers many, but in reality isn’t a big deal, because if you don’t exist, you don’t even need pleasure. Not hungry? You don’t need to eat. No broken leg? You don’t need a painkiller. Problem solved, I don’t remember ever having a desire to exist before I existed because I simply didn’t exist, and I think it’s the same for everyone else ultimately.

The absence of pleasure is not the presence of pain. When you exist, the absence of pleasure is the presence of pain. You don’t eat, you hunger. You don’t drink, you dehydrate. You don’t defecate, you constipate. So when you exist, you need good to avoid bad. But when you don’t exist, pleasure is also absent, but it does not result in any pain. So why create the need for pleasure?

Let’s say I put you in control of Pluto or some other planet, you could press the button to create alien evolution, slimy tentacle monsters cannibalizing each other. You know they currently don’t exist, so they’re not missing out on pleasure. You know if you push the ”create” button, torture will be thrown into the ingredient list. So why create unnecessary torture for unnecessary pleasure?

Sentient existence itself is unnecessary.

All conscious beings do is to try to avoid bad/suffering, by obtaining good/pleasure, relief of bad/suffering, which we didn’t need before we existed and didn’t experience any suffering, so to argue that you could change any organism for the better by making it conscious is ridiculous on the same level as arguing I can do you a favor by stabbing you in the chest for the good of then pulling the knife out of your chest again and putting a bandaid on it.

Yes, the lion might need to eat a zebra to sustain their existence in the wild. But the lion didn’t need to exist in the first place, there’s no unborn lion purgatory from which the lion cubs felt horribly deprived of zebra flesh. So if you just don’t make a new lion, it won’t need to consume any zebras, it’s delusional that nature apologists think there is some kind of great loss for the collective species in simply not existing anymore. If there’s such a high price to pay for this unnecessary cycle of sentient organisms being created, why endorse the game?

Species don’t have interests, individual animals have interest in avoiding suffering, humans are projecting their delusions of ethnonationalism + the silly idea that there is a pre-birth deprivation chamber onto these animals. Ultimately, the responsibility can only be on us to stop harm to these animals, they are too incompetent to do it, but instead idiotic humans are using it as an excuse for inflicting harm because nature does it, and that’s the point here.

Nature is a shithole, but that is not an excuse.

Yes, in nature, bad things happen – at the hands of animals that have a comparable intelligence to severely mentally retarded humans. If a meat eater justifies their mistreatment of animals just because animals in the wild do it, that is ultimately no better than me looking at a violent mentally retarded person and saying they acted badly, so that’s now an excuse for me to do the same, although I’m more intelligent to potentially know better.

Vegans who are in denial or support of wildlife suffering are certainly delusional for clinging to their pro-life bias, thinking the good in life justifies all the bad, but this doesn’t ultimately absolve the carnists of their crimes against other animals.

Carnists frequently make up the narrative that they’re doing these animals a favor by still abusing them, because they would be abused worse in the wild, completely ignoring that they could also just not breed them into existence in the first place.

It’s not as though we just have the options 1. let the cow live on your farm or 2. release the cow into the wild, another option is also 3. don’t breed more cows.

And they could also keep the animals without exploiting them, they just wouldn’t profit from it, and that’s what they don’t like. It’s as though you’re presenting us only with two options of 1. I can adopt a child from Africa and rape it or 2. I let the child starve to death in Africa. Why not leave out the rape part? You don’t have to release a cow into the wild, still doesn’t mean you need to force her through pregnancy again and again.

They use the other animal’s lack of intelligence resulting in harmful behavior as an excuse to engage in harmful behavior towards animals as well.

It would be like I work in a home for said severely disabled people, and I see that one of them is sexually assaulting and beating a girl. But instead of intervening, I figure I might as well just join in. I mean, the retards did it, so why shouldn’t I rape a disabled girl too? Survival of the fittest, top of the food chain bro, big fish eat smaller fish.

Why not? Severely mentally disabled people who don’t understand that they’re causing harm are doing it too, so I should not have to take any responsibility for my behavior either, although I’m more intelligent to know better.

This retarded rapist (nature) brutalizes his victim much worse, I brutalize my victims less (animal agriculture), therefore, rape isn’t really a big deal now, because the mentally retarded rapist rapes worse than I do.

Often in discussions about what is done to non-humans by humans, hypothetical scenarios involving the severely intellectually disabled are used, since speciesists will often excuse the harm they cause by saying that animals are lesser than us in terms of their intelligence.

But obviously there are humans that are stupider than pigs, so if you wouldn’t sign me a contract that said I can cut your nuts off with no anesthesia if you were to get into a car accident tomorrow, leaving you permanently disabled on the same intelligence level of a pig, why would you think that this type of treatment is acceptable for a pig? It’s hypocritical.

Other animals can suffer just like us, all they lack is intelligence, similar to how small children or severely mentally disabled humans lack intelligence, but that wouldn’t lead you to conclude that now their pain is no longer bad. Small children and disabled people are human, pigs aren’t, but that is irrelevant, because braindead humans are human but can’t feel pain, you wouldn’t mind having a knife shoved in your throat if you were braindead.

A good way to demonstrate the horrors of the dairy industry would be to just imagine I’m doing what they are doing with a mentally retarded human female on the same intelligence level of a cow, which is to forcibly impregnate her, rape, but if it’s not rape when it’s happening to cows because cows aren’t smart enough to spell the word rape and explain the concept of rape in proper english, then neither should the rape of said similarly intelligent human female be considered a real rape.

Then, I take her children, which are all due to their young age not much more intellient than a cow anyway and tie them up in some kind of BDSM type manner, so their flesh stays soft and tender, and then after a while I slaughter them all and make steak out of them. I do this to said retarded girl again and again so that I can get the milk, and then when her tits become non-functional, I slit her throat or throw her in a meatgrinder.

And we can do a similar thought experiment for wildlife suffering.

Let’s say we isolate all the severely intellectually disabled, but mostly physically strong into an abandoned forest somewhere, cut off by a wall or some such object from our general public.

They search for berries in the forest, they might resort to cannibalism if they can’t find anything to eat, they beat each other up and rape each other, fall into all kinds of traps and accidents, die of infectious diseases in said forest that they don’t know how to prevent.

There you have basically recreated the wild – mother nature, creatures as sentient as human children being tormented and not knowing how to prevent it from happening.

If we would see the abandoned forest experiment as a problem to be solved because we recognize that although they are less intelligent, but they can still feel pain, then so should we see wildlife suffering as a problem to be solved because we can recognize that although they are less intelligent, but they can still feel pain, there’s no reason why our feeling of responsibility should be any different towards wild animals than towards children or severely mentally retarded humans – we are the only ones that can potentially put them out of harm’s way.

But here the nature apologists want to believe that nature somehow magically knows what it’s doing, many of them don’t feel the need to justify it beyond saying that it exists, so therefore it’s perfectly fine. ”That’s just nature, that’s just life” – it is, so therefore it should keep existing. Is-ought fallacy, nothing more, nothing less.

That’s like discovering the torture chamber of a serial killer somewhere, and then not calling the police, because you see that the torture chamber indeed does exist, so therefore, what’s going on inside it must be good, it should keep existing, otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

They even glorify it, sometimes tourists like to watch these animals fight and don’t feel the responsibility to interfere and shoot a tortured animal to end its misery, leaving their fate in nature’s hands is assumed to be the right course action to take, just because it exists, so it must be good, ultimately this is just as bad as cheering on a retard gladiator war, starved mentally retarded humans trying to eat each other.

They even wish to replicate it, breed more tigers. Why is that? Why is it good to create more creatures that will rely on violence towards other animals to get their food, when you would look at anyone who thinks we should try to breed as many mentally retarded humans that violently assault and rape others as insane?

What’s to take away from this is that yes, nature is bad, many bad things happen in nature. But nature has no intent or plan, and the animals residing in the wild are not particularly intelligent enough to understand the implications of their actions, so to look at such a retarded process and say that it is a great guide for you on how to live your life and justify abusing animals is absurd, similar to pointing to the behavior of a severely retarded rapist and arguing that because he did it too, you should be allowed to rape.

Instead of recognizing nature to be the unfair shithole that it is, they are using it as an excuse for the pain that they cause by this unintelligent, primitive force, saying animals in nature have it far worse, so therefore, animal farming is just fine. That’s just like the retarded rapist raped more brutally, so therefore, you should be allowed to rape as long as it’s a little less brutally.

Why use an unintelligent, crude, dumb force as an example of how to behave?

Lack of consent and procreation.

You could argue that by procreating, you’re always harming someone, it’s impossible to procreate without breaking the do-no-harm principle/idea, you put someone into a state of need/want/desire.

Once you are here, as a conscious organism, you’ll be constantly motivated by suffering. You must eat or you get hungry. You must drink or you get thirsty. You must shit or you constipate. You must breathe or you suffocate. You must socialize or you get lonely.

Whatever example you want to use, you must chase pleasure/relief, or you will continue to suffer. If you don’t get the pleasure/relief, then you will suffer more, similar to how if it’s not brighter, then it is darker, or if it is not drier, then it is wetter. Less pleasure/relief, more suffering.

So procreating equals irresponsibly creating an addiction with no guarantee of fulfillment.

There is also a secondary argument against procreation, which is that you cannot get consent from an unborn child to create it.

When is it important to ask for consent?

I think the best answer is whenever you are exposing someone to some kind of risk of future harm, unless of course you are by doing so preventing a greater harm, easy example: shooting Hitler although he didn’t explicitly consent to it.

It is important for me to ask for consent, whenever I have doubts about what I’m going to do for someone else. So for example, if I want to steal your money and go to a gambling house, the only condition under which this could be made acceptable again is if I can 100% guarantee that I’m going to win the gamble or somehow I’m preventing more harm by stealing your money and taking it to the gambling house.

If I already knew you liked money, I can win the billion dollars, you’re not going to object to the end result, then I may proceed without asking you first, I already know the end result is going to be a win.

If I want to give someone surprise anal sex, the condition under which this could be made acceptable is if I can 100% guarantee they’re going to be into it later on. If I definitely knew they would appreciate it, they’re not going to object to the end result – then I may proceed without asking them first, but if there is any shadow of a doubt, I need to ask if it is being consented to first, I must not assume implicit consent without great evidence.

So I wouldn’t say that asking for consent is in itself always important as some kind of sacred rule, ultimately it is still the harm/suffering that matters,but here we have the problem procreation.

When procreators are about to procreate, it is fair to say that they cannot 100% guarantee a win.

The child could get a disease.
The child could be lonely.
The child could become addicted to drugs.
The child could randomly get struck by lightning or hit by a bus, be crippled for life.
The child could die in some unpleasant way one day.
The child could at all be dissatisfied, like I already pointed out at the beginning.

So to procreation, there is risk, that is undeniable, and on top of that, you also couldn’t argue that we’d be worse off if we stopped procreation, I don’t see how greater harm would befall anyone unless you could somehow argue that there’s some kind of unborn purgatory where people are suffering from not existing.

So we need to ask the unborn child for consent first. How do we do that? The answer is, we cannot do that, so what do we do when there is risk of colossal failure and no ability to get consent? We do not proceed, I cannot break into a random girl’s house while she’s asleep and stick my dick in her ass in hopes that she’ll appreciate the surprise anal sex afterwards.

Here reckless procreators frequently have a different idea all of the sudden:

”I can’t ask for consent, so I don’t need to! How am I supposed to get consent from an unborn child you fucking idiot???”.

So that means they don’t get it, the point isn’t that there is an unborn antechamber where you could have contacted the child and asked for consent, the point is that explicitly stated consent becomes an important priority whenever we are exposing someone to a colossal risk of harm to prevent no greater harm, this applies in the case of procreation, so procreation cannot be justified unless you could ask for consent.

When you procreate, you:

Create harm/suffering, i.e someone will now have basic needs that constantly have to be fulfilled, it makes them suffer whereas if we didn’t create someones anymore, there would be no harm/suffering.
Risk that they won’t be able to fulfill their needs, thus suffer even more intensely.
Don’t have a guarantee that they will be alright with the ticket they pull (consent).

Consent isn’t the only factor here, but I could argue that you not even knowing whether or not the person is going to like their circumstances is even worse, factor 3 here just makes it even worse in a sense.

Again, we can also find scenarios where it is possible to ask for consent, but I would think you wouldn’t need to, if you know you can double my life savings in a gamble, you no longer need to ask me for consent because you’re sure about the end result being a win so I’m going to be alright with it, if I know you always want a dick up your ass, I don’t need to ask anymore, I know you’ll be alright with it.

Similarly, we can give examples of everything that will have a negative effect on a child once it’s born, where we cannot adequately obtain consent beforehand either, because the child hasn’t been born yet.

For example, if I’m about to bring a child that’ll be severely disabled and suffer chronic pain every single day into existence, I also cannot ask the child for consent to be born before it is born, so does that make it alright to not abort that child just because I could have not gotten the consent to put it into a condition of chronic excruciating pain?

What if I want to give a fetus cancer?

Let’s say that’s just my fetish, I inject cancer into fetuses and that child will grow up to deal with cancer, I jerk off to that kid dying of cancer. I cannot ask the unborn child for consent to do so, so does that make it alright to proceed and give the child cancer, even though I don’t know whether or not the child will be fine with that later on?

If we go with the standard of reckless procreators in this scenario, i.e ”I don’t need consent if I’m unable to get it” – then it would be perfectly acceptable to birth a child that’ll do nothing but be severely disabled and in chronic pain every day, by this standard, it would be perfectly acceptable to fulfill my fetish of injecting cancer into fetuses, creating cancer cripple kids.

By this standard, we could justify giving a fetus any sort of disease that we want.

Chronic pain, AIDS, cancer, deformities, etc, doesn’t matter. If I could deliberately make a deformed, chronically pained child with cancer, would that be justifiable simply because I was unable to ask the fetus for consent beforehand?

I couldn’t have possibly asked them whether or not they will be fine with this later on, so I did it anyway, because I don’t need to ask for consent if I am unable to do so, that is the standard natalists are putting on the table.

But if they don’t like it, they can just kill themselves! So they have a choice, take it or leave it!

Often the last retort when you point out that creating a child carries a risk of the child being dissatisfied with life. And it’s true, if the child doesn’t like life, they can still kill themselves later on, just like in any other given scenario where I failed to ask for consent though.

If you really don’t like that I lost all your money in a gamble, you can still commit suicide. If you really don’t like that I broke into your home at night to give you surprise anal sex in your sleep, you can still commit suicide. Don’t like that I drunk drove over your legs? Kill yourself faggot, I’ll never stop selfishly taking risks at someone else’s expense.

When someone wants to kill themselves, it’s already too late, you already harmed them, so excusing the imposition based on the fact that the victim can still commit suicide later on isn’t an argument.

Not to mention, many procreating life supporters do not truly support the right to die for everyone including children, although it would, unlike their selfish behavior, not carry risk of future harm to the child, if you’re put to sleep you’re never going to regret it later on after all, you’re dead.

But they don’t like that, they want to force any child that doesn’t agree with life being a gift to pretend that life is a gift, otherwise they will deny the reproduced victims their freedom required to exit from life, it’s a circularly justified conclusion – the person is assumed to be mentally ill because they want to end their life, and it is assumed that they want to end their life because they are mentally ill, it’s circular logic.

So it’s not like these imposers even give their victim the freedom to exit, this is more like I break into this girl’s home and give her surprise anal sex, and if she doesn’t like it, she technically has the right to commit suicide.

Sentient life is useless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I reject the child/underage sex taboo.

NO EVIDENCE FOR INTRINSIC HARM AND TRAUMA, INTRINSIC VS. EXTRINSIC, SOCIETALLY MANUFACTURED HARM.

There has always been absolutely zero evidence that sex in childhood/youth in and of itself causes trauma, intrinsic (an important keyword here) harm, there are arguably certain cliché factors that could make it harmful that pedophobes automatically think of when they even hear the word pedophilia, such as:

Manipulation.
Blackmail.
Force of any kind.
Early penetration.
Early impregnation.
STD exchange.
Violent abduction, rape and murder.

But nothing says that any of these factors inherently apply to all cases of sex between minors and adults, society is simply disgusted by these relations and therefore fails to adequately distinguish between the harmful and the harmless ones.

There is in fact evidence that suggests children are harmed by these other factors when they feel traumatized after a sexual encounter rather than by sex itself, e.g. Rind et al. as an obvious example, or feel traumatized long after such encounters when they come into contact with society’s negative views on the sexual encounter they had, e.g. The Trauma Myth by Susan Clancy, it can be hard for scientists to talk about these topics in public because it puts them at risk to be publically ostracized by psychotic pedophobes.

This paper is a review of previous works and thus offers no new concepts; the apparent absence of harm in sexually expressed child/older person relationships has been attested to as far back as 1937 (Bender and Blau 1937) and 1942 (Menninger 1942).
C.A. Tripp asked “What is the mechanism {for transmuting a benign childhood sexual experience into harm}?”, noting that “victimologists have never provided one that is scientifically credible;” (as reported by Bruce Rind in personal communication 2002) and Kilpatrick (1987) also posed the question: “What has been harmed – the child or the moral code?” (p. 179).
Bailey (2011) observes what is to him “a surprising… lack of scientific evidence” (p. 3) for these claims. Clancy (2009) proposed that at least initial trauma is a “myth,” and noted that she “cannot offer a clear theoretical model as to exactly how and why sexual abuse damages victims” (p. 142).
Constantine (1981) described the effects of intervention based on this assumed/assigned harmfulness as “psychonoxious” (p. 241).
However, as Rind, Tromovitch and Bauserman (1998) point out, since the late 1970s a large number of mental health professionals have claimed that all sexual interactions between children and older persons “… cause harm, {that} this harm is pervasive,… {is} likely to be intense,… {and} is an equivalent experience for boys and girls…” (p. 22). However, no path or mechanism is offered as to how these sexual interactions actually cause harm.
https://www.brongersma.info/The_missing_mechanism_of_harm_in_consensual_sexually_expressed_boyhood_relationships_with_older_males

It’s just like some spiders are venomous and therefore dangerous, and some spiders are not, but because you find spiders disgusting anyway, you put both spiders into the ”dangerous” category.

Pedophobes feel disgusted by the idea of a child having sex anyway, so they throw the 6 year old girl voluntarily humping a pedophile’s leg into the same category as the 6 year old girl getting abducted and brutally raped, disgust can scare you away from a non-dangerous spider or pedophile.

In and of itself, there is no reason why a child would be traumatized by sex if they found out about sexual pleasure on their own by humping a pillow and now want to receive it by rubbing themselves against an adult’s leg – no manipulation, blackmail, violence required, nothing later on done to the child that the child is harmed by (like anal penetration or impregnation), unless society reacts negatively to it. Why would that be harmful? There’s no explanation of that mechanism, because it does not exist.

If you want to claim that sex in childhood is intrinsically harmful, point out to me in detail why such an encounter of a 6 year old girl voluntarily humping a pedophile’s leg would be harmful if she has not been in any way manipulated, blackmailed, forced into it and the pedophile did not brutally rape her later on, point out how magically trauma will poof into existence out of the great nowhere for no tangible, scientifically explicable reason whatsoever, even if society simply didn’t react negatively to such an encounter.

It is vital to be able to show a mechanism of some sort. Example, with alcohol, we can directly show how it alters your liver, no doubt about it, alcohol can cause liver diseases, independent of which society you live in at what point in time. Now what about sex in childhood, can you show me that a child will feel harmed by voluntarily having an orgasm even in a society that is perfectly accepting of children receiving orgasms?

Pedophobes are engaging in post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning here – B happened after A, therefore, B was caused by A. A child had a harmless sexual encounter, the child is traumatized at some point long afterwards because of secondary harmful factors, which can include society’s negative reaction to the sexual encounter, therefore, harmless sexual encounters cause trauma.

”The child left the house while it was raining, the child was wetted by the rain, therefore, leaving the house causes the child to be wetted.” – is this proper logical reasoning? No.

A child has a harmless sexual encounter with a pedophile, the pedophobes then inflict negative consequences onto the child and the pedophile as they fail to distinguish between harmless and harmful cases due to irrational feelings of disgust/repulsion, such as:

Separating the child and the pedophile.
Screeching hysterically at the child how they supposedly got molested.
Sending the child to a similarly delusional therapist.
Socially pressuring the child to ”accept their rape” or be labelled as delusional.
Telling the child they now ”lost their innocence”, implying they are guilty.
Tormenting/beating the pedophile in front of the child.
Making the child feel responsible for sending the pedophile to prison.
Telling the child how their partner is now going to get assraped in prison.

Then, the pedophobe confuses the harm they cause for harm caused by the harmless sexual encounter between the child and the pedophile, concluding that orgasms under 18 (or whatever holy age they were socially indoctrinated into believing is the only correct one) causes lifelong trauma and depression – a faulty conclusion.

As neurologically typical humans are predisposed to act as social copying machines who largely care about how they perceived by others, it is no wonder that children who engaged in such initially harmless encounters then frequently grow up to parrot the ”I got raped” – narrative when they grow up in order to be accepted by their primitive tribe.

When nothing helps, they also like to appeal to the consequences they themselves are at fault for creating.

When all this is pointed out to them, they then frequently like to commit the argumentum ad baculum fallacy and say that even if the harm/trauma is caused by the social consequences (that we inflict on children and pedophiles), it is still a consequence nonetheless, so there’s still no excuse for having sex with a child/minor, as they will be harmed either way. It doesn’t matter if the harm is just caused by society reacting negatively to the encounter, because society does react that way after all!

This is a catastrophically idiotic argument, considering that the harm is caused by them and could be easily eliminated by them no longer reacting in this fashion to such encounters between children/minors and pedophiles/adults.

It would be like saying if you sell a child ice cream, although selling ice cream to children might not be inherently harmful, if you do so, I’m going to castrate and shoot you in front of the child because I’m an anti-ice cream bigot who thinks everyone who sells ice cream to anyone under the age of 18 should be violently murdered, so therefore, you harmed this child by selling it ice cream, because in response to it, I cut your nuts off and set you on fire in front of the child, thereby traumatizing the child. See, it’s all your fault.

Why should a society have the right to make a harmless activity into a harmful one?

It’s blaming the victim just like any other bigoted nazi would do, no better than a rapist saying you can’t be a whore or else he’s going to rape you, or a homophobe saying don’t be a faggot or I’ll beat you, just that the pedophobe is saying don’t be a pedo or else I’m going to traumatize a child by beating you up in front of the child for giving the child an orgasm, don’t make me harm the child by harming you and by extension the child with my psychotic bigot meltdown in response to you giving a volunteering child a perfectly harmless orgasm.

HIGH INTELLIGENCE AND MATURITY ARE NOT PREREQUISITES FOR GIVING CONSENT.

It is untrue that children are fundamentally incapable of literal consent, agreement. Any conscious, sentient organism can be agreeable or disagreeable, children have preferences, almost everyone has seen a child spitting out food they didn’t like before or buy ice cream, I could argue even a dog can consent to go for a walk outside, the function of agreement and disagreement, attraction and repulsion exist in every conscious organism.

What is true though is that children are until a certain age indeed less intelligent and mature than adults, but there is no reason to think that this inherently disqualifies them from consenting to sex, which is what pedophobes would like to think.

A good word to use here is foresight and/or future concept, the ability to plan and think ahead, calculate future consequences and ramifications of actions. The point is that whether or not you need great foresight in order to consent to an act is entirely dependent on the future consequences of the act we are discussing.

If there is no innate, foreseeable harmful consequence to an act, a subject does not need great foresight, intelligence and maturity.

For example, let’s say we have a child subject that wishes to ride a bicycle, despite not understanding traffic rules yet due to their lack of intelligence and maturity. Would it be ethically responsible to allow this child consent to ride a bicycle? Can they consent? The answer is that it entirely depends on the environment and its consequences.

On the freeway? No, there is a potential negative consequence, i.e getting hit by a car that the child is unable to take into account yet, so they are disqualified from consenting.

In a completely safe, harmless, child-friendly environment? Yes, because there is about absolutely zero chance that they’ll get hit by a car anyway, so in a completely safe and harmless, child-friendly street, even a child with no ability to understand traffic rules is perfectly able to consent to ride a bicycle.

There is no age restriction for children eating broccoli, but there is an age restriction for children drinking alcohol, and the general idea there is that even if a child consents to drink a bottle of whiskey, they may not consent to the future consequences of that act but might not be able to appreciate that, whereas with broccoli, there is no such risk, so there would be no reason to prevent the child from consenting to eat broccoli.

Similarly, using the simple concept of logical consistency, we can apply the same reasoning to sexuality. If there is no innate, foreseeable harmful consequence to a sex act between a child and a pedophile that the child fails to see due to their childishness, then there is no reason to disqualify the child’s consent as ”somehow not real consent”.

So let’s use a similar example in a sexual context. We have a child subject that wants to receive sexual pleasure, but is too unintelligent and immature to grasp sexual education.

Would it be responsible to allow this child to have sex? Depends on the environment and consequences, just as with the bicycle example.

If the situation is sufficiently devoid of harm risk, i.e the child humps a pedophile’s leg, no risk of STDs or pregnancy involved, then there’s no logically detectable problem, if the child does something that exposes them to STDs despite not even properly understanding what STDs are yet, like having unprotected anal sex with strangers, that would be bad.

P1: Dangerous activities require foresight (ability to understand future consequences).
P2: Sex is not necessarily a dangerous activity.
C: Sex does not necessarily require foresight.

And of course again, pedophobes will sometimes appeal to the social consequences that they themselves are creating in response to such sexual encounters, i.e ”children can’t consent because there are just social risks amd consequences the child isn’t able to deal with yet!” – but obviously the answer to this is simply to abolish those social consequences, rather than to abolish a harmless sex act, again, it’d be like saying children can never consent to buy ice cream because I’m an anti-ice cream bigot who’ll burn you alive in front of a child for selling them ice cream.

”They could regret having sex later on!” might also be a concern, but that isn’t a fair risk to name, because that can literally be applied to every single interaction anyone ever has, so by that standard no social interactions should be allowed at all.

The reason why pedophobes think children need to be intelligent and mature to consent to sex is because they believe sex to be harmful (based on their irrational feelings of disgust) so in order for children to consent to it, they expect them to be rocket scientists first, even when the sex act in question is completely non-dangerous like leg humping.

It is equally ridiculous as not allowing a child to ride a bicycle in a safe and harmless environment just because the child isn’t competent to drive a car on the freeway yet, intelligence and maturity are not per se required for it to be possible for a child/minor to be agreeable.

We generally allow children to do what they want, as long as it has no secondary consequence that they may later on not want, resulting in harm to them, such as eating broccoli but not drinking alcohol. Pedophobes falsely believe that sex is one of those things that will later on always turn out to be harmful, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when they react negatively to it.

POWER DIFFERENCE DOES NOT EQUAL POWER ABUSE.

It is true that in certain areas, depending on what we are measuring, adults are more powerful than children, though it does not even apply to all areas of life.

It is irrelevant if adults are more powerful than children, because the existence of power in and of itself does not equal abuse. If a child voluntarily does garden work for an adult for a little extra pocket money and someone comes around the corner and accuses that adult of blackmailing a child into slave labor in his garden, they need evidence for that claim, the fact alone that this adult has authority does not mean that the child was forced to work.

When it comes to sex however, these critical evaluation skills shut down, and pedophobes see the fact that a given adult, be it a teacher or not has power over the minor as evidence that if sex happened between the adult and the minor, it must be the result of power abuse, no doubt about it.

Adult has authority over 15 year old, 15 year old however completely voluntarily does garden work for extra pocket money – not abusive.
Adult has authority over 15 year old, 15 year old however completely voluntarily sticks penis in them – somehow abusive.

Father has physical strength advantage over 6 year old daughter, 6 year old daughter consents to be lifted up by him – not abusive.
Pedophile has physical strength advantage over 6 year old girl as well, 6 year old girl consents to ride on his leg – somehow abusive.

This is a case of hypocrisy we are dealing with here, ”power imbalance simultaneously does and does not make an interaction abusive.”

The existence of power does not equate to abuse of that power, and in most other contexts, pedophobes are perfectly capable of recognizing that the possession of power is not the same thing as the abuse of power.

They only fail to recognize it in the sexual context, and this is because they most likely live in a delusional disney fantasy world where they want to believe that their 15 year old daughter is an asexual, innocent princess whose sexual impulses are all triggered by some kind of malicious pedominati propagandist fooling her into thinking that orgasms are totally not harmful, when in reality they obviously cause PTSD for life when you receive them under 18, 17, 16 or whatever may be the holy age they have been indoctrinated into thinking is the only correct one.

They already made another false assumption, which is that children are asexual, innocent (sex=guilt) angels that would never possibly want sex (that’s too icky of a truth to accept, OMG children can perform basic biological functions like producing excrement just like adults, this is unacceptable!), and they base their assumption that if sex between a minor and an authority figure happens on that first fundamentally false assumption that manipulation must be used to get a minor to have sex.

Someone can have sex with you in spite of their power, e.g. although I have a gun and have power over you, you want to suck my dick completely regardless of the fact that I own a gun.

Or, someone can also feel aroused by the power, but not abused by it, this can apply in cases where young girls might look up to an idolized musician or someone like that, but this doesn’t mean that 12 year old girls only want to suck Justin Bieber’s dick because they’re scared he’s going to kill them, so you could also suck my dick because you are aroused by guns, not intimidated by them.

Both are possible, so the power itself does not equate to abuse. If it does, then any interaction where there’s a power imbalance involved, not only sexual ones, are by default abusive.

In conclusion:

I don’t think there is any rational reason for upkeeping this backward taboo against sex in childhood and/or youth, or sexual relations between children/minors and pedophiles/adults, it is in the end just like all other bigotries a result of disgust and fear of the unknown, not truly rational thought.

It is barbaric pro-suffering non-sense, no better than having some kind of other non-sensical taboo, pick any other object and make it into a taboo, like candy.

Anyone who gives anyone under 18 candy will be violently harassed by society for the child that received candy to see, the child will be sent to a therapist and socially pressured to say they were forced to eat candy at knifepoint by the evil candy distributing monster.

You can say ”age of consent is not just some dumb religion, we have to draw a line somewhere”, but this principle of hyper-caution can literally be applied to any activity a child could ever engage in.

If we give people the freedom to tell children about religion, some islamic terrorists could try to manipulate children into joining a terrorist organization like ISIS, therefore, castrate and shoot every peaceful religious person.

If we give little girls the freedom to use beauty products, some narcissistic, abusive parents could use this freedom to try to manipulate little girls to participate in beauty contests they don’t want to partake in, therefore, we should assume a girl under 18 has been abused whenever she’s wearing make-up and throw the person that sold it in jail.

Arrest all, because some do bad things, that’s the idea there.

Instead of just making rape illegal, you end up harming a bunch of innocent individuals who did nothing harmful in this morally panicking crusade, when you could just make the abuse, manipulation, blackmail, force element illegal, in fact, rape and blackmail are already illegal.

Ultimately, pedophobes seem simply caught up in a state of moral panic like all kinds of other bigots, imposing their religious, non-sensical, unevidenced ideals on others to the detriment of both adults and children, thinking they’re saving the children, as is often the case with bigots.

Fetuses and future value.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about coma patients though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prevention of future suffering and pleasure.

A somewhat common objection to Benatar’s asymmetry in particular is the non-identity problem, basically stating that because a child is not born yet, it cannot appreciate that its future suffering has been prevented, so the prevention of future suffering for a would-be person is not good, it’s nothing, it’s just neutral, morals/ethics cannot be applied to the unborn.

How can it be good to prevent a pain from happening, if the person hasn’t been born yet to appreciate the prevention of said pain? One of the clearest examples that is often used would be the one of a severely disabled child that will be in chronic pain every single day once it’s born, the child can’t appreciate the fact that it hasn’t been forced into a life of chronic pain after being aborted, but that doesn’t mean that shitting it out would be a good idea.

Another example would be that there have been serial rapists and killers before that got off on the idea of keeping a girl in their basement, then producing a child for the sole purpose of raping that child. If some Josef Fritzl type of guy is overtly and clearly saying that that is his plan for the future, is anyone really going to argue that you shouldn’t call the police, because after all, he hasn’t done it yet, so therefore, what will happen when the child is born is also completely irrelevant?

I don’t think so. Is it a good idea to pollute the environment as much as possible, dump toxic waste into the oceans because the future generation that will experience complete environmental degradation is not here yet, so it’s not that big of a deal anyway?

Why do we euthanize dogs and cats in their sleep when they have terminal cancer and are in chronic pain, when they aren’t even around afterwards anymore to appreciate that their cancer and chronic pain have been prevented? Why not let the cat die as miserably as possible? It won’t appreciate that its more miserable death has been prevented once it is dead, so you might as well slowly torture the cat to death.

With some of these examples, of course the natalist will try to get around the idea that creating future harm is bad because in the scenario of the rapist breeding a child into existence to rape it or experience environmental degradation, the child already existed before it got raped or experienced environmental catastrophes, so they’ll say but the harm happened to someone who already existed, it’s different.

But then I can obviously just as easily say that every single harm in existence that definitely will and could potentially befall the child will befall them when they will already exist in the future, and you are at fault for that by bringing them into existence in the first place, same difference in the grand scheme of things, any harm befalling the already existent child is a byproduct of them having been brought into existence.

The idea here is that it is a good idea to prevent a state of deprivation, suffering from happening before it happens, in principle, but it’s only bad to prevent a pleasure, its relief from happening if the alternative to it is feeling pain, which the unborn do not, but you’re always doing once you are alive, chasing pleasure to avoid feeling pain.

As long as you exist, suffering is the alternative to pleasure.

You don’t eat, you suffer hunger.
You don’t drink, you suffer thirst.
You don’t shit, you suffer constipation.
You don’t cum, you suffer sexual tension.
You don’t socialize, you suffer loneliness.

So on and so forth, use whatever example you want. Once you’re here, you’re trapped in a system of having to chase relief or being subjected to more suffering.

So to use a metaphor for the asymmetry, you could say I need to take into account the future consequences of injecting you with heroine in your sleep before I inject you with heroine, how it might negatively affect you in the future, but it would be silly to lament that I need to take into the account the loss of pleasure of not injecting you with heroine, I deprived you of satisfying an addiction that you don’t have.

Though admittedly, even that is not a perfect example, it is hard to find a perfect example because someone who doesn’t exist can never feel deprived of anything, at least a person that already exists could miss the fun that heroin might bring them, whereas a non-existent person can miss absolutely nothing.

If the reason why we chase pleasure in the first place is to avoid the pain/discomfort/suffering of not having it, then that explains some of people’s common intuitions that Benatar often points to – preventing the severely disabled, chronically pained child from being born is good, but preventing the happy child from being born is not bad, because the reason why they’d chase pleasure anyway is to avoid being in pain, and by not existing, they already perfectly avoided all pain, you don’t need a fire extinguisher if you’re not in a burning building.

If I abort the child that’ll be in chronic pain every single day for the rest of their life, it’s good that I’ve done this, similar to how it would be good to euthanize a cat with cancer, even though the cat obviously doesn’t wake up afterwards to appreciate that now they won’t have to die of cancer.

You also prevent their pleasure, but they won’t miss it, it won’t harm them.

A ton of semen is ejaculated, never implanted into a vagina to grow into a sentient child later on, I don’t really know anyone who laments semen being flushed down the toilet just because it depletes the potential for future sentience, I would argue because we ultimately recognize deep down that the soul of the potential child in that sperm is not writhing in agony in the unborn purgatory, distressed over missing out on the pleasures of life.

Even pro-lifers don’t go that far, they think once sperm and egg is merged, there is an obligation to give it a right to life, or that it has some kind of natural right to life, but I don’t see them getting upset over wasted sperm, so the pro-life version for this ethical questions would be: ”If you knew the sperm contained an extremely unhappy person, would it be ok to use it to make a child?” and ”If you knew the sperm contained an extremely happy person, would it be ok to flush it down the toilet nonetheless?”

Eating animals because they’re less intelligent.

The argument for humans rights is the same argument for animal rights, other animals possess the characteristic that makes it important to be put into the category of organisms that have rights, which is sentience – the capacity to feel things.

It is not my white skin color that makes it important for me to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat, as I could be braindead, still contain white skin color, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not the white skin color that makes avoidance of a knife in my throat into an important priority.

It is not my penis that makes it important for me to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat, as I could be braindead, still contain a penis, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not penis that makes avoidance of knife in my throat into an important priority.

And finally, it is not my human DNA that makes it an important priority to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat either, as I could be braindead, still contain human DNA, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not human DNA that makes avoidance of knife in my throat into an important priority.

There is absolutely no reason why it would be in any way worse to pull the plug on a braindead person, any more than to pull the plug on a computer, the only reason why it could ever possibly be bad to do so is because it affects another sentient organism, like a family member or friend of their’s that has some kind of emotional attachment to the braindead body, but if that family would indeed be more upset by someone destroying their computer than the braindead human, then it would be worse to destroy the computer in fact.

Speciesists are under ingroup favoritism/bias, just like racists and sexists, i.e I am important because I can feel things, that is understood, but this other creature is not important despite being able to feel things just like me, because it doesn’t share group membership with me, you’re not in team white, team penis or team human, so we can torture you.

An other difference that exists between humans and animals, that does not as severely exist between whites and blacks, or men and women, is the different level of intelligence, it is true that pigs, cows, chicken are much less intellectually capable than humans, whereas there’s no such extreme difference between blacks and whites, or men and women.

However, then we run into the mental retardation problem.

There are of course severely mentally disabled humans that aren’t much more intelligent than pigs, cows, chicken, definitely not chimpanzees, so would any of these speciesists sign me a contract that states that if they were to get into a car accident tomorrow and end up on the same level of intelligence as a pig, cow or chicken, I am allowed to treat them as a pig, cow or chicken?

Let’s say you are no longer able to add 50 plus 50, and cannot read books, so now I can cut your nuts off with no anesthesia, stick my arm up your asshole and throw you into a meatgrinder once you are of no more use for me to rape and exploit? Is that perfectly fine? I couldn’t get any more milk out of that retarded bitch’s tits, so I beat her to death with a sledgehammer. Why not?

”BUT THEY’RE STILL HUMANS!!!!!”

Saying that such disabled humans are still human though, even if they’re not as intelligent, so they’re still granted rights unlike the other animals is nothing but a cheap cop-out, because if the speciesist specifically states intelligence to be the reason why humans have rights unlike animals, and we already established that human DNA in and of itself is worthless (braindead vegetables contain human DNA but can’t feel shit), then obviously if there’s a human that does not possess such a level of intelligence, they don’t deserve rights, plain and simple, it’s logical consistency.

It would be analogous a sexist saying men are granted rights because they’re stronger than women, but then, when we find these sexists a man that is just as weak as the average woman, they say ”but he still has a peepee!” to justify why this man has rights, but women don’t, because the very reason they stated as to why penis havers deserve rights is because they’re stronger than women, this man is not, so he doesn’t deserve rights according to said sexist.

They basically want to attempt to say that even if this retarded person is no more intelligent than a pig that they justify eating based on said pig’s lack of intelligence, they should still be treated the same as other humans, because they share one characteristic with them, which is being human.

This is completely irrational and arbitrary, by that sort of rule (treat the minority the same as the majority based on sharing one characteristic with them), I could say most people are not rapists, Ted Bundy is a serial rapist but also a person, so therefore, we shouldn’t arrest Ted Bundy, because he shares the characteristic, which is personhood with non-rapists.

Speciesists don’t really have any coherent excuse for this, here they frequently just try to make it sound more complex than it is, by appealing to extrinsic factors that may in practice, not in principle be different about causing harm to an unintelligent creature, or use other concepts to describe intelligence and say that animals lack these capacities, like rationality, reason, the ability to reciprocate morals and social contracts, etc.

So they might say if you assault the retarded person, the family of the retarded person would be upset, if you assault the cow, no one would be upset, except the cow of course.

Great, then just rape a retarded orphan child that no one knows on an abandoned island, or in a society of psychopaths that all join in and rape the retarded orphan child too. You’d sign the contract then that says if you end up retarded, we can treat you like that? No.

The pig on the other hand was just bred for meat, the retard wasn’t! Great, then let’s just explicitly breed pig IQ humans for the purpose of turning them into mince meat then, that surely makes it a lot better, as long as you breed someone for the sole purpose of exploiting them it’s alright, slavery is only a problem if you weren’t bred for it and your IQ is over 70.

Of course, they’d mock even the idea of a cow being assaulted or raped, because the cow is supposedly not intelligent enough to understand the concept of assault and rape (i.e in our differently verbalized language, they still feel what is happening), the cow cannot spell the words assault or rape. So therefore, supposedly you can’t assault or rape them because they’re too dumb.

Although, they would of course be completely fine with calling the assaulting and raping of a human female on the IQ level of a cow assault and rape, it’s hypocritical on every level, perhaps they’d even say ”OH MY GOD THIS IS RAPE” if they walked in on some guy inserting his arm into their tied up pet dog’s anus, that is no more significantly intelligent than a cow either.

Or speciesists may dress it up in other abilities that are related to intelligence to make their bigot argument sound more complex, some examples would include:

”Ability to understand morals and reciprocate the social contract.”

Same problem applies, some humans cannot adequately reciprocate ethics, here a favorite dishonest weasel tactic is of course to appeal to violent mentally handicapped humans that have been locked away for the sake of public safety to demonstrate how these individuals lost their right to freedom as well, but we’re not talking about their violence, just their retardation, and there are harmless retarded individuals that don’t need to be locked away, just like pigs, cows, chicken are harmless.

”Ability to understand and speak in our language.”

Hilarious one too, that retarded mute cunt couldn’t talk back, so I just kept raping her.

”Ability to write poems, philosophize and make scientific discoveries.”

Even average humans often can’t do that, so turn them into mince meat?

”Ability to do math.”

So a calculator or a computer has more rights than an average human child?

”Ability to think and plan ahead for the future.”

Same problem, not to mention that many animals can do this, but that’s a less important point.

And so on and so forth, ultimately it all boils down to the same concept – intelligence, and very obviously, intelligence is not why you want to avoid pain, if you legitimately believe that, you are delusional, psychotic, fundamentally disconnected from objective reality.

A butthurt attempt at downplaying the suffering of animals is then often times also that because these other animals are less intelligent, therefore can’t comprehend how to act rationally towards one another, we’re somehow allowed to be just as retarded, even when we know better.

”Ha! Silly vegans, you all try to save the animals, but the fact is, these animals would eat you too if they got the chance!!! Look at nature, dog eat dog world, the lion is eating the zebra too so why shouldn’t we do the same???”

You are appealing to what retarded creatures that don’t know any better are doing, to justify you doing the same, even though you know better.

Imagine the following scenario, I work in a facility for mentally retarded humans, sometimes these disabled individuals are sexually assaulting and beating each other, because they lack the ability to think about and contemplate the ethical implications of their actions.

What would be the ethically responsible thing to do here?

1 – Prevent them from sexually assaulting and beating each other.

Or:

2 – Joining in and brutally raping a mentally disabled girl too because they did too.

Look, these retards don’t know any better, they would sexually assault you as well, so you might as well just join in and sexually assault them too. No problem.

Not to mention, other animals are largely completely harmless to you as well, pigs, cows, chicken generally don’t assault humans in some kind of dangerous manner, so that makes it even worse.

It’s not as though we’re talking about a lion attacking you, which we could analogize to a big, strong retarded person sexually assaulting you, we’re talking about a chicken that can’t seriously harm you, so this is pretty much like some sociopathic rapist saying you are under no obligation to not violently assrape a 3 year old with your fist because a 3 year old kicked you in the nuts once.

The 3 year old has no obligation not to punch me, so I don’t have an obligation not to punch the 3 year old either, checkmate you anti-child abuse idiots. You don’t punch 3 year olds? Well guess what, they would punch you because they don’t know any better, so I should do the same!

You get the point, ultimately supporting animal abuse because animals have a lower IQ is not a rational stance, it’s an irrational stance, and none of the dishonest tactics that speciesists use to justify this stand up to scrutiny in any way.

Ethical egoism is irrational.

With the topic of utilitarianism (consequence-concerned ethic) vs. deontology (strict rule- concerned ethic), I think there are primarily two common flawed objections to utilitarianism.

One has more to do with false threat detection, i.e where someone believes in their particular moral rule, but they fail to see that they only believe in that rule, because there is already an underlying goal of wanting to achieve better consequences (i.e suffering reduction).

Our goal is always suffering avoidance, but they fail to detect that this is the underlying motivation of their action and believe there’s something else to life, e.g. the American flag causes a reduction of suffering from loneliness in someone, eliciting feelings of patriotism and group membership, rather than to acknowledge that the real good is the elevation of their sensation state, the person now comes to the conclusion that the American flag is the good.

Now, they get more upset about it being burned than they would get upset about a fully sentient chimpanzee being burned alive, this is delusional behavior, they fail to acknowledge the value is in elevation of their sensation, from one negative to less negative, not in the flag itself.

For example, a delusional religious terrorist might say he cares more about following god’s orders than reducing suffering, that’d be an example of deontological rule rather than consequentialism.

But the point is that if you dig deep enough, chances are you’ll find that he only cares about following god’s orders because he believes it’ll be conducive to reducing suffering, i.e if I do the terrorist attack, I’ll go to heaven, if I don’t kill the faggots, they’ll infest society with their AIDS and rape everyone, so he’s a not a real deontologist, there is no real deontologist, so to speak, we are always just trying to run away from suffering.

Authoritarians and libertarians both have the same goal I could argue, authoritarians believe that society must be ordered to not become too chaotic, then ultimately lead to more suffering, libertarians want to maximize freedom because being locked in a cage causes suffering, that’s the same goal, they just have different ideas about what will achieve that goal.

Even if they proclaim to know what they are supporting is not conducive to reducing suffering, but it feels ”just wrong” to not do x, then following their ethic is still an attempt of suffering avoidance, feeling ”just wrong” is in and of itself also a form of suffering, which they are trying to correct for by doing what intuitively feels ”just right”.

But then there’s also the more egotistical, though delusional type of argumentation.

This is when someone openly declares that they only care about themselves, suffering in others is irrelevant. What is vital here is to find out why they ultimately try to avoid suffering, and then you can demonstrate an inconsistency in that type of thought pattern.

If suffering were only a problem because it happened to you in particular, then obviously you would also try to avoid pleasure, like getting an orgasm, because it’s in the same category logically speaking, i.e ”things that happen to you”. So if suffering is only a problem by virtue of happening to you, pleasure is equally a problem, because it also happens to you.

The fact of the matter is, you put your experience of suffering into the category ”worth preventing” based on something innate to those sensations, it’s a negative sensation, it does not make you feel better, that is why you try to avoid it, not because it happens to you in particular, you don’t try to avoid orgasms just because they happen to you in particular, so obviously that indicates strongly that it is about something more than it just happening to you.

If:

P1 – Suffering is worth preventing for you because it feels bad.

P2 – Suffering in other organisms also feels bad.

C – Suffering in other organisms is just as worth preventing.

Whereas if:

P1 – Suffering is only worth preventing because it happens to you in particular.

P2 – Pleasure also happens to you in particular, e.g. orgasms.

C – Pleasure and suffering are both equally worth preventing.

You put suffering into the ”worth preventing” category because of something innate to suffering, i.e because it feels bad, if you just avoided it because it happened to you, you would try to avoid pleasurable sensations just as much.

If suffering in meat suit A is worth preventing because it feels bad, then so is suffering in meat suit B worth preventing because it also feels just as bad, if suffering in meat suit A is only worth preventing because it happens in meat suit A, then so is pleasure in meat suit A also worth preventing because it happens in meat suit A.

Here we can use many different metaphors to demonstrate this point, let’s use watering plants, bringing out the trash and cleaning toilets.

If water from water bucket A should be used to water plants because it’s water, then so is water from water bucket B fair to use for watering plants because it’s also water, if water from water bucket A should only be used to water plants because it’s in water bucket A, then so would you be obligated to use battery acid to water plants if it were in water bucket A, but you wouldn’t, because it’s about the content of the water bucket, not in which water bucket it is located.

If trash in trashbin A should be disposed of because it’s trash, then so should trash in trashbin B be disposed of because it’s also trash, if trash from trashbin A should only be disposed of because it sits in trashbin A, then so would you dispose of gold if you found it in trashbin A, but you wouldn’t, because it’s about the content of the trashbin, not the trashbin in which it is sitting on.

If you’re a toilet cleaner and shit in toilet A is worth flushing down because it’s shit, then so is shit in toilet B worth flushing down because it’s also shit, if shit in toilet A is only worth flushing down because it sits in toilet A, then so would you flush your credit card down toilet A if it were to fall into toilet A, but you wouldn’t, because it’s about the content of the toilet, the shit, not the toilet in which it is sitting in.

So we can do the same thing here as with any other scenario where someone says they value their particular rule over suffering, e.g. if they say breaking the law is wrong, ask if breaking the law would be wrong if it only lead to better consequences and never caused any suffering, in order to demonstrate that it’s not the breaking of the law itself that is bad, but suffering.

Same can be done here, if the egotistical psychopath would propose the rule ”suffering is bad if it happened to me, that’s why suffering is worth avoiding”, ask if pleasure is also worth avoiding by virtue of happening to them, obviously they don’t avoid sensations just because they happen to them, there is a clear subliminal understanding on their part that it’s suffering that is worth preventing, not every sensation that they experience is equally deemed worth avoiding – you avoid suffering, you seek pleasure, the relief of your suffering.

You are just one of many sensation containing toilets, if suffering is worth being flushed out of you because it’s something innate to suffering, how it feels that makes it worth being flushed away, rather than the fact that it happens to you, then obviously it is just as worth flushing away for everyone else, just like it’s about the content of the toilet, the shit.

If you shit in your toilet, and you say that is worth flushing down because it’s shit, then yes, obviously the obligation is just as loud and clear when it comes to any other toilet, shit in a different toilet still is shit, so the right thing to do here is to push the button as well, even if it’s a little more work, this is the obligation that logically follows.

Otherwise, you’re being contradictory, i.e shit is worth flushing down because it’s shit, but not in this toilet, suffering is worth preventing because it’s suffering, but not in this meat suit. That’s the wrongness, the falseness in that behavior, the different treatment of the same property.

Of course you’re biased towards yourself, you cannot directly experience someone else’s experience, only improve in your understanding that it is not in any way substantially different from your’s.

Different objects may cause different sensation states in different subjects, but the sensation is the same ultimately, i.e in you negative sensation might be caused by almonds, if you have an almond allergy, but in someone else it might be caused by peanuts, if they have a peanut allergy, but is the feeling really different?

No, you simply are able to notice your experience of suffering much more than anyone other particular organism’s experience of suffering, but ultimately the sensations are the exact same, if I save a cockroach from being stepped on, that’s as good as preventing my finger from being stepped on, if I save someone else from drowning, that’s as good as saving myself from drowning.

Take an example you are more disconnected from to see the absurdity to see value in preventing only your suffering, not suffering in general.

Let’s say we have two bugs, bug A and bug B, one of the two has to be squashed in order to prevent the entirety of all other organisms on planet earth from going to hell and being tormented for all eternity, squash bug A or bug B, the harm experienced by either will be the exact same, they have the same suffering capacity.

Which should you squash and what would be the rationale for favoring one bug over the other? You could say if we squash bug A it’s different because bug A will personally feel it, but if we squash bug B then bug B will personally feel it. True, but the feeling is exactly the same, so all you can really do is flip a coin here.

Let’s make it even more similar, let’s say we make an exact clone of you, exactly the same appearance and thought patterns, and we have to sacrifice one to prevent us all from going to hell and being tormented for all eternity. What’s the right answer here, should we take the clone because otherwise you’ll personally feel the suffering? Great, but then the clone will personally feel the suffering, and the suffering is the same – so what’s the difference?

You put yourself into the category ”worthy of protection from chainsaw in my anus” based on the characteristic ”sentience/consciousness”, so if you discover the existence of other sentient organisms around you that are obviously also in the same category of being sentient/conscious, they have to be put into the same category of ”worthy of protection from chainsaw in anus”, otherwise there is an error happening, it is false, a correctly functioning machine would now try to prevent as many chainsaws from going into anuses as possible.

In general, some idiots seem to believe that these types of excuses of just saying ”I’m selfish” are somehow more consistent and rational, they think they can just say ”I don’t care” in any ethical debate, and that means they are not contradicting themselves.

”I don’t care” is still a non-consistent philosophy and way of viewing reality.

If someone told you they were going to break into your house and rape you at knifepoint later on, and you then called the police, and the person then said ”but, I don’t care”, would you then abstain from calling the police, because if the perpetrator doesn’t care, you somehow wouldn’t care either?

It doesn’t matter if the perpetrator doesn’t care, their non-caring would still not deplete your caring about what will happen to you. So if you on the other hand, when you are in the position of the perpetrator, expect your victims to stop caring on the basis that you don’t care, you are contradicting yourself, because if you were in the position of the victim, the non-caring of the perpetrator would not deplete your caring either, you’d still want to be cared for even if no one else cared.

So if you say some stupid shit like ”pigs are gassed for bacon, whatever, I don’t care”, then you also have to accept being gassed for bacon as long as society said ”we don’t care”, but you wouldn’t, because again, deep down you recognize suffering itself to be the problem, deep down you argee that sentience/consciousness is the characteristic that demands care, if you can correct a negative condition, it’s good to do so, regardless of where it’s happening.

Saving your clone from being squashed is just as good as saving yourself from being squashed, and in terms of the property consciousness, we are all clones performing the same function, experiencing discomfort and comfort.