On life and reproduction.

(Sentient) life is a problem state demanding of constant fixing. What you do when you create life is essentially to throw something into a state of deprivation, struggling to constantly tame/fulfill their needs/wants/desires, accumulation of urges and compulsions you have imposed on it by having created it.

Imagine it as being trapped in a hole, the further you sink, the more you suffer, the closer you get to the surface, the more you feel relieved of it again, but you cannot climb out of the hole, you’ll always sink down again and have to keep struggling to remain as close to the surface of the hole as possible until you are dead.

Now that the organism has been created, it is constantly suffering, experiencing desire, deprivation. Hunger, thirst, constipation, sexual frustration, fatigue every single day to differing degrees, and proneness to worse future suffering, e.g. all sorts of accidents, drug addiction, loneliness, cancer, paralysis, the list goes on and on.

You fulfill a desire, then either a new desire pops up (e.g. appetite after hunger) or the old desire comes back in time and you’ll have to fulfill that initial desire again to avoid more suffering.

You must eat or you suffer hunger, you must drink or you suffer thirst, you must defecate or you constipate, you must breathe or you suffer suffocation, you must masturbate/have sex or you are sexually frustrated and tense, you must sleep or you fatigue, you must socialize or you feel lonely, etc.

We can use pretty much whatever example we want, we must obtain pleasure or we suffer, that’s the deal of sentient life.

Of course getting higher to the surface of the deprivation hole feels good, but would it really be an important priority to climb to the surface of the hole if you were never thrown into it in the first place? I don’t think so, I may enjoy a fresh breath of air, but I know that before I existed, there was no suffocating version of me trapped in an unborn purgatory, waiting to be brought to earth so that I can finally breathe clearly.

Creating a problem because mitigating and/or solving it is good.

Considering there was no kind of desire problem prior to the existence of an individual that demanded for some kind of happy moment to distract the individual, justifying reproduction on grounds of some kind of good in life is akin to justifying setting someone’s house on fire because extinguishing the fire again is good, giving someone AIDS because AIDS treatment is good, breaking someone’s leg because painkillers are good, throwing someone into the ocean because saving them from drowning is good, breaking the vase because halfway repairing it again is good, shitting on someone’s carpet because cleaning it off afterwards is good.

It’s an irrational idea, creating a (light to severe) torture mechanism just for the sake of sometimes stopping the suffering for the victim to appreciate what it’s like to not be burdened, for which they had absolutely no use prior to being burdened with it anyway, all the suffering could be prevented by abstaining from creating sentient life in the first place and no unborn child would miss out on anything, there is no child right now being tormented in the unborn purgatory waiting to be released, suffering from a need to be suffering from needs, procreators create all need.

It might be good to clean shit off of the carpet when there is already shit on it, but you wouldn’t think I’d be doing you a favor if I defecated onto your carpet for the good of cleaning it off again, most likely incompletely. It might be good to repair the vase when it is already broken, but you wouldn’t think I’d be doing you a favor if I broke it for the good of trying to repair it again, most likely incompletely.

To create sentient life in and of itself is to harm, you cannot reproduce without breaking the do-no-harm principle.

Let’s say I could bestow desire by snapping my fingers, or there were desire serum, so I could inject different desires into lifeforms, inject you with a substance in your sleep that makes it so that unless you stare at a red painted wall at least once a day and ejaculate into a purple cupboard, you won’t be able to fall asleep anymore.

The reason why everyone would most likely look at me as an asshole for doing that, but not their parents for giving all them all sorts of burning needs for:

food
taste satisfaction
shelter
resources you’ll have to do possibly dissatisfying work for
constant entertainment
acceptance, reassurance
affection
sex

with this need mechanism perhaps even leading to needs that are hard or nearly impossible to fulfill, which a good chunk of individuals are suffering from, like for example the need to:

stay healthy and simultaneously be an alcoholic or eat greasy, salty, sugary foods
copulate with more females than you have opportunity to copulate with
go back into the past you may feel more attached to than the present
not decompose and die, although you inevitably will anyway
be someone else that you are not

or perhaps even needs of which the fulfillment will directly necessitate the frustration of someone else’s needs, like for example the need to:

rape others for your sexual relief
make yourself feel superior to others by subjugating them

is because every sentient being in existence has been harmed in this way, with the evidence being that they currently exist, so you most likely assume it must be this way and take it for granted without ever questioning it, as opposed to me injecting someone with desire serum. It is simply impossible to create a sentient lifeform with the main function to suffer for constant need fulfillment without causing suffering, to create a sentient life is by itself to create suffering, it’s directly entailed.

It’s the creation of preferences that demand constant satisfaction, needing is a problem, you are in need of something, it is a deficit that if not alleviated in time will only intensify. And this is the act breeders engage in, they put you in need, similar to injecting you with heroin, except they bestow not one little deprivation by snapping fingers or using hypothetical desire serum, they create numerous desire wounds without lifelong, failsafe guarantee of bandaid supply.

In that sense, the more frustration is experienced by the victim, or the more frustration would be experienced by others if they were satisfied, the crueler the act of reproducing them – and you don’t know what the victim will win in the suffering lottery beforehand, someone is going to pull the brain tumor ticket, someone is going to pull the ”you can only orgasm if you set little kittens on fire” ticket.

You create an addiction, for example, a dependency on sex. Now perhaps the organism will always be able to find a hole to stick their penis in just in time, before the suffering gets out of hand, perhaps you’ll create an ugly elephant man experiencing lifelong loneliness though. You create an addiction, for example, a dependency on air. Now perhaps the organism will always be able to breathe in and out clearly just fine, perhaps you’ll create a child with cystic fibrosis or lung cancer though.

Every sentient organism experiences needs, wants, desires, every sentient organism is being harmed. Some victims are lucky enough to always get a painkiller just in time, others are not.

I would say that considering that if you were never put into this situation in the first place, you would not be suffering from not having your needs/wants/desires fulfilled (because you wouldn’t exist in the first place), the suffering of the ones unlucky enough to not receive painkillers is not justified.

The ugly elephant man’s unfulfilled sexual need to cum inside a hot pussy is not justified by someone else cumming inside hot pussy for him, because that happy individual would not be trapped in an unborn purgatory missing hot pussy if no one ever took the risk of creating either of these two individuals.

The dissatisfied child with leukemia isn’t justified by the happy child without leukemia, because that happy child would not be trapped in an unborn purgatory missing their life if no one ever took the risk of creating either of these two individuals.

You’re creating a problem, i.e the sentient organism needs to be pumped full of pleasure or else perhaps tragic suffering will ensue, and you created the sentient organism…with no guarantee that they can even be pumped full of sufficient pleasure at all times.

Our conditions of suffering may not only be impossible to alleviate sometimes, they also demand one to make others suffer in the process of alleviating your suffering, so perhaps your desire machine will also harm others.

Sometimes in this game, the relief of pain will depend on the pain of another organism. Perhaps you’ll create some organism that can only get off if they brutally rape and subjugate someone else, perhaps the organism will be an animal abuser their entire life, then in the metaphor, you basically created a fire that can only be extinguished by setting someone else on fire, you can only give the one organism the painkiller if you stab the other organism and let them bleed out on the road.

Childhood bullying is an almost instinctive, natural occurence, it’s a good example of sentient organisms being naturally in such a shitty insecure condition that they’re always aching to get a relief, even by making others suffer, in this case alleviating the suffering to be in control and feel powerful, this bad instinct comes naturally, civilized behavior on the other hand may take hard work.

It’s arguably a harm, you are creating states of deprivation, bestowing the itch that then demands to constantly be scratched, with no 100% guarantee that the itch can even be successfully scratched all of the time, possibly creating itches that can’t be scratched adequately or itches that can only be scratched by giving someone else the itch.

But let’s even assume we established some sort of as close to utopian scenario as possible where every suffering/need could be immediately alleviated, all itches scratched in due time.

At that point I’d be less concerned about procreation but I still wouldn’t say that it’s obligatory, because likewise, you still wouldn’t be able to miss being here if no one ever brings you into existence, so it doesn’t seem like a big deal.

It’s completely solving a problem (no life at all) vs. alleviating it as greatly as possible (utopia). If we exist in the utopia, we still have needs/wants/desires that if left unattended would lead to greater and greater suffering, but it’s just always being alleviated just in time.

Good without suffering seems impossible because pleasure and suffering exist in comparison to each other similar to bright and dark or wet and dry, when you take away suffering aou have pleasure and when you take away pleasure you have more suffering again, I don’t see any kind of neutral point in between where it’s clearly divided and then we just cut off suffering and have solved the suffering problem once and for all.

If you have more pleasure, you have less pain. If you have less pain, you have more pleasure, so I think the closest we’d get to a utopia would be perfectly alleviating the problem, always putting a bandaid on the problem just in time.

So we might create pain still, but then we always perfectly alleviate it. We have AIDS, but we also have the perfect cure for AIDS on hand. We create fires, but we also have the perfect fire extinguishing technology in place.

But if there’s no problem to fix anymore because life wouldn’t exist anymore, then I don’t think that having no utopia would be a problem either of course.

The endless orgasm utopia would be a great tool to have in place in a case someone is brought into existence and feels frustrated, but it certainly wouldn’t be a reason to create it in the first place, just like I would say that the existence of the cure for AIDS wouldn’t be a reason to infect someone with it in the first place just to then perfectly cure them of it afterwards.

The perfect problem solving means don’t obligate us to create a new problem, there is no need for desire fulfillment before desire is created, it doesn’t follow that the suffering of desire must be created merely because the perfect means to alleviate it would exist.

Perfectly alleviated suffering > suffering left to fester and intensify in our current world where desire fires are set with no guarantee of extinguishing

but

zero suffering > perfectly alleviated suffering.

And of course, on a more practical level, it simply also isn’t an argument for causing suffering by reproduction right now, just because of the possibility of a utopia in the distant future, that’d be like setting the forest on fire before the water hose was even invented.

On abortion.

What does it mean to create life?

When you create life, you make someone addicted to pleasure/relief, and if they don’t obtain it, they will be exposed to suffering, life entails constantly facing series of suffering, like hunger, thirst, constipation, sexual frustration, fatigue, etc.

You have deprivations imposed on you, and if you fail to alleviate deprivation, you will suffer more intensely as a result of that. At its core, you are presented with the task to alleviate deprivation, if you fail to do so, it intensifies. If you alleviate it, A. another deprivation will pop up (like appetite after hunger, now you need to eat just to avoid suffering boredom) or B. the initial deprivation (hunger) is going to return in time, and you’ll have to eat again.

You have to chase pleasure your entire life or you are subjected to harm, and the relief from harm is not guaranteed before you procreate.

Eat or hunger.
Drink or thirst.
Defecate or constipate.
Ejaculate or become tense.
Sleep or fatigue.
Breathe or suffocate.

So on and so forth.

I think it is therefore the responsible thing to do to kill a fetus. You prevent all future suffering by doing so instead of irresponsibly creating an addiction to pleasure that you cannot guarantee will be properly satisfied, and while there won’t be any pleasure, again, it won’t be a problem either, because there won’t be an addict craving for more pleasure in the first place.

Here I’d like to bring up the concept of Benatar’s asymmetry:

Benatar’s asymmetry:

Is the absence of pleasure really an issue if there is no one to experience it and suffer from it? Imagine this, I have both hypothetical pleasure and pain serum, if I inject said liquids into inanimate objects, they will turn conscious and either experience intense pleasure or intense pain, depending on which liquid I choose obviously.

Is injecting the pain liquid into my chair problematic? I would say yes.

Is not injecting the pleasure liquid into my chair problematic? I would say no.

Sentience is the only important characteristic.

Badness is necessarily something that is happening in feeling organisms, the capacity to have sensations that can either be of negative or positive value, this function is enabled by a brain and nerves that have to be developed to a certain degree. A rock cannot produce badness, neither can a fertilized egg or human fetus until a certain point.

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as “qualia“).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience

Sentience is arguably the trait that makes it most important to avoid having certain things happen to you, such as getting run over by a car, having a knife stuck in your throat or being burned, it opens the door to very negative sensations, it’s the only thing that could make it an important priority for you to avoid it.

A tree doesn’t care if it’s being burned down, it could only generate negative sensations in the sentient organisms that may in some way care about the tree, not in the tree itself. If an asteroid hits and destroys the entire planet, that can only be bad if there are sentient organisms on said planet, otherwise it is a completely insignificant event.

The reason why it’s bad when I’m harmed is not because I contain human DNA, it is bad because I have a functioning central nervous system generating a pain response, enabling me to even be harmed, it is the only reason why I am even capable of experiencing harm in the first place.

I think the common question of: ”Is it a human life?” is simply completely misguided to begin with, being human is not why I try to avoid being squashed.

It doesn’t matter whether or not something contains human DNA or is alive, a braindead human contains human DNA, a head of broccoli is alive too, that doesn’t make it bad to destroy a thing, many pro-lifers are simply speciesists.

If they knew they had to experience the life of a factory farmed pig getting its nuts hacked off with no anesthesia tomorrow, they wouldn’t agree to that based on their entirely misguided notion that the thing that makes not having a knife stuck in your throat important is the trait human DNA. Human life by itself is absolutely worthless, life only has extrinsic value to sentience.

It’s similar to a white slave owner accepting the torture of black slaves because they don’t contain white skin color, but having qualms about pulling the plug on his braindead white grandmother because she contains white skin color, neither white skin color nor human DNA are the characteristic that make it important to avoid torture.

Pre-sentience abortion for the ”victim” is essentially just like it’s for tomatoes when you turn them into tomato soup, it cannot matter to them.

The only two common objections I consistently hear to this type of argumentation are that:

The fetus could become sentient in the future.

This is true of every potent sperm sample, if you don’t impede the process by flushing it down the toilet, I’m in full agreement that life starts in the testicles. Sperm lives, sperm dies, new sperm comes to life, sperm can survive in a moist environment up to 5 days.

If that argument is rejected because sperm could not ”on its own” grow into a sentient child (i.e by leeching off of a female’s body for 9 months, so not really on its own), only the morning after pill, not ejaculation would have to be a crime, as it prevents the sperm from fertilizing the egg on its own once it has been successfully ejaculated into a vagina, then realizing its potential to grow into a sentient child later on, on its own.

The effect is the same – no suffering.

It still cannot matter to the ”subject”, so there’s no rational reason for concern because of the aforementioned point I made, I don’t think the absence of pleasure is a problem if it doesn’t result in suffering. The fact that the fetus could become sentient doesn’t matter to the fetus right now when it’s not sentient, so it can’t possibly hurt it to be aborted, if you’re purely asexual, you can’t be deprived of sex.

I like the hypothetical of sentient grassblades. Let’s say if I let grassblades grow for 9 months, they would become sentient. Would it be a problem to mow them down before they have grown for 9 months? I’d say no, because they’re not sentient yet, so they won’t even care about never becoming sentient in the future.

If I took life away from a sentient organism, it could result in some badness as their sentience enables them feel distress in response to their life being taken away, sure, the arguably living organism that is not sentient yet cannot miss anything on the other hand.

So even if there were a hypothetical tomato that could become sentient tomorrow, if I turned it into tomato soup today, it could not possibly matter.

Coma patients are temporarily unconscious, but we don’t put them down either.

It doesn’t necessarily harm the coma patient to just not wake up again either, what could worry people though is to know that they could be legally euthanized if they were to fall into a coma one day, before they fall into that coma, because they have some kind of delusional death anxiety that they’re going to miss being alive once they’re dead.

So it doesn’t lead to badness to kill a sufficiently unconscious organism, but it could produce some suffering to legalize doing it, worrying others that they may not wake up again if they were to fall into a coma, that’s the slight distinction.

The fertilized egg/embryo/fetus was never conscious before, when it was a sperm, it never worried that if it were to fertilize an egg one day, it may be aborted by some evil, uncaring monster although it wished to become a fully conscious child one day, so in the case of an abortion as opposed to coma patients, we don’t have this whole problem.

And again, some organisms that live outside of wombs also have utility to helping others, I could argue it’s bad to pull the plug on someone who has to take care of a child, or a scientist who is about to find the cure for AIDS. We don’t live in a vacuum, the fetus kind of does.

What if the fetus is already sentient though?

If the fetus is unfortunately already able to suffer, without any great debate now about when exactly that happens, just presupposing the fetus is, then the same goes as for every other organism, if it’s killed entirely painlessly, without any suffering involved, it still wouldn’t be bad. It cannot be intrinsically harmful, it could only be extrinsically harmful, as in:

Family members and acquaintances might miss the painlessly killed person.
If we legalized this act of painless killing, you may scare others they’re next in line.
You prevented the person from reducing more suffering in other organisms.

Death is not an intrinsic harm, it can only be an extrinsic harm. This goes for late term abortion, infanticide, really any death. It’s only a problem in practice, there’s no problem with a theoretically completely painless death in principle, it prevents all future pain/suffering/harm/negative qualia.

Believing in the badness of death itself almost requires the subconscious or conscious delusion of some sort of afterlife. Even if you know that once you’re dead, it’s over, you can still be delusionally scared of things that aren’t a threat to you, arachnophobia, fear of even little spiders that you know to be harmless would be an example, and similarly irrational is fear of being dead.

Obviously, if you are dead, you no longer experience needs, wants, desires just like you didn’t before you were born, so the only thing that could be bad is your departure, you’re not going to wake up afterwards as a ghost and feel the need to come back but being unable to.

The general utility of the right to bodily autonomy.

Another thing to point out in general is also that even if the fetus is already sentient, that doesn’t automatically mean that the harm of the abortion outweighs the harm of forced birth.

Of course, anyone’s right to bodily autonomy isn’t absolute.

It matters like anything, only because of the existence of pain. You don’t want to get raped, generally there’s no worse harm to prevent by raping you, as in, we have to rape you or otherwise we all go to hell and burn for all eternity for example, so we write on a piece of paper that person x now has a legal entitlement not to get raped for no great reason randomly.

Fair deal, if you want to violate it, it’d be good to show evidence that you’re actually going to prevent a worse harm by doing so, and this is where pro-lifers fail.

Two organisms are connected to each other here, so if the pregnancy is unwanted by the hostess (which ideally, would be all pregnancies to begin with), we are automatically forced into a situation of having to harm one by abortion or the other one by forced birth. So if the only two options are:

harm the more sentient
harm the less sentient

then it’s still the lesser of two sufferings to abort than to force birthing – the fetus should be sufficiently sedated though if there’s a chance that it can suffer to some degree at that point, there’s still no adequate justification to cause unnecessary (to prevent greater) harm.

Just as when you leave the door open and an uninvited intruder comes in and refuses to leave your house, you have a right to shoot them, not torture them to death over the course of three days, that’d be doing unnecessary harm to prevent the threat.

Here pro-lifers will frequently say but the fetus is innocent, the intruder chooses to harm you, therefore it’s different. This is irrelevant, a rapist with severe mental retardation, multiple personalities or schizophrenic delusions who thinks he must rape to cure world hunger and cancer is also innocent and has a good motive in mind, that doesn’t diminish the harm caused, so it’s probably still better to defend yourself.

Sometimes two organisms are connected to each other and you have to harm one either way, e.g. a cat has an ixodid tick or a tapeworm. All suffering is bad, perhaps you’ll cause some suffering to the slightly sentient tick or tapeworm, but certainly much less than if you let the parasite inside the cat’s asshole, causing worse suffering to the cat.

Pro-lifers would have more of a point if they demonstrated the suffering of the fetus to be worse, more intense than the suffering of the hostess, if pro-lifers could legitimately prove that the fetus has a soul and its soul is after the abortion forever suffering in a purgatory for aborted fetuses, getting raped by demons with pitchforks, then of course it’d be better to take that mother’s right to bodily autonomy away.

In that case, the forced-birth rhetoric would indeed start to make a lot more sense, granting bodily autonomy in that scenario would lead to a much worse outcome, but that is what makes the forced-birth view so absurd in our reality, because abortion does not lead to the more suffering producing outcome, to the contrary, it greatly prevents and reduces suffering.

UPDATE:

What if the fetus is already sentient?

That’s indeed a more complicated question, I have no qualms with anything non-sentient being killed, and technically I don’t think the painless killing of a sentient organism is a problem either.

If the non-existence before existence isn’t harmful, neither is the non-existence after you died harmful, it’s the same non-existence, and the organism won’t miss pleasure. If I’m not sad about my non-existent sibling that was never born not experiencing happiness, and I’m not upset about a potato not being able to experience happiness, why would it bother me that a corpse cannot experience happiness? They all have in common that they don’t miss it.

So what I’m saying is that all that can actually be harmful is the process of you dying and its external consequences (sad family members, friends, etc).

However, in practice I still don’t take the view that you should just walk around trying to euthanize as many people as possible, there would be practical issues with that, it would have lots of negative side effects, so it seems to me I would think this is simply a case by case kind of thing if it can be done rather painlessly, admittedly I’m not an expert on that subject – so I can’t really comment that much at what point a fetus is sentient and it might be ethically problematic to squash it, I won’t declare it’s always right.