”Life’s not fair.”

Then why is it justified to produce it? Shouldn’t we ban unfair deals that harm others? Aren’t you just saying you are a supporter of unfairness then, trying to shift the blame to life? Why are you all in support of it or don’t mind it? Life does not just happen, it is created by humans with deliberation.

Especially when procreators tell this to their children whenever the child is frustrated about something it is particularly absurd and irritating.

”Life’s not fair” – you produced said life, so all you’re telling the child in response to their pain is ”I’m unfair”.

”I’m suffering from x circumstance”

”I know, circumstance x is not fair…and I created circumstance x”

If life is so unfair, why make it?

Prevention of future suffering and pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A detailed refutation of common pro-natalist arguments.

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.

On life and reproduction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but

zero suffering > perfectly alleviated suffering.

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

On abortion.

What does it mean to create life?

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

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

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

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

So on and so forth.

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

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

Benatar’s asymmetry:

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

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

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

Sentience is the only important characteristic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fetus could become sentient in the future.

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

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

The effect is the same – no suffering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if the fetus is already sentient though?

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

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

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

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

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

The general utility of the right to bodily autonomy.

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

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

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

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

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

harm the more sentient
harm the less sentient

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE:

What if the fetus is already sentient?

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

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

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

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