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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let’s go back to the rapist metaphor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can it be good to create desire?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antinatalism and the question of a hypothetical utopia.

An occasional objection to antinatalism/the idea that it is better never to be brought into existence is the idea of transhumanism and a future utopia in which things are perfect or just better than they are now.

”What if we just made the world a perfect place for everyone, and then there’d be no more suffering?”

The first flaw to detect in that question is obviously that the pleasure is still a relief of suffering, they exist in direct relation to each other. For example, more pleasure of satiation, less suffering of hunger, more suffering of hunger, less pleasure of satiation. If you feel better, you feel less bad. If you feel worse, you feel less good.

So by creating a world of no suffering, you must create a world with no sentient life in it, thus no pleasure either.

To use a metaphor, it’d be like saying what if we just alleviated the pain of the stabwound by putting a bandaid on it, but the stabwound didn’t actually exist?

That makes no sense, you don’t have pleasure, relief of suffering, without suffering, just like you don’t have extinguished burning house without burning house, or cured infection without infection. If the infection is cured, that indicates that the infection must have existed beforehand. If fulfilled desire exists, that indicates that unfulfilled desire must have existed beforehand to some degree.

Where would that pleasure come from if there’s no pain to relieve? A utopia in the strictest sense of perfection involding ”no suffering at all” seems impossible.

So still, life involves suffering that must be fixed, you’re still creating the problem and then perfectly alleviating it instead of not creating it to begin with.

It’s not that I dismiss the utopia hypothetical because it is unrealistic, dismissing hypotheticals based on being unrealistic is irrational, I dismiss it based on it being contradictory, if you fulfill a desire then it had to be unfulfilled beforehand, just like if you told me you extinguished a forest fire, the unextinguished fire also had to exist beforehand, I wouldn’t believe someone that they extinguished a fire they just told me doesn’t exist.

Let’s assume that utopia instead simply means we could alleviate every need, every pre-existing condition of suffering in due time before it gets too out of hand.

Right now, sentient organisms have needs that are not being fulfilled – they have to go to work, they may get lonely, they rot and expire, they get addicted to substances and suffer the negative side effects.

In the utopia, this wouldn’t be the case.

Let’s say in the utopia, they could fulfill all their needs in time without too much suffering involved, the desire mechanism is never left to fester and rot like it is right now in our current world, e.g. you could be an alcoholic forever and you never suffer any great side effects like there are right now, like liver cirrhosis or throat cancer.

Would it be worth it to create conscious life then?

I still don’t think the perfect problem solving means obligate us to create more problems.

The endless orgasm utopia is an important priority if there is someone that is sexually frustrated, requiring to be endlessly jerked off, if you just don’t create the organism with a need for the endless orgasm utopia, the endless orgasm utopia loses its extrinsic value to solving that problem of someone being frustrated sexually.

So the same fundamental question remains, why does suffering need to exist at all?

Why do we need to instill sexual frustration, deprivation, tension into an organism so that it can be endlessly jerked off afterwards? Why do you need to create the problem that made you become an alcoholic in the first place? It’s still a deficit/harm, you’re in need…you just always manage to resolve it in time before it gets too bad.

You may say because the procreators also suffer a desire to create more children, but even then, just going extinct once would solve all suffering, whereas by putting things in the utopia, you still didn’t solve the problem, you just created the best possible bandaid for the wounds of desire and deprivation, which is better but not optimal, and it will take a while until any such thing will exist if it will ever exist at all, which will mean a lot more less benign suffering until then.

The procreators also experience deprivation, but what would truly solve the problem of deprivation is stopping the creation of more pain machines, not creating more and more and trying to manufacture more perfect bandaids.

They have an irrational perception that necessity – need, want, desire must exist, when the only thing that in reality needs anything is us, there would be nothing horrible about us simply no longer existing. They assume conscious life must be, so that then we can solve problems (need, want, desire) that the creation of that life caused in the first place.

Just because the cure for AIDS exists, I would not necessarily intentionally try to give myself AIDS in order to get rid of it again afterwards, so why would you insist on creating unfulfilled desires, instilling deprivation into a perfectly non-conscious, non-bothered organism, just because the perfect means to fulfill those desires, alleviate that suffering exist?

You can use many metaphors to demonstrate the absurdity of creating desire for the good of fulfilling it, creating damage for the good of fixing it again afterwards, for example:

Setting a house on fire for the good of extinguishing it again.
Throwing the child into the ocean for the good of saving it from drowning.
Infecting someone with AIDS for the good of giving them AIDS treatment.
Breaking someone’s leg for the good of giving them painkillers.
Stabbing someone in the chest for the good of pulling the knife out again.
Shitting on someone’s floor for the good of cleaning it off again.

In the utopian scenario, we just solve the problem perfectly after creating it, but there’s still a problem of being in need.

So:

perfectly alleviated suffering in endless orgasm utopia > unalleviated suffering left to fester and rot in our current world.

But:

zero suffering > perfectly alleviated suffering in utopia.

The perfect solution to a problem is still to not create it to begin with.

So to use the same metaphors again, we could say:

No burning house > perfectly extinguished house > unextinguished house.
No drowning child > perfectly rescued child > drowned child.
No AIDS > perfectly cured AIDS > uncured AIDS.
No broken leg > perfectly numbed broken leg > no painkiller.
No stabwound > perfect bandaid > untreated stabwound.
No shit on floor > perfectly wiped off shit > shit on floor.

It is good to solve a problem perfectly, but it doesn’t get any less bad than to not have any problem in the first place.

Another problem to point out, despite also other practical factors like humans using future technology to do bad things rather than good things, is also that even if we accept that such a utopia where everyone’s needs can be satisfied in time before they mutate into too much suffering will definitely exist in the future, is that right now, it does not exist, so the future utopia still doesn’t justify causing suffering by reproduction right now where you have no means to alleviate it.

That’s like someone setting your house on fire before the waterhose was invented, just because in the future the waterhose might be invented, or injecting someone with AIDS blood before the cure for AIDS exists, just because in the future the cure for AIDS might exist, how is it a good idea to cause a problem now just because in the future there might be a solution to it? It’s not.

It doesn’t help the victims of reproduction right now, and there’s simply no necessity for a utopia in the future if you don’t produce more victims that will desire to live in the utopia, if you don’t create the necessity for it.

So it’s kind of as if we could get kill the AIDS virus, get rid of it forever right now by pressing a button (sentient life going extinct), but you insist on creating more AIDS (desires) so that then we can find the perfect pill to cure individual AIDS infections in the future (perfectly fulfilling desire instead of putting an end to desire), then we can always infect ourselves with AIDS and get rid of it immediately afterwards by taking the anti-AIDS pill, instead of just pressing the button to kill the AIDS virus forever right now.

It doesn’t matter if we drown a bunch of children here and there by throwing children into the ocean for the good of trying to save them from drowning afterwards, because in the future, we’re going to have perfect fishing nets that will be able to save every child we throw into the ocean from drowning – if we were to keep throwing children into the ocean for the sake of saving them from drowning, instead of just not insisting on throwing children into the ocean in the first place.

Solved problems don’t exist if they have not at some point been unsolved problems, a perfectly solved problem is good, it prevents an unsolved problem, but not as effectively as never creating that problem to begin with.