Natalist/pro-lifer ad hominem attacks.

Something that is particularly idiotic is when natalists, pro-lifers, life apologists try to defeat antinatalists in an argument by presupposing that the only reason why one becomes an antinatalist in the first place is because their own life sucks.

You point out that by creating sentient life, you are creating need/want/desire, life is fundamentally so that one must obtain relief or one will be subjected to suffering. Eat or hunger, drink or thirst, breathe or suffocate, sleep or fatigue/other health consequences.

In short, fulfill need/want/desire or be subjected to harm. Prior to procreating, there is no guarantee that relief from suffering will be obtained, you can create needs/wants/desires that go unfulfilled and torment the victim continuously – which means the act of procreating is an act of recklessness and irresponsibility similar to gambling with another person’s money, drunk driving, surprise anal sex, putting drugs in someone’s drink and risking them having a bad trip.

But even if the victim of procreation somehow managed to fulfill all needs/wants/desires just in time, they always manage to stave off increasing bouts of suffering just in time (and I think this is a minority of lucky outliers), they still wouldn’t miss that fulfillment if they were never born in the first place, and this is also an additional important point.

Person A has great life, person B has horrible shit life (by procreating we risk either), person A would not miss great life if they never existed in the first place, so I don’t think person B is justified, because there is no problem/emergency in pleasure just not existing, poor person A not getting their pleasure fix by never being born is as big of a problem as a tree or a rock not experiencing an orgasm. A tree or a rock don’t miss an orgasm, there is no need/want/desire for it, so who cares.

So once in a while the natalist then responds with some imbecilic character attack like:

”But you only think that way because you have a shitty life yourself, your life sucks and that’s why you’re an antinatalist, so your opinion is not to be taken seriously.”

This is extremely absurd, because the whole point is that it’s reckless and irresponsible and harmful to procreate because it may result in someone having a very shitty life, so this is like saying:

”But you only think that gambling with someone else’s money is wrong because when I took your money and gambled with it, I lost it all, the people for which I won are all happy, so your opinion on gambling with someone else’s money is not to be taken seriously, you’re just a loser.”

”But you only think that drunk driving is wrong because you got hit by a drunk driver, so I don’t care about your opinion on drunk driving, I only want to hear from people that never got hit by a drunk driver.”

”But you only think that rape is a problem at all because you’re a dumb rape victim yourself, I only listen to views on rape by people who weren’t raped.”

You were victimized by the irresponsible gamble that creating a conscious lifeform involves, so therefore your views are to be immediately dismissed by the life apologist cult, no right to object.

Another one that pops up sometimes is this whole incel accusation.

Incel=involuntary celibate, so someone that can’t get laid is what it meant originally essentially, at this point it’s just kind of become a buzzword that dumb bitches use whenever they want to slander and censor someone, paint someone as a sexist.

And again, my response is similar, why would someone being an incel (by original definition) be an automatic disqualification for being taken seriously? This is insane, an incel is obviously a tormented victim of reckless reproduction, they were injected with romantic and sexual desires and suffer as a result of not being able to meet them.

Evolution is an asshole and made it so that male animals have to shoot their jizz or they may experience excruciating suffering/despondency, because evolution favors what results in survival, and that results in survival, coupled with intelligence low enough to not understand what contraception is.

Now the incel supposedly says ”hey life apologist cunt, stop injecting everyone with desire poison, I’m suffering because of you” and is dismissed by the life apologist cult with ”but you’re only mad about life because our people gave you a shit life”. Well no shit you retarded idiot, that’s the whole point.

I throw my TV out of the window, you get hit by it, you’re mad, but you’re only mad about people throwing TVs out of windows because you got hit by one, so fuck off.

That’s the whole point – procreation carries the risk of creating a chronic harm/suffering.

The sadistic breeder.

Why do humans reproduce? In general I think they are just naive/delusional and not seeing how reproduction is a harmful activity.

When you don’t exist, you don’t need constant relief from suffering, there is no addiction. Creating sentient life means you make it so that relief must constantly be obtained, because otherwise they’ll suffer, now we have an addiction problem.

You must eat or you get hungry.

You must drink or you get thirsty.

You must breathe or you suffocate.

You must fulfill your needs/wants/desires or you are unfulfilled, face suffering. You fulfill a need/want/desire, and then either a new one pops up, like appetite after hunger, or the old one, hunger, simply comes back in time – this way you’re stuck your entire life.

It is fair to say that before procreating, the procreator has no guarantee that relief can be obtained, it is possible in life to face needs/wants/desires that cannot be met, you can have the need to move yourself by engaging in sports, but suddenly you get hit by a bus and become a cripple, no longer able to find relief, now you are tormented.

So breeding in anything short of a utopia, creating need (that may not be fulfilled) where there was no need beforehand (because they didn’t exist) I see as an irresponsible act.

In general, I would say that most people don’t think about it to that degree, they are simply deluded optimists and think everything will turn out alright, but I would argue that there is a subtype of breeder who does act out of enjoyment of the child’s suffering.

The sadistic/narcissistic breeder.

What I mean by this is that a child presents a perfect opportunity for someone with the urge to dominate and degrade others to live out their fantasy under the guise of doing good in a socially acceptable manner.

Young children due to their lack of intelligence and maturity may sometimes want to do things that are harmful to them, like eating crayon or refusing to get vaccinated.

The sadistic breeders use this as a great pretense to make the child feel like shit.

”Ha, see, here I videotaped that little faggot when I told him he can’t eat any more crayon! He had a nervous mental breakdown! Haha, what an idiot!”

Eating crayon might give the child a stomach ache, so of course, they feel completely justified in how they acted, they must protect the child, even if it causes the child extreme distress…but if they were honest with themselves, they’d admit that the main reason why they do it is simply because they get enjoyment out of causing someone pain.

And that suffering is bad, I can acknowledge that regardless of whether or not it was necessary in that moment to stop the child from doing something or forcing them to do something.

The child may need you to protect them from certain dangers, and in protecting them from these dangers, you may cause them extreme emotional distress because they don’t understand why that danger is a danger, but the child wouldn’t have needed any of this if you simply never brought them into existence in the first place, so you deliberately created someone who you know won’t understand why you’re acting this way towards them, because you get enjoyment from causing them distress and you can mask it as just doing the right thing.

It would be somewhat like I give you a pill that makes you retarded, and then no longer understand why you need to stop eating crayon or why you need to get vaccinated, and I do this so that I can get enjoyment out of playing the mature adult hero who stops you from eating crayon and forcing you to get vaccinated, causing you great distress.

Look what a hero I am, but in reality I of course only give you that pill to fuel my sadism and domination fantasies, so I can have someone to control and exert power over.

Your state of retardation that you need rescuing from would not have existed if I didn’t give you the pill, and the state of the child’s retardation that they need rescuing from would have not existed either if the breeder didn’t create them in the first place.

While definitely not all breeders act based on this urge, I’m sure some do because the child simply presents the perfect opportunity to live out that need to dominate and subjugate others in the name of doing good ”I’m just toughening them up for later in life!” (but why do they need to be toughened up for later in life – they only need that because you forced them to be alive in the first place).

This type of breeder likely also enjoys guilt-tripping the child, the typical ”I took care of you so you have to be grateful and do whatever I want!” – which is idiotic of course, because they are at fault for having created every need/want/desire that the child has.

You gave the child food and shelter – after creating the child’s need for food and shelter by creating the child instead of simply aborting it, and now you expect the child to be obligated to you for having caused them harm and having tried to fix it (most likely incompletely at best).

This is like I pay back my debt and then expect the bank to pay me back because I paid off the debt I created, or expecting a girl to have sex with me because I rescued her from her burning house that I deliberately set on fire so I can come to the rescue and play the hero.

Not all breeders are this malicious, but some use the child as a tool to live out their fantasies of control and domination with the pretense of it being necessary and for the child’s benefit.

Benatar’s asymmetry – some thought experiments.

Benatar’s asymmetry states that when one exists:

The presence of pain is bad.

The presence of pleasure is good.

Whereas when one does not exist:

The absence of pain is good.

The absence of pleasure is not bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have two planets, planet A and planet B.

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

We have two buttons, button A and button B.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another important and strong point to establish the asymmetry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let’s go back to the rapist metaphor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.