Lack of consent and procreation.

You could argue that by procreating, you’re always harming someone, it’s impossible to procreate without breaking the do-no-harm principle/idea, you put someone into a state of need/want/desire.

Once you are here, as a conscious organism, you’ll be constantly motivated by suffering. You must eat or you get hungry. You must drink or you get thirsty. You must shit or you constipate. You must breathe or you suffocate. You must socialize or you get lonely.

Whatever example you want to use, you must chase pleasure/relief, or you will continue to suffer. If you don’t get the pleasure/relief, then you will suffer more, similar to how if it’s not brighter, then it is darker, or if it is not drier, then it is wetter. Less pleasure/relief, more suffering.

So procreating equals irresponsibly creating an addiction with no guarantee of fulfillment.

There is also a secondary argument against procreation, which is that you cannot get consent from an unborn child to create it.

When is it important to ask for consent?

I think the best answer is whenever you are exposing someone to some kind of risk of future harm, unless of course you are by doing so preventing a greater harm, easy example: shooting Hitler although he didn’t explicitly consent to it.

It is important for me to ask for consent, whenever I have doubts about what I’m going to do for someone else. So for example, if I want to steal your money and go to a gambling house, the only condition under which this could be made acceptable again is if I can 100% guarantee that I’m going to win the gamble or somehow I’m preventing more harm by stealing your money and taking it to the gambling house.

If I already knew you liked money, I can win the billion dollars, you’re not going to object to the end result, then I may proceed without asking you first, I already know the end result is going to be a win.

If I want to give someone surprise anal sex, the condition under which this could be made acceptable is if I can 100% guarantee they’re going to be into it later on. If I definitely knew they would appreciate it, they’re not going to object to the end result – then I may proceed without asking them first, but if there is any shadow of a doubt, I need to ask if it is being consented to first, I must not assume implicit consent without great evidence.

So I wouldn’t say that asking for consent is in itself always important as some kind of sacred rule, ultimately it is still the harm/suffering that matters,but here we have the problem procreation.

When procreators are about to procreate, it is fair to say that they cannot 100% guarantee a win.

The child could get a disease.
The child could be lonely.
The child could become addicted to drugs.
The child could randomly get struck by lightning or hit by a bus, be crippled for life.
The child could die in some unpleasant way one day.
The child could at all be dissatisfied, like I already pointed out at the beginning.

So to procreation, there is risk, that is undeniable, and on top of that, you also couldn’t argue that we’d be worse off if we stopped procreation, I don’t see how greater harm would befall anyone unless you could somehow argue that there’s some kind of unborn purgatory where people are suffering from not existing.

So we need to ask the unborn child for consent first. How do we do that? The answer is, we cannot do that, so what do we do when there is risk of colossal failure and no ability to get consent? We do not proceed, I cannot break into a random girl’s house while she’s asleep and stick my dick in her ass in hopes that she’ll appreciate the surprise anal sex afterwards.

Here reckless procreators frequently have a different idea all of the sudden:

”I can’t ask for consent, so I don’t need to! How am I supposed to get consent from an unborn child you fucking idiot???”.

So that means they don’t get it, the point isn’t that there is an unborn antechamber where you could have contacted the child and asked for consent, the point is that explicitly stated consent becomes an important priority whenever we are exposing someone to a colossal risk of harm to prevent no greater harm, this applies in the case of procreation, so procreation cannot be justified unless you could ask for consent.

When you procreate, you:

Create harm/suffering, i.e someone will now have basic needs that constantly have to be fulfilled, it makes them suffer whereas if we didn’t create someones anymore, there would be no harm/suffering.
Risk that they won’t be able to fulfill their needs, thus suffer even more intensely.
Don’t have a guarantee that they will be alright with the ticket they pull (consent).

Consent isn’t the only factor here, but I could argue that you not even knowing whether or not the person is going to like their circumstances is even worse, factor 3 here just makes it even worse in a sense.

Again, we can also find scenarios where it is possible to ask for consent, but I would think you wouldn’t need to, if you know you can double my life savings in a gamble, you no longer need to ask me for consent because you’re sure about the end result being a win so I’m going to be alright with it, if I know you always want a dick up your ass, I don’t need to ask anymore, I know you’ll be alright with it.

Similarly, we can give examples of everything that will have a negative effect on a child once it’s born, where we cannot adequately obtain consent beforehand either, because the child hasn’t been born yet.

For example, if I’m about to bring a child that’ll be severely disabled and suffer chronic pain every single day into existence, I also cannot ask the child for consent to be born before it is born, so does that make it alright to not abort that child just because I could have not gotten the consent to put it into a condition of chronic excruciating pain?

What if I want to give a fetus cancer?

Let’s say that’s just my fetish, I inject cancer into fetuses and that child will grow up to deal with cancer, I jerk off to that kid dying of cancer. I cannot ask the unborn child for consent to do so, so does that make it alright to proceed and give the child cancer, even though I don’t know whether or not the child will be fine with that later on?

If we go with the standard of reckless procreators in this scenario, i.e ”I don’t need consent if I’m unable to get it” – then it would be perfectly acceptable to birth a child that’ll do nothing but be severely disabled and in chronic pain every day, by this standard, it would be perfectly acceptable to fulfill my fetish of injecting cancer into fetuses, creating cancer cripple kids.

By this standard, we could justify giving a fetus any sort of disease that we want.

Chronic pain, AIDS, cancer, deformities, etc, doesn’t matter. If I could deliberately make a deformed, chronically pained child with cancer, would that be justifiable simply because I was unable to ask the fetus for consent beforehand?

I couldn’t have possibly asked them whether or not they will be fine with this later on, so I did it anyway, because I don’t need to ask for consent if I am unable to do so, that is the standard natalists are putting on the table.

But if they don’t like it, they can just kill themselves! So they have a choice, take it or leave it!

Often the last retort when you point out that creating a child carries a risk of the child being dissatisfied with life. And it’s true, if the child doesn’t like life, they can still kill themselves later on, just like in any other given scenario where I failed to ask for consent though.

If you really don’t like that I lost all your money in a gamble, you can still commit suicide. If you really don’t like that I broke into your home at night to give you surprise anal sex in your sleep, you can still commit suicide. Don’t like that I drunk drove over your legs? Kill yourself faggot, I’ll never stop selfishly taking risks at someone else’s expense.

When someone wants to kill themselves, it’s already too late, you already harmed them, so excusing the imposition based on the fact that the victim can still commit suicide later on isn’t an argument.

Not to mention, many procreating life supporters do not truly support the right to die for everyone including children, although it would, unlike their selfish behavior, not carry risk of future harm to the child, if you’re put to sleep you’re never going to regret it later on after all, you’re dead.

But they don’t like that, they want to force any child that doesn’t agree with life being a gift to pretend that life is a gift, otherwise they will deny the reproduced victims their freedom required to exit from life, it’s a circularly justified conclusion – the person is assumed to be mentally ill because they want to end their life, and it is assumed that they want to end their life because they are mentally ill, it’s circular logic.

So it’s not like these imposers even give their victim the freedom to exit, this is more like I break into this girl’s home and give her surprise anal sex, and if she doesn’t like it, she technically has the right to commit suicide.

Intelligence, maturity, consent.

Consent at its core implies agreement and wanting, for your desire to be in accordance with something or not, I offer to give you a cake, you consent, agree, want it, or you don’t consent, you disagree, you don’t want the cake. A simple enough concept.

You cannot consent to get raped or be a slave, that would be what we call an oxymoron, because it innately implies unwanted sex, what might be meant by ”wanting to get raped” is that you want someone to have sex with you who doesn’t care whether or not you want to have sex with them, but ultimately you still wanted the sex, so it wasn’t truly non-consensual.

A common argument against having sex with children/minors, or also mentally handicapped humans of similar intelligence or non-human animals (beastiality) is that they cannot consent, because they are unintelligent and immature.

Intelligence and maturity of course have nothing inherently to do with consent, you can consent to, agree to, want to do things even if you are stupid and immature. A child can disagree to eat broccoli, a child can agree to eat ice cream instead. A dog can disagree to go for a walk outside, a dog can agree to take a shit in the garden instead. Every conscious organism can agree to, want things, or disagree to, and not want certain things.

The argument to my understanding is really about whether or not we should allow children, the mentally handicapped and other animals to consent to certain things, because they may lack the intellect and maturity to make decisions in their best interest and appreciate future ramifications and consequences of their actions, they may be vulnerable to certain harms and risks.

The problem here is the idea that sex is innately dangerous, risky, harmful, so parents don’t want to allow children to agree to sex, whereas in reality, it is not inherently dangerous, risky, harmful, so there would be no reason to not let children agree to it. I would argue:

P1: Intelligence and maturity are required when the act has a clear risk of future harm.
P2: Sex does not inherently contain a clear risk of future harm.
C: Not all sex inherently requires intelligence and maturity.

Whether or not you need the ability to understand future consequences is entirely dependent on the future consequences of the act.

Here we can use differing examples to make this point in both sexual and non-sexual contexts. Let’s say a child isn’t able to understand traffic rules yet, but this child wants to ride a bicycle. Can this child consent to ride a bicycle?

Depends on the environment and consequences would be the answer. On the freeway, no, the child shouldn’t be riding the bicycle, but in a safe and harmless environment with no traffic going on inside it, it’d be perfectly fine.

We can allow the child to ride the bicycle in a safe environment, but we shouldn’t allow it on the freeway. Now let’s use a sexual example, let’s say a child is sexually curious, found out about the existence of sexual pleasure and wants to experiment with it, but is too immature to understand sex education and take it seriously. Can we allow this child to consent?

Again, depends entirely on environment and consequences.

Would it be a good idea to let such a child go to have unprotected anal sex with 100 strangers in a row despite not even knowing what an STD is?

No, of course not, we can entirely agree with the anti-pedo folks here that that would be a bad idea. But would it be bad to let such a child hump the leg of a pedophile they know and trust? No, because that would be a harmless scenario, there’s no risk to that that the child may fail to appreciate due to their childishness, so it’d be perfectly fine to allow that.

Similarly, we can use such examples in the context of disabled people.

Can a severely intellectually handicapped person that wants to play with blue marbles but has a tendency to swallow them (and fail to comprehend that this is unhealthy) consent to play with blue marbles?

Depends on the environment and consequences. Alone in their room with no one at home? Probably a bad idea, probably shouldn’t be happening. But under the supervision of someone who makes sure once in a while that they don’t swallow the blue marbles? Fine, no problem, they can consent.

Now let’s use a sexual example again.

Let’s say there’s an adult woman on the mental level of a 5 year old child that doesn’t understand sex education, but it is clear that she wants to someone to stick his dick in her pussy. Should we allow her to have sex? Again, depends on the environment and consequences.

Should we sell her out on the streets to have an unprotected threesome right away? No, bad idea. But let’s say she finds a partner, and he’s willing to stick it in her, and he takes care of the contraception process. Then why not? No problem, she is consenting to receiving the sexual experience, and the risks she doesn’t comprehend are no longer present, there’s no need to comprehend them.

You only need intelligence and maturity to understand potential negative future consequences of your actions, if those potential negative future consequences actually even exist.

We don’t forbid children to eat broccoli, and that is because there is no great foreseeable future consequence to eating broccoli that this child may feel bad about later on, so anyone who would screech that children can never consent to eat broccoli and you should be put in prison for giving a child broccoli would sound insane, but there is an age restriction for alcohol, and the idea there is that while a child may agree to drink a bottle of whiskey, they may not appreciate the risk of harm that it later on imposes on them, so they didn’t really agree to all aspects of it.

Some also call it a difference between simplistic and informed consent.

So simplistic consent would just be the ”I want something” statement/indication which a child, mentally handicapped person or even non-human animal can do, informed consent refers more to also understanding the consequences and ramifications of wanting and agreeing to things.

Then the argument would be as follows:

P1: Clear risk of harm requires informed consent.
P2: Sex does not necessarily have a clear risk of harm.
C: Therefore, sex does not necessarily require informed, but only simplistic consent.

So what I’m arguing is mostly to take away from this is that if you are interacting with someone who is less intelligent, less mature, has impaired foresight – there’s extra responsibility on you to make sure that the individual is not harmed by anything you do, because they may not be able to take care of that by themselves, but that doesn’t mean they are fundamentally incapable of consent. In that sense you could even argue that it’s sometimes even better if a young girl who is still somewhat irresponsible would have sex with an older man rather than someone her age, on her maturity level, who would equally be too irresponsible to use a condom, since that is often a concern parents have.

The adult has to make sure the child that doesn’t understand traffic rules isn’t riding the bicycle on the freeway, the caretaker has to make sure the retarded person doesn’t swallow the blue marbles, and similarly a pedophile would have to make sure they are not subjecting the child to some undesirable consequence of a given sex act. Adults already do this with children in other aspects of life, so I don’t see why the same reasoning shouldn’t consistently be applied to sexuality.

This idea that children can never consent to sex is based on the assumption that sex is automatically, inherently and always dangerous/harmful, so no one feels comfortable with allowing less intellectually equipped individuals, like young children, the severely disabled or non-human animals have sex – this becomes apparent when they then like to bring up dangerous scenarios where children supposedly consented to do certain things but have to be stopped by adults because they were endangering themselves, they use these examples to invalidate the idea that we should let children consent to anything, or take their consent seriously.

”So what if a child consented to run across the streets without looking left and right???”

If this is happening in a dangerous environment where the implication is that the child would definitely get hit by a car, then obviously, the child did not actually consent to run across the street at all, because the act of running across the street encompasses getting hit by a car, so obviously if the act ”crossing the street” encompasses ”getting run over by a car”, and the child in question does not want to get hit by a car, then the child did not consent to run across the street.

The question to these pedophobes here should really be – what is the harm in sex that the child always fails to see (due to their childishness)?

They never want to allow a child/minor to agree to sex, even if we eliminate all potential harmful factors. It’s true that we don’t always just allow children to do whatever they think they want, but that is because there’s usually some kind of danger to it that the child/minor may fail to see.

Why should I think that sex is so inherently dangerous that a child should never be allowed to have it? Why should one believe that?

Let’s say the child found out about sexual pleasure on their own by humping their pillow, they were not manipulated, blackmailed or forced to hump the pedophile’s leg. The pedophile didn’t do anything to the child that the child did not want, like penetration, the child cannot get an STD or get pregnant, no such risky sex act was performed.

Now where’s the risk of harm that requires the child to be a rocket scientist first in order to be able to circumvent it?

In these examples that they give to discredit the idea of a child consenting, they always smuggle in some kind of later on harmful consequence that will befall the child, like the child running across the street and then getting hit by a car, or the child refusing to get vaccinated and then dying of small pox – so I would agree with them that if there is such a harm to an activity that the child wants to do or not do, the child shouldn’t be allowed to do it.

But what is the harm to sex, why should I assume sex is per se harmful? Why would a child agreeing to sexual pleasure necessarily result in harm to the child? There is nothing inherently about sex that makes it so that whenever you have it under 16, 17, 18 (or whatever is considered to be the particular holy age), it would automatically result in pain and trauma, there are acts I’ve listed like voluntary leg humping that don’t carry any significant risk of harm, so it’d be non-sensical to suggest that one needs to have high intelligence or maturity first before they consent to it.

Possible pedophobe answers might be:

”The child could regret having sex later on!”

That is true of every activity a child, minor or even adult could possibly engage in, including riding a bicycle or eating ice cream, so we cannot allow the child to do anything by that standard, they could always regret it later on. I see no reason to think sex what be particularly regrettable unless society started to make a big deal out of it.

”There are still social consequences that the child might not be equipped to deal with yet!”

True, there are certain social consequences to sex between the child and the pedophile that the child might not be equipped to deal with, like being hysterically screeched at by everyone around them how they got raped, forced to have sex, when they really were not forced at all, which confuses the child, plus they witness their partner being ostracized and arrested – a lot of unnecessary drama.

Those consequences definitely exist, but society is responsible for creating them in the first place, they are not innate to the sexual encounter, so if they appeal to those self-created consequences, they are just committing an argumetum ad baculum fallacy – it’d be like saying children can never consent to buy ice cream, it’s harmful, because we live in a society where we burn people alive in front of children for selling ice cream to them, and children aren’t mature enough to deal with that possible traumatic consequence yet. Don’t wear a red hat, it’s harmful, because if you wear one, I’ll cut your head off and set you on fire.

So again, in that case the social environment can be expected to be safer for the less intellectually equipped/less mature individual, why not? Why should they insist on inflicting harmful social consequences after such an act, if the act itself wasn’t harmful?

”I don’t care, the child is still emotionally undeveloped and immature, so the child can NEVER consent, period!”

That is just blind dogmatism at that point. If it’s just per se wrong to have sex with a child just because that child is unintelligent and immature, it’s also wrong to do anything else, e.g. hug children non-sexually or give them ice cream, because the child has the exact same level of IQ and maturity while they’re eating the ice cream as when they’re having sex.

P1: It’s wrong to have sex with children/minors because they don’t have fully developed brains and/or cannot consent.
P2: Children/minors don’t have fully developed brains and/or cannot consent.
C: All social interaction with children/minors is always wrong, not just sex.

If it’s just per se wrong to have sex with a child because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature, then it is just as wrong to give a child ice cream because they are just unintelligent, undeveloped and immature when they eat ice cream. If a child can never consent to sex because they are unintelligent, undeveloped, immature, then a child can likewise never consent to eat ice cream because they are just as unintelligent, undeveloped, immature when they are offered ice cream. It’s logical consistency, if you like apples because they have a round shape, you must like oranges because they have a round shape.

You actually need to specify why intelligence and maturity are prerequisites for all sex acts, not just say ”they are unintellligent and immature”, because their level of intelligence and maturity is exactly the same in all other areas of life, so if that makes sex with them wrong/unethical, then it makes all other interactions with them wrong/unethical, logical consistency 101.

In conclusion, I would say you only need to be intelligent, developed and mature when you want to engage in acts that carry a significant risk of future harm, sex is not necessarily an act that carries a significant risk of future harm, so sex does not require you to be intelligent, developed and mature by default, a child/non-human animal/mentally handicapped person on the IQ level of a dolphin can perfectly consent to sex under many circumstances.

No one would forbid a child to consent to eating broccoli (or go as far as to say they are somehow intrinsically unable to consent), because they recognize there is no harmful consequence to eating broccoli that this child fails to understand due to their childishness.

The reason why pedophobes won’t allow children to consent to sex is because they already falsely believe sex is intrinsically harmful, based on irrational feelings of disgust and repulsion towards pedophiles, leading them to conflate harmful cases of child sex (where coercion and violence were involved) with harmless cases of child sex (where no coercion nor violence were involved), so they reach the false conclusion that it is innately impossible for a child to consent to sex.

The ”most are happy to have been born” argument.

A somewhat common objection to antinatalism/the idea that it is better not to be born is that most people are happy to have been born, and if you surveyed them anywhere, they’d say they’re happy to be alive, so how can one say that it’s good to stop the production of sentient life when most are happy with it?

I think the first and rather fundamental issue is that they would still not have missed being happy if they never came into existence in the first place, so there wouldn’t have been any harm to them in not bringing them here.

I would agree with Benatar’s asymmetry that preventing a bad is always good to do, but preventing a good is not always bad to do, only if the alternative to it is feeling bad, if you’re not hungry, it doesn’t matter if I throw the food in the trash, the absence of pleasure is only an ethical problem if it presents a deprivation for someone who is chasing after said pleasure.

Many other examples you could use to demonstrate that point – if you’re in a burning building, the absence of a fire extinguisher is a problem, if you’re not, then it’s not. If you have cancer, the absence of chemotherapy is a problem, but if you’re not, then it’s not. If suffering is no longer the alternative to the pleasure, its relief, then its absence cannot possibly be a problem either.

I don’t think not giving someone something that they don’t need/want/desire is an issue, and the non-existent don’t need/want/desire anything, because they simply don’t exist.

Of course you are happy that if you feel hunger, you relieve that hunger by eating, but that doesn’t mean that you would have been harmed by never being made into a hungry organism in the first place.

So I still don’t think that the fact alone that they are happy means there is a benefit that justifies all the bad unhappy experiences. It’s like saying a crack addict is happy when they get some new crack to smoke, that doesn’t answer the question of ”was it good for them to become addicted to crack in the first place?”.

People that exist right now are obviously already suffering from severe addictions, so unless they put some deeper thought into it, they can’t really grasp what it would be like if they weren’t here anymore.

”I’m glad to have been born!” (as if something bad would have happened to them if they didn’t) isn’t really much of a rational utterance.

It’s an irrational reaction of them not being able to grasp that their absence could not be a problem. You wouldn’t complain about not having food in the next 5 hours if you knew you weren’t going to be hungry for it, so the way they talk about non-existence actually indicates they think that they would still experience a deprivation of their happiness.

This similarly applies to pro-lifers that argue for the rights of non-sentient fetuses to have a future, obviously the fetus is not sentient right now, so it can’t possibly be concerned with its future either, it doesn’t care whether or not it’s going to be sentient in the future, so you can’t possibly hurt that fetus by aborting it, but they still can’t get over their deeply engrained gut instinct that it somehow does and ask stupid questions like:

”Well what if YOU got aborted, think you’d still be saying this shit???”

And this is the problem and where we get more into the psychology, do most people really grasp that not existing isn’t harmful, or do they imagine it as some kind of second life where they are missing out on all the fun things they like doing? I think it’s questionable.

Of course, if they imagine themselves to otherwise have been trapped and tortured in an unborn purgatory prior to birth, they’re going to irrationally conclude that every single torture they face in life is definitely worth it, i.e if someone who is dying of cancer right now on their death bed thinks that if they didn’t get born, then had their first orgasm at some point, they would’ve really missed out on that first orgasm from the pits of the unborn purgatory, to be eternally tormented, of course they’re going to think that now dying of cancer is definitely worth it for that first orgasm.

They are imagining it as ”I wouldn’t be here” from the perspective of ”I’m here right now, and then I would be really upset that I’m not here! That would make me angry not to exist!”.

It’s like I’m addicted to crystal meth, going through a lot of suffering and watching my face fall apart, and a genie in the bottle or the toothfairy offers me to take away my addiction in about three seconds by waving a magic wand, but I say no, because as an irrational addict, all I’m hearing is ”taking away my meth” instead of ”taking away my addiction for meth”, I’m so owned by the drug that I fail to even possibly imagine that it’s possible for the addiction to not exist.

I think if the life addicts got rid of this irrational perception, they couldn’t think that the first orgasm justifies dying of cancer later on anymore, because they know that they didn’t have any pre-existing need to experience need, no pre-existing want to experience want, no pre-existing desire to experience desire, so it’d be questionable why any of life’s suffering is worth it.

It’s just like they also think they’re still going to be alive and conscious after they’ve died, so they’re irrationally scared of death rather than the dying process, as if afterwards they’ll be a ghost and then look down on all the fun things to do that they’re now missing out on, when in reality they’re just going to be dead, so of course won’t experience any distress in response to no longer being able to eat chocolate cake. They just grasp that the goods will be gone, they fail to grasp that their need/want/desire for the goods will also be gone.

And of course, they will deny that this is the case and state that they know they haven’t been here before they were actually born, or they know they won’t suffer once they’re dead, but rationally comprehending something still doesn’t mean that you can’t falsely intuit there to be a harm in something, as in this case non-existence.

Many people simply seem intuitively terrified of death, we make associations between the painful dying process and death, it’s something that looks scary.

I can rationally comprehend that a little spider is not going to eat me alive, but still irrationally feel otherwise, there are certain deeply engrained intuitions that don’t necessarily make a lot of sense, take for example arachnophobia, the fear of even little spiders even though you know they won’t attack you, fear of non-existence is similarly irrational.

Their worship of life is also perfectly analogizable to a form of stockholm syndrome, that’s how life works, you experience unfulfilled desire, and if you fulfill it, another one pops up, like appetite out of boredom after hunger, or in time the initial desire, hunger, is going to return and you’ll have to eat again. They cannot imagine anything else, it’s all they know, it’s all we can experience.

We get continuously whipped by our needs, wants, desires, and sometimes we fulfill some of those needs, wants, desires, avoid some of that suffering of being whipped. You can observe that children for instance are until a certain age much less used to this mechanism of deprivation, they still feel raped by their desire and scream if they can’t get something they want in the middle of a supermarket, their flesh is still in the process of acclimating to the whip.

This is an uncomfortable state to be in, so at some point they adapt, and then they start being grateful and think life is their friend and has any purpose except to impose need conditions onto them that if not alleviated in time, will lead to even worse harm than before, sometimes the whip is hitting you less intensely, so now you’re happy that you’re getting whipped, because that makes you able to appreciate when the whip is not hitting you as intensely, perhaps even taking some kind of pleasure in the fact that other slaves are getting whipped harder.

The kids in Africa have no food to stave off the suffering of hunger, at least I have food to stave off the suffering of hunger, without ever fully coming to recognize that the existence of the suffering of hunger itself is suboptimal, it’s a deficit to experience hunger at all. If you didn’t exist, you wouldn’t be hungry anymore.

It is a harm to impose unfulfilled desires, plain and simple, you might as well say that when you whip people, some of them are really happy afterwards when you stop whipping them, so that then they can appreciate what it’s like to not get whipped anymore.

Pointing all of this out directly to others makes them uncomfortable, so another important aspect that should be pointed out here is also that if someone comes to these realizations, there’s also always a certain amount of social pressure from others against it. If there’s no unborn purgatory and the absence of me wouldn’t be a problem, then maybe the absence of you also wouldn’t be a problem, this has the potential to make others uncomfortable.

You can see this when someone is suicidal, even if they don’t know that person’s circumstances, their convictions are quite strong that there’s always something wrong with said suicidal person and that life must be worth it, there’s never a good reason to kill yourself, it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem (as if it’s an issue to end a temporary problem permanently?), and if you question any of this, then automatically you must be mentally ill and wrong because you want to end life, and you want to end life because you’re mentally ill and wrong, it’s circularly justified.

So there’s not only illogical reasons that lead many of us to think that life is always worth it no matter what, but once the taboo is questioned, there’s also social pressure from viviocentrist fascists to keep pretending that life is always worth it no matter what.

Optimism-bias is a real thing, you risk being exposed to unpleasant social consequences by revealing your dissatisfaction, but there are many dissatisfied individuals on some kind of prescription, legal or illegal drug to get through the day, every day on planet earth there are at least one or two suicide attempts here and there.

So is just world-bias a real thing, people who consider themselves victims of life creation are unlikely to come out anyway because society is prone to shame anyone who complains about anything, you don’t really hear their opinions because they’d just be told to toughen up anyway.

Not to forget the imposition aspect.

Another aspect to point to and explain is also that using ”most are happy to have been born” as a breeder to defend yourself is also kind of like saying you’re a good gambler, so therefore, it’s justified to risk someone’s welfare by gambling for them, because most people are happy that you gambled for them when you won the game.

It’s a useless game to start with, so that makes it even more absurd, because again, the absence of pleasure is only be a problem if someone is experiencing being deprived of it, there is no one who needs the money.

So a more fitting, better analogy would be you take money to a gambling house where you can only either:

Win back the exact amount of money you put in.
Lose more money than you initially put in.

Absolutely none of your victims have any desire for you to risk their money and then win it back, they are completely apathetic about it you winning money back for them that they already had, and much of the time they don’t even get everything back, only half or a quarter of it, and then you justify all the losses you create by saying that you also ”win” sometimes, you win back the money you put in.

Then in practice, something to point out is also that you’re playing with high risks. If you’re about to gamble with someone else’s money, it’d at least be great to know that you’re going to win the game, or if you’re about to practice surprise anal sex on someone, it’d at least be great to know that they’re going to be into it, this is almost impossible to fully ensure with the life gamble, even if someone might be happy with it afterwards, the list of possible risks isn’t low.

I don’t go around and make someone happy here and there by practicing surprise anal sex on them, it’s generally more important that I don’t traumatize someone who doesn’t want surprise anal sex by sticking my dick in their ass in their sleep.

Some might be happy about it, but wouldn’t have been terribly devastated by me not fucking them in the ass either, some might come to cope with it after the fact and rationalize what happened as not so bad, just like many do the exact same with life in general and rationalize everything that happens to them as not so bad, and some will be completely traumatized about it.

And again, making people happy by creating them is even dumber than doing it by surprise anal sex, at least you can argue that there are some already existent people that would enjoy getting surprise anal sex, and they can suffer from not getting the surprise, but non-existent people do not exist, they don’t have any desires to fulfill.

Not even taking into account any kind of genetic defects, any possible illness or any crime of other organisms the child could fall victim to, the fact that they’ll die one day which will likely not be too pleasant, even if you create a sentient organism with unfulfilled desires and you always fulfill them just in time, you always risk money, then win it back just in time, said organism can still randomly get hit by a car and suffer from an unfulfilled desire to not get hit by said car, or get struck by lightning randomly and suffer from an unfulfilled desire to not get struck by lightning.

Accidents happen to the happiest still – one wrong move and you’re fucked, and with most cases of procreation it’s perfectly fair to say that these procreators have no absolute guarantee that nothing will go wrong when they’re about to procreate.

There’s a possibility for great failure and the absence of possibility for their happiness is obviously never a problem until they are created, so why should even one accident be justified? There we’re back to the asymmetry argument, natalists are essentially arguing that it’s acceptable to inflict harm for unnecessary pleasure, our top priority is surprise anal sex and all the traumatized victims can go fuck themselves in the ass.

So ultimately, I think that this argument of ”most people are happy to have been born/are glad to be be here” is an emotional reaction largely based on them not comprehending this fundamental asymmetry of prevented pleasure not being a problem for the non-existent as they do not experience desires, and why they’re making said argument could be motivated by many different factors from stockholm syndrome to real social pressure from viviocentrist fascists not to talk about dissatisfaction with life, but it doesn’t seem to come from any place of rational inquiry, there’s no reason to think it’s an argument for the production of sentient organisms in the grand scheme of things.