• There are good things in life too. Surely there are many bad things in life, like cancer, disability and torture, but there are also many good things in life, like sunsets, chocolate ice cream and orgasms, and the good things overall justify the bad things. What about all the good things in life?!

Once you exist in the conscious sense, you need to feel good to avoid feeling bad. But before you exist, while you don’t feel good, you don’t feel bad as a result of not feeling good, so not feeling good is never a problem until the desire machine is created.

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. So on and so forth, so by obtaining any good in life, you are always preventing a greater negative/harm to yourself, but never as efficiently as by not being born in the first place.

That’s why it’s a ludicrous the idea that we can do any organism a favor by making it conscious, it didn’t need to feel good to avoid feeling bad before it existed because it didn’t exist, but once it exists it’ll have to feel good to avoid feeling bad, it’s doing them a favor in the same way it would be doing you a favor if I gave an illness (a bad condition) solely for the good of then treating that illness (correcting the bad condition, which you did not need before I created the bad condition in need of correction).

So when you bring a child into existence for some supposed good in it, you’re causing a problem to exist for the sake of fixing it, this is about as absurd as to set someone’s house on fire for the good of extinguishing it again, give someone AIDS for the good of giving them AIDS treatment, breaking someone’s leg and stabbing them in the chest for the good of giving them a painkiller and a bandaid afterwards, you’re creating pain for the sake of trying to eliminate it again.

You didn’t need to have your house extinguished before I set it on fire, so to argue that I’m achieving a net positive by creating the negative condition for you to prevent (the burning house) would be non-sensical, the good is contingent on your suffering.

Once every urge that could have pushed you to eat it is gone, the food will stop to induce pleasure in you, be it hunger or appetite, it could also be appetite instead of hunger, appetite is still suffering, if we forced you to never eat your favorite foods again you’d experience a certain discomfort as a result of that, discomfort that isn’t as intense and noticeable in an everyday situation where you are mostly able to quickly satiate yourself.

If unfulfilled desire already exists, then it may be a good idea to fulfill it, but it’s certainly not a good idea to create unfulfilled desire in the first place, it’s a problem, you put the child in need, into a degraded condition – just like if you see a burning house or a child drowning in the ocean, it’s good to extinguish the fire and save it from drowning, but it’s certainly not a good idea to set the fire or throw the child into the ocean in the first place, you’re just creating a problem.

The worst is that the alleviation is not guaranteed either, breeders have no failsafe guarantee that the child will be able to fulfill all its desires in life, they produce this desire machine without guarantee how tormenting the desires will be, how long lasting the fulfillment of said desires is, if the desires can even be fulfilled, if the desires can be fulfilled without harming someone else in the process. Many desires go unfulfilled, and the fulfillment of many harms others, so reproduction as a whole is kind of like setting a renting apartment on fire for the good of extinguishing only some of its parts, while some children will burn to death inside the building.

• It’s neither good or bad to prevent the suffering of a future child because it doesn’t even exist yet, it can’t be good for that child, so it is irrelevant if you prevent its potential suffering, it can’t appreciate that, morals and ethics can only be applied to those that already exist.

By this standard, you’d ultimately have to bite the bullet on accepting every possible future atrocity being planned ahead for someone that does not exist yet, because right now, the situation doesn’t exist, so what happens in the future will not matter either.

There wouldn’t even be any point in preventing a child from being born that is going to be in chronic pain every day and severely disabled, it doesn’t exist yet, so it doesn’t matter to the child that its suffering has been prevented, might as well just shit it out and keep it in your basement as a sex slave, doesn’t matter that you’re planning to do that, you haven’t done it yet after all, so what happens in the future will also be completely irrelevant – that’s the general idea here.

• The future generation doesn’t exist yet, so why is it a problem if I pollute the environment for them as much as possible?

• Terminally ill cats and dogs won’t appreciate the prevention of their future pain after we euthanized them in their sleep, so why not just let them die as painfully as possible?

• In fact, why does anyone commit suicide if they can’t even appreciate the fact that their pain has been prevented once they are dead? Prevention is pointless, right?

It’s called the non-identity ”problem”, future harm obviously matters as you can see in these examples I’ve just demonstrated, what we do right now will have an effect on the future, so it is completely hypocritical to make an exception for reproduction, or in fact usually just cases of reproduction where we don’t know what the future victim will win in the suffering lottery and it isn’t crystal clear from the start they’ll be severely disabled and in chronic pain every day.

Let’s say it’s just a hypothetical button I could push to create an alien species that does nothing but to feel the worst possible pain ever, would you be ignorant enough to argue it’s not important for me to make sure I don’t accidentally hit the button, because since these aliens don’t currently exist, they can’t appreciate that the worst possible pain ever is not currently taking place?

• If preventing the future suffering of a yet to be individual is good, then the prevention of their pleasures and goods in life is however also bad, you’re depriving that future person of many good things that could happen too!

If one never comes into existence at any point in the future, one can never be deprived of anything. Do you think it’s good if a semen sample that contains a severely disabled child that will do nothing but experience chronic pain is flushed down the toilet? Most likely, yes.

Do you think it’s a horrible crime to flush a semen sample that contains a very happy future person down the toilet? Most likely, no, we don’t recognize the absence of pleasure as a problem unless it results in pain for someone craving that pleasure.

The absence of pleasure is not in and of itself the presence of pain. The absence of pleasure is the presence of pain as long as you exist as a sentient organism, but the millions upon millions of years before you existed, your pleasure was also absent, but never actually resulted in any pain for you, because you didn’t exist. Was that a big deal, that you didn’t get to eat any chocolate whilst you didn’t exist and therefore didn’t crave any chocolate either?

It is irrelevant, someone cannot enjoy being saved from drowning if you don’t throw them into the ocean, but it wouldn’t matter, you don’t need to be saved from drowning if you’re never thrown into the ocean. There is no good in chemotherapy if you don’t have the cancer, but it wouldn’t matter, because you don’t need chemotherapy if you don’t have cancer.

Some life supporters like to give unfair examples of how you can still meaningfully deprive someone even if they never felt deprived of something, e.g. what if you win the lottery and someone takes your money, but doesn’t tell you? What if someone dropped a gift in front of your door while you were on vacation but then I took it away?

In those cases, you still had an already existent quality of life, and your experience was degraded by not receiving the money to fulfill your already existent needs, wants, desires, your experience was kept in a worse state by not receiving the gift you would have liked to receive.

But non-sentient matter before it becomes sentient has absolutely no needs, wants, desires whatsoever, so you are not hurting it by aborting it before it becomes sentient. No desire, no need for desire fulfillment, you didn’t desire to have desires before you had desires.

By this standard that it’s supposedly bad to not create a new pleasure, relieved conscious experiences, you’d then also have to ultimately mourn every ejaculation flushed down the toilet, it is the destruction of potential sentient life that could be put into a negative condition of need, want, desire, and then feel the pleasure of avoiding said negative condition.

Why do I have the right to experience all the good things in life but not my potential 100 siblings? Is it fair that I discriminate against potential sentience whenever I ejaculate? Shouldn’t every potential sentient lifeform that I ejaculate be incubated, so that then it can one day also experience tension, stress and pressure which they can also alleviate by ejaculating like me?

We’d have a duty to reproduce as much as possible if the absence of pleasure were that big of a problem for the non-existent, but it’s obviously not, there is no unborn purgatory from which any unborn children are missing out on life.

• Most are happy to have been born, if you surveyed them, almost anywhere, they would say they’re glad to be alive.

The point is that the fact alone that they are happy still doesn’t prove that we should think existence has any important benefit over non-existence, you can avoid suffering by always arriving at your next pleasure rush just in time, but never as efficiently as by never becoming conscious. It’s certainly good that they’re happy, they’re avoiding suffering always just in time before it gets too bad, but they could have done it even better by not being born and then they wouldn’t have missed anything.

The fact alone that a heroin addict feels happy when they get their new heroin fix to alleviate their already existent addiction doesn’t answer the question of whether or not it was sensible to start becoming addicted to heroin in the first place.

The problem is that most people are not really deeply contemplating it like this when they make this point, if it’s possible that a vast majority of humans are delusional enough to iamgine that they will still exist after they’ve died and then look down upon earth, lamenting all the fun things they’re now going to miss out on, then it’s also possible for them to have a similarly flawed intuition when it comes to what happened before their birth, that’s how we sometimes imagine death.

They only know their state of being addicted to life, so obviously they think that if they didn’t come into existence, they would have somehow missed out on something, ”I’m glad I’ve been born!” they say, as if something bad would have happened if they didn’t, imagining their needs, wants, desires somehow existing independently of them, as if if no one were to be left on planet earth anymore, it would somehow be a great problem that no chocolate cake is being enjoyed.

They imagine ”I wouldn’t have existed” from the perspective of ”I already exist, and then I would feel really bad that I don’t exist!”.

So of course, when they see it in this delusional context of ”if I didn’t get born, I would have missed out on my first blowjob!”, they’re going to think that dying of lung cancer is worth it later on, as they intuitively imagine that they would have otherwise suffered from missing out on that first blowjob from the depths of the unborn purgatory, but once you remove that delusional perception, it’d be questionable why they would think any risk of suffering is worth it, considering the absence of their pleasure couldn’t possibly have never manifested as a real harm of any sort.

You may even rationally comprehend that you weren’t a ghost lamenting that you were missing out on the pleasures of life before you were born, or that you won’t be one after you’ve died, but it’s an irrational fear that you cannot fully get rid of, such as arachnophobia, fear of spiders. For instance, you might understand that a little spider is not going to harm you, but you can still irrationally feel that it is an extreme threat, fear of non-existence is similarly irrational as arachnophobia.

Also, why would the fact that some of the organisms are happy justify the unhappy ones?

I could argue if I impose the risk of trauma on others by giving them surprise anal sex, I might make some of them happy, but this doesn’t justify all the ones that are unhappy about it.

Using procreation to make the procreated victims happy is in fact even less justifiable than surprise anal sex, because as stated before, non-existent children have absolutely no desire to be made happy in the first place because they don’t exist, at least the surprise ass rapist could argue there are some people that would want to get randomly fucked in the ass.

Another point is also that it’s socially unacceptable to criticize life likely due to the exact delusions I’ve explained here, such as life’s pleasures being a necessity for the non-existent. With life, similar to a rape I could argue, some won’t be too bothered by the suffering in it, some will rationalize it, some will be completely destroyed by it.

But a lot of it is rationalization, there are a few suicide attempts here and there every day, there are a few individuals here and there that need to use drugs every day to get through said day.

• If the child doesn’t like life, it can still always opt out by committing suicide, they have a choice, so it’s all fair. Why don’t you just kill yourself if life is so bad? If it were really so bad, you would kill yourself.

Giving your victim the chance to commit suicide doesn’t justify you imposing on them.

If I locked a girl into my basement and raped her every day but also gave her a rope to hang herself with, this wouldn’t justify what I have done, I already caused a great harm that isn’t nullified by her being given the chance to commit suicide.

This is exactly the callous attitude the life apologist demonstrates in this scenario though, if the girl really didn’t want to get raped, she would have killed herself, this proves that rape must be good and it’s perfectly justified to impose rape.

If the birthed really didn’t want life’s suffering, they would have killed themselves, this proves that life must be good and it’s perfectly justified to impose life.

Obviously, if someone wants to kill themselves, you already harmed them, it’s too late, something happened to them in life that they didn’t want to happen to them because you created that opportunity by making them sentient. What makes even more idiotic is that those pro-lifers are frequently also opposed to the right to die on top of being in favor in reproduction, so the rapist throws you a rope to hang yourself, but if you do it when he notices it, he’ll rape you again and won’t let you go until you pretend to like it.

There are also practical reasons for those opposed to procreation to keep living.

While you’re here, you can also spread the message and possibly reduce more suffering than by just killing yourself, so it doesn’t logically follow that just because one dislikes and disagrees with x circumstance, they would immediately try to get away from x circumstance.

See it this way – if you take issue with being sent to a war, you aren’t exactly solving the problem of the war by just killing yourself, if you kill yourself, they are going to send someone else into it anyway, so you might as well try to persuade other people to stop blindly supporting the war and to minimize harm/cruelty in the war as it is taking place.

How is the overall problem of war solved by you shooting yourself in the head? It is not.

Then, life is also an addiction, and the ethical question here is whether or not it’s a good idea to impose the addiction. I am not wrong for pointing out that the addiction is harmful just because I’m not ready to quit living myself, just like a cigarette smoker would similarly not be wrong for pointing out that cigarette addiction comes at a cost, just because they aren’t ready to quit smoking, claiming otherwise would be an appeal to hypocrisy.

The natalist can be seen as the irresponsible heroin addict here, not willing to admit that heroin addiction doesn’t only have benefits, so to reinforce this view, they inject unsuspecting victims that didn’t consent to it in any way with heroine, then if you criticize them, they say ”if you’re opposed to me injecting unsuspecting victims with heroin, you have to quit the heroin yourself first!” – No I don’t, that simply doesn’t follow, just like it doesn’t follow that I have to quit the life addiction myself in order for it to be true that life addiction comes with many great harms.

• But everything we do in life carries certain risks of damage, that doesn’t mean we should avoid doing it altogether. When you get into the car or sun, you risk getting into an accident or skin cancer, but we still do it, we just take certain precautions like putting on the seatbelt and sun creme.

Producing a child is completely different from all these scenarios because in that case, there is no downside to not producing it for the non-existent child that could justify this lack of absolute risk aversion.

In most cases, we think of 100% risk aversion as absurd because it results in the very thing that it is trying to prevent – suffering. When you avoid everything, like driving a car for instance, you’re suffering from not being able to drive anymore, a great loss for you, so you suffer a loss even though you avoided driving altogether.

The child’s soul on the other hand can never suffer from not having its consciousness activated, it is not writhing in pain in the unborn purgatory, lamenting that the parents are too risk-averse to bring it into existence, there is in fact no unborn purgatory where children are suffering from a desire to be brought into existence, procreators 100% create all suffering of desire.

You might argue that there is a downside of suffering for the person that wants to create the child but shouldn’t, this is however looking at it from the perspective of the perpetrator, that’s like lamenting that you can’t steal someone else’s money and take it to a gambling house.

Notably, it is obviously not even you taking the risk for yourself of course, you are forcing someone else to get into the car or sit in the sun, you are taking a risk for someone else, telling them they ought to think the risk is worth it.

• Suffering can be good as well, there is great value in suffering sometimes, makes you grow stronger and resilient. Injection is painful, but it’s still good, and what about masochists?

Suffering, negative sensation, is always inherently negative, saying suffering can be good is like saying wet can be dry or hot can be cold. Sometimes you are forced to decide between experiencing two sufferings and go for the lesser of two evils, that doesn’t mean negative sensations are good.

You are not getting the injection because the sensation of the injection itself is a good, you’re taking the injection only to avoid a greater suffering as it grants you immunity to illness, it is not the stab of the needle by itself that constitutes a positive, if you could grant yourself immunity to illness by just snapping your fingers, you would do that instead.

In all these situations, pain is only incorrectly indentified as a good because it helps to prevent a greater pain. Fact is, if you could manage to prevent the same pain in a less painful manner, such as by snapping your fingers, you would choose to do so. Plus, there are tons of pains in life that are not instrumental to avoiding a greater pain.

Even if you are an extreme masochist ramming a needle in your urethra, you are arguably still avoiding a suffering. You are suffering from a strong sexual impulse to ram a needle into your urethra, sexual frustration, tension, stress. To mitigate the frustration, tension, stress, you have to ram said needle into your urethra and accept this in this case lesser suffering to mitigate the greater suffering from the strong sexual impulse to ram it into your urethra, that still doesn’t prove negative sensation to somehow simultaneously be positive.

Of course, there is also only need to endure suffering to avoid greater suffering once you create the victim and throw the child into a state of suffering/deprivation by initiating its consciousness in the first place, the suffering caused by procreation is not a form of suffering that is instrumental to avoidance of greater long term suffering.

The non-existent child right now doesn’t need to go through any injections to avoid the greater bad of suffering from various illnesses, it can’t become ill as it doesn’t exist, so the creation of the problem in the first place still remains unjustified, there is no unborn purgatory from which children need to be rescued to avoid a worse suffering.

The injection might be necessary once the proneness to illness exists, but the natalist in question has still not explained coherently why the proneness to illness has to exist in the first place, so the child would still be perfectly rational for blaming the parents for creating the possibility for them to get sick.

In the case of reproduction, you don’t have to cause suffering to the child to prevent it from experiencing greater suffering, it’s not one of these scenarios, you create suffering and proneness to greater suffering.

• But what if we just make a utopia then where everything is good, you could have a constant orgasm and there would be no more suffering.

It would still just be a bandaid rather than a cure, pleasure and suffering exist compared to each other. If you have more pleasure of satiation, you have less suffering of hunger, and if you have more suffering of hunger, you have less pleasure of satiation. So if there are varying degrees of pleasuredness in the utopia scenario, it’s not a scenario of true perfection, you’re still always trying to arrive at a greater state of pleasure/evade the punishment of becoming bored with the last one.

The concept of goods in existence without suffering is contradictory, it’s like saying you have an extinguished fire without there having been a fire first, or a cured infection without there having been an infection first, a desire has to be able to be unfulfilled for it to be able to be fulfilled, so if there’s the good (fulfilled desire), then there’s the threat of the bad (unfulfilled desire), you still need to give these organisms unfulfilled desires to fulfill, suffering to alleviate, where else is their relief supposed to come from?

If I’m not in any way hungry for it, the perfect meal won’t be the perfect meal anymore. If I’m not in any way horny for it, the perfect pussy won’t be the perfect pussy anymore. So we still have to create suffering to then later on constantly keep relieving, which isn’t as good as zero suffering, and the pleasure remains disposable in the sense that the non-existers still won’t feel deprived of it.

But let’s suppose that we had a utopia in the sense that all of our desires could be fulfilled, the endless orgasm utopia where we could alleviate our deprivations just in time before it gets out of hand and mutates into long-lasting periods of unalleviated suffering.

Even if future technology granted us the perfect fire extinguishing means, whatever that would look like, it wouldn’t be a reason to just randomly set a forest on fire, it would be worse without the perfect fire extinguishing means in place, but no fire would still be less bad than a perfectly extinguished one.

Even if we discovered the perfect, immediate cure for AIDS, I still wouldn’t inject myself with AIDS blood just to then thereafter give myself the cure for AIDS again.

And in the same way, it would only be rational to ultimately view our desire. It’s good to fulfill it in the sense that you avoid an otherwise unfulfilled desire, suffering, and pleasure, relief is what you obtain when you do that, but still wouldn’t crave if you didn’t exist.

Zero desire > fulfilled desire > unfulfilled desire.

No AIDS > cured AIDS > uncured AIDS.

That’s the point, perfectly solved problem > unsolved problem, but no problem > solved problem, you can’t get any better than no problem, zero suffering is the least bad.

If the goal is to not have a broken vase, the best step to take is to abstain from throwing it onto the floor in the first place instead of throwing it onto the floor and then perfectly repairing it again, it’s better than imperfectly repairing it, but it doesn’t get any better than not breaking it to begin with.

Important to point out is also that even if we presuppose that it is possible to have a solved problem without a problem, or that the existence of perfect problem solving means would obligate us to or justify the creation of problems, it would certainly not be a justification for causing suffering by reproduction right now, it would be like setting a forest on fire before the waterhose is even invented, just because you hope that the water hose might be invented one day, or injecting someone with the AIDS blood just because you hope for an AIDS cure in the distant future.

• ”If we stopped breeding, we’d go extinct.”

That’s like saying if we stopped slavery, slave owners would go out of business.

You haven’t justified slavery yet, so the fact alone that slave owners would lose their jobs if we stopped slavery is not an argument for the continuation of slavery.

You’re just making an assumption that slavery must be great by saying that if it were to end, it wouldn’t be here anymore, which is wrong.

It’s entirely begging the question – ”if we stop the creation of sentient life, then there won’t be any more sentient life, which is why stopping the production of more sentient life is bad”, this is a bad argument similar to saying ”stopping slavery is bad, because then there won’t be any more slavery, and that is why stopping slavery is bad”.

Also, of course, every little need, want, desire anyone could possibly have, including the need to see life flourish is a problem that has been caused by sentient life existing. If sentient life no longer existed, we would no longer have the problem of desiring for it to exist. There’s no problem that can’t be solved by non-existence, including your impulse to see existence continue.