On toughening up children.

I argue that the existence of conscious life itself in the universe leads to unnecessary suffering, it is an unprofitable game.

Some people dispute this and say suffering can be good too, because sometimes in life, you are forced to endure one suffering to avoid even more of it in the future, so you take a painful injection to avoid a worse illness, or tolerate a painfully boring school life to avoid even more painful homelessness, or endure a painfully draining traffic jam to avoid the more painful boredom of never arriving at the amusement park.

But in and of itself, suffering is bad, that’s the point here. If you had the opportunity to just snap your fingers and become immune to all illness, you’d do that.

If I only rammed a needle into your arm as hard as possible for no benefit in return, you would decline the offer.

Masochists are not a fair counterexamples, because they are getting a benefit in return for the pain they cause themselves, sexual frustration is a form of suffering, and if the masochist wouldn’t already experience such tension, they wouldn’t inflict the pain on themselves to relieve that possibly more torturous long term frustration.

It is fair to say that before consciousness ever existed, there was never any suffering going on in the world that needed consciousness to exist in order to alleviate it, so it is irrational to argue that it’s good that consciousness started to exist.

The sea was not crying over not having a conscious fish swim in it, consciousness solved no problem, it is the problem.

Before an organism is conscious, it doesn’t need to feel good to avoid feeling bad, but once it’s conscious, it needs to constantly chase good to avoid feeling bad. So all pleasures of existence are unnecessary to avoid suffering, suffering is avoided just perfectly by not existing, by obtaining any pleasure once you’re alive you’re only preventing a state that would otherwise be suffering, compensating for a deficit.

You don’t eat, you hunger. You don’t drink, you thirst. You don’t defecate, you constipate. At best you get back to a more neutral, un-harmed state of not experiencing unfulfilled need, want, desire, in the worst case scenario, your needs, wants, desires remain unfulfilled for life. A starving third world person and a first world person are both tormented by hunger, it’s just that one always gets a painkiller just in time before it becomes too bad.

Suffering apologists who defend the continued production of suffering-capable life will sometimes also argue that deliberately inflicting suffering onto children, beyond just producing them to begin with, is necessary and good to do.

They need to be ”toughened up”, they’ll say things like my parents beat me when I was a kid and it made me a better person, I was an entitled brat who had to learn I don’t always get what I want, I got bullied in school and it made me stronger.

And this, in their delusional state of mind (where they already unfairly presupposed that the existence of consciousness is absolutely necessary and vital) may seem sensible to them, but if you take into account what I just explained this starts to seem more absurd.

It is true that once a child exists, the child will need to learn how to be disciplined and stronger in order to avoid suffering, unmet needs, wants, desires associated with being lazy and weak in the future. As in, little billy needs to learn how to deal with bullying at school, so then he knows how to handle adversity later on and get a good job to avoid being a loser in the life game, and be able to meet his needs, wants, desires.

Though questionable if beating up children and bullying them will achieve that, you can argue that once kids exist they need to learn to be disciplined to avoid certain forms of even worse discomfort and suffering in their future lives. Little billy needs to learn he can’t get any toy he wants at the store, or later on he’s going to rape a bitch – whatever example you want to use.

But the problem with all of this is that the need itself did not need to exist.

As a non-conscious fetus, little billy did not feel the need, want, desire to become conscious in the future. His parents created the need, want, desire to do certain things in him when they didn’t abort him before the brain started to fire up consciousness.

Now that the organism is conscious, it will have to learn how to struggle and fight, be toughened up in order to deal with even worse adversity later on in life, not be totally crushed by it and then become one of the loser organisms who’ll fail to fulfill their needs, wants, desires.

So the parents really created that problem in the first place.

Let’s say I abduct you into my basement, and then I initiate some sort of sadistic game, let’s call it torture and the carrot. The rule is that in order to obtain food for further survival, the carrot, you have to saw your entire left hand off.

Once I have put you into this situation, I argue that I can totally justify cutting your little finger off first. Why? Well, because it will get you used to pain, and later on you will have get used to pain, because you’ll have to saw your entire left hand off in order to obtain the carrot.

So see, I’m actually doing you a favor by sawing only your little finger off first, because that’ll get you used to pain, which is a necessity (that I have created) for obtaining the carrot later on, I’m just toughening you up to achieve the task I imposed on you.

See how this would be completely unfair?

It would be completely unfair because I’m the one at fault for you being in need of the carrot in the first place. I was the one who abducted you into his basement to play this sadistic torture and carrot game, before I made your survival forcibly dependent on that carrot, you did not need to saw your left hand off in order to survive.

And this is the problem with toughening up children in general as well.

In life there’s need, but prior to the needer existing, there is no need. So little billy is faced with this unfairness of not getting a new toy at the store, but this is necessary in order for him to learn that sometimes, you cannot get whatever you want, we don’t want him to become a rapist in the future who’ll throw a tantrum when a girl refuses to have sex with him.

But why will little billy develop the desire to have sex? Obviously only because his parents initiated his consciousness, if they simply aborted him before the brain started create needs, wants, desires, he would not be in this situation right now where he has to endure one discomfort in the present to avoid even worse discomfort in the future, just like in my torture and carrot example, you wouldn’t need the carrot if I didn’t abduct you into my basement.

Enduring the discomfort only became a necessity when I created the chance of even worse future discomfort. If little billy isn’t created in the first place, he won’t be dependent on money in the future, so he won’t need to learn how to deal with hardship earlier on to learn how to deal with it later on in order to not become unsuccesful, by aborting the child before it becomes conscious, you eradicate all its potential needs, wants, desires for future success.

So when parents make this point that children need to be toughened up, they are missing the real point.

They created the necessity to avoid harm, i.e create need, want, desire by creating a conscious organism, and now that organism needs to learn to become strong to avoid harm that is associated with being weak in the future.

If you’re halfway reasonable, you would think of me as an asshole for doing this in any other context, creating a dependency like that.

Like me abducting someone, locking them in a basement and making their survival dependent on cutting their left hand off – now they need to be toughened up by having their little finger cut off, so that then they can later on more easily chop the entire hand off or they won’t survive under the conditions which I have set.

You’d think I’m an asshole if I were a violent pimp who made someone addicted to heroin and crack in their sleep, then forced them to work for me as a whore, if I then made the argument that me treating them roughly is really ok, because later on all the customers will be even rougher, so they need to get used to it in order to obtain their new heroin fix after I made them dependent on the heroin in the first place, so I’m actually being completely benevolent here.

You’d think I’m asshole if I threw a child in the water again and again and make it fear it might drown, just because later on I wanted them to become a professional swimmer, so they need to be toughened up and get really passionate about trying to swim, instill some torturous fears into them to be a winner in the future.

Once threat of worse future discomfort is created, it can be necessary to endure a certain amount of discomfort to avoid even worse future discomfort, but this does not give a justification for why the threat of worse future discomfort has to be created in the first place.

Sometimes in life, we have to endure one suffering to get a pleasure, relief of suffering later on, the painful experiences that make us strong, immune to suffering associated with weakness in the future.

But that pleasure is only a necessity if the threat of suffering from not having it is created, and parents create that threat of suffering whenever they don’t abort a child before it becomes conscious in the first place, they instilled the threat of desire and deprivation by creating a new consciousness.

You might say it was good that your father beat you up as a kid because that made you tougher, so later on you succeeded in life and got more money and pussy, but the only reason why you needed to succeed in life in order to avoid suffering from being a loser is because your father created you in the first place, thus creating the opportunity for loss, if he just punched your mom in the stomach instead, you wouldn’t have been trapped in some kind of pre-birth torture chamber where you prayed to be released onto the earth so you can finally get some money and pussy.

If little billy is never created, he won’t be trapped in the unborn purgatory, feeling the desire to obtain desires to fulfill in order to avoid being tormented by them, thinking ”I wish I would be exposed to negative future consequences, so that then I can be toughened up in order to deal with them accordingly and lead a succesful life”.

Non-existers have no need to be succesful, so in the grand scheme of things, all child up-toughening is unfair abuse, it happens for an illegitimate, unnecessary purpose of giving the child some form of pleasurable future experience that they didn’t need before you created the need for it by creating the child in the first place.

Life is an unhealthy addiction.

In life, there’s suffering, and that’s not good. Some will say this isn’t always bad, because sometimes in life you’re forced to endure one suffering to avoid an even greater one, i.e painful injection to avoid a worse disease.

But in and of itself, suffering is bad. If you could magically give yourself immunity to cancer by snapping your fingers, you’d do that. If I only rammed a cactus in your ass for no benefit in return, you’d decline the offer.

An absolute fact is that prior to the existence of conscious lifeforms, there was obviously absolutely zero suffering going on in the universe that needed us to exist in order to prevent it, so the suffering that was caused by the first conscious lifeform ever existing was unnecessary suffering, not instrumental to avoiding even greater suffering, the existence of the first organism that suffered cannot be compared to the perhaps painful, but useful vaccination, it served no pre-existing need.

So we can see that a good way to end all pain, suffering, negative sensation is to put a stop to all conscious life in the universe.

What do we lose? All pleasures, joys, happy moments. Some people think this is a big deal, but it’s not, because the fact of the matter is that non-existers don’t need to achieve happy moments of relief in order to avoid miserable moments of suffering. Only utterly disadvantaged existers need to achieve happy moments of relief in order to avoid miserable moments of suffering.

I need to eat, or I suffer hunger. I need to drink water, or I suffer thirst. I need to shit, or I suffer constipation. I need cum, or I suffer tension. Non-existers do not eat delicious food, they do not drink refreshing water, they don’t get a feeling of relief from pressing a big turd out of their asses, they don’t ever get an orgasm – but – they do not suffer hunger, thirst, constipation or tension as a result of that – so it’s no problem.

Here you can think of many metaphors, let’s use heroin. If you are addicted to heroin, then the heroin gains value, now it can serve a need. But if you’re not addicted to heroin, then it loses all its value.

If I stick a knife in your chest, then the bandaid gains value, now it can serve a need. But if I don’t put a hole in your chest, then the bandaid loses all its value.

If I don’t make you addicted to heroin, you avoid all future problems associated with heroin addiction, and losing out on the pleasure of satisfying an addiction you don’t even have isn’t going to be a problem either, because you currently don’t have that addiction.

If I don’t stab you in the chest, you avoid all future problems associated with having been stabbed in the chest, and losing out on the pleasure of receiving a bandaid won’t be a problem either, because you don’t even have a wound.

I don’t think pleasure, relief of suffering is as important as simply avoiding suffering altogether, there is an endless number of potential people that could experience pleasure that are not being born, I don’t see this as a tragedy because they never suffer from not having pleasure.

By stopping the production of all sentient life, all negatives are avoided, and the positives too, but I think that’s irrelevant because no non-exister misses them, again, no negatives. No problem, no fun either…but it won’t be a problem either.

I’d say it’s a win win situation, the sadness of the starving third world person is solved, and the non-existent first world person that can’t eat any more chocolate cake isn’t sad about not eating more chocolate cake either in some kind of unborn purgatory – win win situation that everyone should be content with.

So it brings up the question:

If stopping the production of consciousness solves all problems that could ever exist, why are people so opposed to the idea of all conscious life extinction?

It’s simple and in what I just described – because it is an addiction, they have an addict’s mindset.

As disadvantaged existers, we are in a position where we have to chase the happy relief moment in order to avoid suffering, fulfill your need or be tormented by it. So unless you’re constantly intellectually contemplating and analyzing it, perhaps you’re going to end up subconsciously thinking no pleasure=suffering.

Many people seem to be irrationally scared of death as if death is actually some kind of second life where you are simply deprived of all pleasure, which would mean suffering again of course, so it seems to me as if they’re in reality scared of suffering and just falsely think that non-existence somehow involves suffering.

”No more x (whatever it may be) that makes my life great, how horrible!”…but you also have to take into account that your need/want/desire for x will not exist anymore, so is it really that big of a deal? I don’t think so.

If someone is not contemplating their existence too deeply, it could be that they’re just not really taking that into account and their immediate gut reaction is ”oh no, no more pleasure, not having pleasure results in suffering! I don’t eat so I get hungry! So I have to make a child so that then that child can eat in order to avoid being hungry!”.

It’s just like a heroin addict might in their addiction not grasp the idea of ”taking away the addiction”, all he hears is ”we want to take away your heroin” and even that is still not a fitting comparison, because with someone who already exists, we could at least argue that they might already have problems in their life that have been temporarily alleviated by becoming addicted to heroin, we could at least argue that treating the heroin addiction might very well be difficult and they’re going to feel like shit afterwards – make a fair cost-benefit analysis.

But not creating a new addiction to pleasure, relief of suffering by simply not creating a new conscious lifeform has absolutely no downside for that would-be person that will now never come to exist, at least with the already existent person we could argue that becoming addicted to heroin might give them some relief from a bad day they were already having, the non-exister on the other hand never had a bad day on which they really needed you to make them existent.

So an honest cost-benefit analysis is always going to reveal that it’s a stupid idea to make them existent, being upset about humans or other animals on this planet not being born to experience relief of suffering they didn’t need before they existed is just as idiotic as being upset about non-existent martians or plutonians not experiencing pleasure on mars and pluto, or being upset that objects around me like chairs, tables, rocks aren’t sentient so that then they could experience the heavenly pleasures offered by consciousness.

Of course, I could see how from that perspective you could justify almost all suffering that happens to you, if you think that if they didn’t get whatever little pleasure moment they got in their lives, they would have suffered even worse from not obtaining that pleasure moment, if that is an intuition one has (i.e ”I somehow existed before I existed and then I would have been hurt by not receiving my great life”).

So if someone who is dying of cancer thinks that if they got aborted and didn’t get their first orgasm, they would have really missed out on that first orgasm from the depths of the unborn purgatory, they might conclude that dying of cancer is now totally worth it for that first orgasm.

But if they actually understood the full context, that absence of pleasure does not inherently equal presence of suffering, that absence of pleasure only means presence of suffering as long as you exist, but not when you do not exist, then why would you think that a little pin prick of suffering would be worth tolerating, since prior to existing, the non-exister had absolutely zero need, want, desire to be served whatsoever by coming into existence? Why tolerate any risk?

Similarly, humans project value onto objects that don’t have any real value, e.g. you think the goal is getting money, you think the goal is buying resources with money, but the real underlying goal is always avoiding pain and suffering, that’s the only reason why you chase the money to get resources, to ultimately alleviate some form of suffering in you.

We all have slightly different needs, wants, desires, but the function is the same – we experience suffering if we don’t do a given activity, that is what defines a need, want, desire, do x or suffer. So existers notice that some objects bring them alleviation – you suffer and you ate a chocolate cake, now the suffering went away.

Because it creates more exhaustion to constantly analyze what is going to most efficiently prevent suffering, they then make a rather sloppy evaluation, as in: chocolate cake=good, no chocolate cake=bad. It’s a projection, they don’t recognize their underlying motivations, the real good is just the elevation of their state from a worse to a better one.

But in their addiction they end up thinking that whatever object that helped them prevent suffering is now the real good, and fail to understand that if no sentient life existed, then there would be no one to miss the chocolate cake and suffer from not having it anymore, it’s simple.

Another explanation could be the stockholm syndrome angle, life as the tormentor.

Stockholm syndrome has been defined as a condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity.^[1] Emotional bonds may be formed between captor and captives, during intimate time together, but these are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome#Sexual_abuse_victims

The slave grows up getting whipped, so at some point the slave starts to defend the slave owners. If I didn’t get whipped – then I wouldn’t be able to appreciate how good it feels to not get whipped for a few minutes, get a small moment of relief.

True story, but if you wouldn’t get whipped, then you wouldn’t need to feel relief from not getting whipped anymore either, because you wouldn’t get whipped anymore.

But the slave is so deep into their rationalization of slavery that they lose their ability to see that, so not only do they support their own enslavement, they actually want everyone to be enslaved and get whipped as much as possible, so that then these people that had absolutely no use for the pleasure of not getting whipped anymore can appreciate what it’s like to not get whipped anymore, after they got whipped as much as possible.

At first the victim is usually still struggling and doesn’t appreciate it, you can see that children for instance are much more likely to scream and throw a tantrum in the middle of a supermarket when they don’t get something they want, they’re still not used to the whip of deprivation, they still feel raped by desire, as they grow older they start to delusionally appreciate getting whipped by deprivation, because sometimes the whipping isn’t as intense, and then they can appreciate getting whipped less intensely for a while, develop stockholm syndrome just like their parents.

Perhaps even taking some kind of solace in the fact that other victims of desire are getting whipped harder than you. ”At least I have something to eat to alleviate hunger, the people in Africa don’t” without ever recognizing that hunger itself is a deficit to begin with, what is good about even needing to eat food to avoid suffering?

You’re tormented by your need, want, desire, and sometimes you feel relief from them, so you mistakenly end up believing it’s necessary to create more conscious life whipped by need, want, desire, for the relief of sometimes fulfilling a need, want, desire that they didn’t have before you created them in the first place.

I think the psychology that keeps this game going is one of addiction and stockholm syndrome, humans instinctively imagine the addiction to somehow exist independently of them. Somehow, the universe must need us inside it.

Somehow, there must be an unborn purgatory, just like many of them also believe in some kind of non-sensical afterlife notion because they simply fail to imagine what it would be like if we didn’t exist anymore.

So life is seen as a necessity, when it in fact satisfies no pre-existing need whatsoever, only a need in greedy animals that can’t possibly imagine that the need could also just not exist anymore.

Can it be good to create desire?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if someone is too incompetent to be granted the right to life, not the right to die?

A frequent concern in the right to die debate is whether or not people who choose death are mentally competent enough to make that choice, perhaps they are mentally ill, irrational.

What if the patient only wants to die because he believes he’s trapped in hell, awaiting to be raped by a demon? Then that person is delusional they’d say, and we should get rid of that delusion before we euthanize that person.

Chances are, even if that person had a rational, clear-headed moment and reflectively said:

”Ok, I know that hell and demons aren’t real, but to be honest, I still don’t like living like this and having to deal with psychosis, I still want to be euthanized to no longer have to struggle. Yes, I won’t experience any happy future either, but that’s irrelevant, because I know that once I’m dead I’ll no longer feel the need to have a happy future either. See it as similar to an addiction, if you’re not addicted to heroin, not getting any new heroin isn’t a problem. If I experience no discomfort that is caused by my life, I don’t need to be comforted, I want to permanently end all discomfort by terminating my life and that’s it.”

The strongest proponents of the anti-right to die crowd would still deny that person the right to die because they think that any person that wants to die is irrational.

And what do they base this idea on you may ask, this idea that everyone who wants to die is irrational? Well, based on the fact that they want to die. If you want to die, you’re irrational, and you’re irrational, because you want to die.

It’s circular logic entirely basically.

Circular reasoning is also known as circular questioning or circular hypothesis. It can be easy to spot because both sides of the argument are essentially making the same point. For example:
Everyone loves Rebecca, because she is so popular.
You must obey the law, because it’s illegal to break the law.
Harold’s new book is well written, because Harold is a wonderful writer.
America is the best place to live, because it’s better than any other country.
Violent video games cause teens to be violent, because violent teens play violent video games.
All of these statements cause the listener to ask, “But how can you be so sure?” They offer no valid evidence besides the assertion that A proves B.
https://examples.yourdictionary.com/circular-reasoning-fallacy-examples.html

So here is a challenging question I have for these people in particular, just a thought experiment that might even happen in real life in some cases:

What if someone is too incompetent to be granted a right to life, not the right to die?

They wouldn’t let a person who has an acute psychotic episode make the decision to die, not even when they are no longer having the episode but simply say ”ok, but I don’t want to deal with psychosis and have to take medication forever, just let me die” – so what if someone actually only wants to continue living because they are psychotic and delusional?

Let’s say an old person with both brain and some other problem – dementia and terminal cancer. They have been indoctrinated by religion their entire life, so they have an intense fear of going to afterlife hell for all eternity at any moment if they make the wrong choice in God’s eyes.

They tell you they don’t want to be euthanized, but that’s only because they believe that if they get euthanized, they’ll get raped by a demon in hell, not here on earth like the delusional person that they wouldn’t let make the decision to die based on their delusion.

Let’s make this even worse, we could provide them palliative care and make their dying process less painful, but they say no, no medication against the pain, I believe medication is unnatural man-made garbage, there is no pain medication in mother nature, in the jungle either. You ever seen wild boar taking painkillers when it gets eaten by parasites?

But you see this person lived in a house, in a civilization, had a tv, a shower, telephone, etc, all things that don’t occur in mother nature, in the jungle either, so this is completely contradictory.

So this person will subject themselves to an extremely agonizing dying process by cancer, so this kind of brings up the question:

Shouldn’t you euthanize this person painlessly in their sleep when you get the chance?

Yes, they have given reasons why they don’t want euthanasia, but you see that these reasons are completely incoherent. They give no evidence for the existence of heaven and hell, and neither is the ”I only do natural things” narrative being applied by them with logical consistency.

They have just as much evidence for their ”I’m going to hell” narrative as the schizophrenic who believes a demon is standing next to him has evidence for there being a demon standing next to him, waiting to eat him alive at any moment.

They wouldn’t let that schizophrenic person die because they are considered delusional, so why would they not euthanize this old, indoctrinated person who actually sincerely wishes to escape the pain they will experience, but only abstains from doing so because they are suffering from a delusion that they will go to hell for it, for which exists just as much evidence as for one individual demon standing next to you?

Possible answers and my responses:

1 – We should do what reduces suffering the most, so euthanize.

This is the most rational, reasonable answer I think. I would argue that there is much more reason to be concerned with people who want to die choosing to continue living based on false beliefs, rather than people choosing to die based on false beliefs.

I could in theory argue I’m doing anyone a favor by painlessly euthanizing them. I terminated the possibility of any future pain for them, and that I terminated the possibility for all future pleasure, relief of pain as well is irrelevant, because they are dead, so they no longer long for any pleasure, for any relief either.

If you’re not addicted to heroin, heroin has no value and power over your life. Get it? If you’re not in discomfort, you won’t chase comfort. Non-existers experience no comfort, but they also experience no discomfort as a result of not having comfort – only the utterly disadvantaged existers are experiencing discomfort as a result of not having comfort.

But it’s hard for people to comprehend that they really didn’t exist in an unborn purgatory prior to being born, aching to be released, they think ”a happy future” is an absolute necessity to avoid suffering. Little do these delusional people know that experiencing a happy future is only a necessity as long as you’re actually alive and conscious.

There’s much more reason to be concerned with people going through more pain than they would actually be willing to take if they simply got rid of their delusion that future happiness is somehow a necessity (to avoid suffering) for dead people. At least if a person chooses to die as a result of delusional beliefs, they’re not going to experience any painful regrets afterwards, but the person who chooses to continue living for a delusional belief is tormented.

2 – We should give them the freedom to choose whatever, so it’s wrong to euthanize them.

The libertarian approach, I would argue that if we care about any action that is not called ”avoiding suffering”, we only care about that action because it is conducive to avoiding suffering in some way, shape or form, so we actually only care about avoiding suffering, not that other action, so utilitarianism is more rational than libertarianism.

Let’s say I lock an eggplant in a cage. Does the eggplant protest? Does it try to escape? No. And why? Because the eggplant is not conscious, it cannot experience pain and suffering.

Being able to suffer is what makes us strive for literally everything we strive for, a conscious human or other animal would try to escape the cage, because being locked in a cage causes suffering, so it’s bound to chase the concept of freedom, i.e more place to walk on.

But if no conscious life existed, there could be as much place to walk on as possible, and it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone. Avoiding suffering is the only goal that exists, anything else is either conducive or not conducive.

But if someone takes this position and we just grant it has some merit, then they also ought accept people that make the decision to get euthanized.

3 – I’m a pro-life fascist, if life is chosen as a result of delusion, it’s fine.

Irrational for aforementioned reasons. If it’s wrong to euthanize a delusional person who wants to die because they have a false belief that a demon is going to torture them otherwise, you also ought to care about actually euthanizing someone when they only abstain from doing it because they have a false belief that they’ll be tortured by a demon after death.

If you only proclaim to care about life existing, that is likely based on a delusion again, going against the fundamental motivations of a sentient organism, i.e you believe that human or other animal life must exist in the universe to prevent harm, when in reality there would be absolutely no harm left if sentient life did not exist anymore, no one there to miss it.

Life is and of itself is not an absolute necessity to avoiding pain. We care about life because we care about the joyful experiences we may have in it, and we care about having joyful experiences in life because if we didn’t achieve them we would feel bad. So by trying to achieve life to achieve joy you are trying to avoid suffering.

In this case, more suffering is caused by the person not being euthanized, so it’s better to euthanize them, but pro-lifers just lack the metacognitive insight into their own motivations to see this, so they would support torturing such a person for the greater ”good” of more life existing in the universe, when in reality life itself has no value whatsoever, and they only think it’s important because they subconsciously associate life with certain happy experiences they had, that many people they are denying the right to die simply are not having.

Pro-life ideology frequently motivates speciesist behavior.

Some vegans make the point that a lot of other injustices that exist, such as racism and sexism are often motivated by speciesism, and if we taught children how to respect animals, it would be much harder for them to be racist and sexist later on, discriminate and objectify other humans.

This is all fine, but I think it’s not the root cause, I’m going to argue it goes even deeper. The real problem is pro-life, pro-natalist, viviocentrist (life-centered) ideology, the idea that life can be a net positive is used to justify speciesism.

Species survival is assumed to be a noble goal overriding suffering:

”But if we didn’t eat the cow, then the cow wouldn’t even be alive right now, they’d all go extinct! You want to murder the cows???”.

It’s true that if we didn’t want to eat pigs, cows, chicken anymore – pigs, cows, chicken as they are would go extinct, we wouldn’t deliberately breed them into existence anymore and it’s unlikely that such animals could survive in the wild.

However, it would be completely irrelevant, because before cows existed, cows were not trapped in an unborn cow purgatory from which they desperately waited to be released. All their pain would have been prevented, and no pleasure, relief of pain they could have experienced in their lives, like eating grass, could have been missed by them either.

You only get hungry from not eating if you exist. If you don’t exist, you don’t eat, but you also don’t get hungry as a result of that, because you don’t exist.

Pleasure is not intrinsically valuable, it only becomes valuable when you make someone dependent on it by reproducing them. If you’re never reproduced, you don’t miss pleasure from the unborn purgatory, by being reproduced on the other hand, you’re being put into the position of having to chase comfort to avoid being in discomfort.

So really, the cow is not benefitted by being made dependent on comfort that farmers give the cow in return for the milk they give, because the cow did not feel a need to exist before it existed, so arguing you’re doing it a favor by giving it comfort in return for milk would be like arguing I’m doing you a favor by injecting you with heroin in your sleep, making you addicted to it, and then making you suck my dick for more heroin. See, it’s a symbiotic relationship, if I didn’t make you addicted to heroin, you would have never enjoyed satisfying your heroin addiction.

Circle of life, the cow gets comfort and shelter from wild predators that it didn’t need before you forced the genetically modified, retarded cow to exist in the first place, and you get to fondle the cow’s tits. You get new heroin that you didn’t need before I forced you to become addicted to it, and I get my dick sucked.

”Are you going to stop all the carnivores from eating meat, silly vegans? No? Then veganism is wrong! Just admit it vegans, you want to murder lions, just admit it!”.

A great amount of speciesists spend their time pestering vegans with questions about how we ought to deal with cats that need meat to survive, and then all the wild animals that need meat to survive if we want a vegan world.

In all of this, they don’t even question whether life itself is an absolute necessity. Fine, let’s say the animal needs meat to live – does the animal need to live in the first place?

Let’s say some mad scientist bred a new alien species in his laboratory. They will be carnivorous, and they will thrive primarily eating the intestines of human children.

Meat eaters think that it’s justified for cats and other carnivores to hunt for flesh based on the justification that they are carnivorous, and frequently they want to pretend that they themselves are also carnivorous.

So if ”I’m carnivorous” is a justification for harming someone else, then these meat eaters would have to offer their children to the carnivorous alien species in order to not be total hypocrites.

Would they do that? Why or why not? I thought that ”I need meat to live” is an adequate justification for eating someone? Are you saying that the suffering experienced by your child being gutted by my alien breed justifies sterilizing and/or straight up euthanizing my alien breed?

So you SUPPORT GENOCIDE? You don’t think these aliens need to exist?

Suddenly, I think most of these meat eaters would be able to give a clear answer. No, these aliens did not really need to exist to be honest. Before they existed, no one ever needed them to exist. But guess what, that’s the same for all life – before conscious life existed in the universe, the universe never said ”but I really need conscious life to exist! :(”.

If humans, cats, lions and my hypothetical alien breed didn’t exist anymore, they would never miss out and lament not existing, so why is the harm caused by their existence justifiable? It is not.

”What about animal experimentation, you want humans to get sick and die? Ha! Veganism disproven, harming animals is necessary to preserve human life!”

Same, just use alien hypotheticals. We do it for factory farming, we can do it for the animal experimentation problem too. Let’s say there are aliens that will have to perform medical experiments on human children in order to save themselves from a few illnesses that their existence presents them with.

It’s true that these aliens might have to experiment on us once they exist and are prone to suffering, but it still does not explain why they need to exist and be prone to suffering in the first place.

If I know that if I create an alien species, I will have to perform a thousand horrific vivisections on human children in order to figure out what the right medication is for my alien breed when they get a migraine headache, you’d look at me the same way we look at someone like Josef Mengele, what gives me the right to do all that, just because I have a giant boner for aliens existing on planet earth?

Nothing. And similarly there is no justification for the harm caused by human existence or non-human animal existence, speciesists just have a hard-on for humans existing ad infinitum, we can torture as many organisms as possible to preserve human life, life itself is more important than suffering.

Nepotism, another form of ingroup bias: why is it wrong to value the dog over the pig? I also value my child over any other child!

Nepotism is the favoring of your family over others, many vegans while they try to reject speciesism don’t fully reject nepotism. Nepotism is making the value of an organism dependent of what a third party feels about them, i.e it is bad if my child is raped and killed, because that then makes me feel bad because it’s my child.

But obviously, you know that if the parent that valued the child did not exist, you still wouldn’t want to be in the position of the child getting tortured, you recognize the suffering itself as a problem as soon as it happens to you, and don’t want your right to be free from torture based on how your family would be affected by you being tortured.

What about orphan children whose parents don’t feel bad about them being abducted, raped and killed? So nepotism is a bigoted non-sense philosophy, just like speciesism, just like racism, caring about a child only because it popped out of your vagina is bigotry.

An equal consideration of interests as true anti-speciesist philosophers like Peter Singer promote also goes against nepotism, you want exception from torture based on the fact that you are able to be tortured, so can other animals be tortured, so they have to consistently go into the category of organisms that have a right to be free from torture. The same principle rejects nepotism, your child is torturable, but it is not torturable just because it is your child.

Some vegans argue that humans learn racist behavior from being speciesists who ignore the suffering of other animals first, and then they internalize that behavior and have a higher chance of becoming nazis.

”Jews are just subhuman animals” – the nazis said.

But I think the truth is that nazi ingroup favoritist behavior is learned much earlier when the child internalizes that their parents and siblings are somehow more important than everyone else’s parents and siblings.

Right there, they learn to ignore the capacity to suffer in organisms of equal suffering capacity to their own, because other parents and siblings are able to suffer just as much as their own parents and siblings, but somehow the child is more attached to their family than anyone else’s.

So it’s more likely that nepotism comes first, then comes speciesism, then comes racism, that is where the first ”somehow my ingroup is more important” feelings are created, and the creation of families is again promoted by pro-lifers, pro-natalists, viviocentrists who think that life is an absolute necessity, because if there’s no life, there’s no happy happy joy moments, and the reason why we chase happy happy joy moments is to avoid miserable miserable pain moment, and they’re just too dumb to figure out that if life didn’t exist, miserable miserable pain moment would no longer exist, so it wouldn’t need to be escaped.

The assumption that life must exist can be found in a lot of anti-vegan arguments, showing confusion about the implications of what would happen if we were to reject speciesism:

”But then these farm animals would go extinct!”
”But then what about wildlife suffering, euthanize carnivores???”
”But that’s the circle of life, big fish eat small fish!”

There is no need for life to exist, it is not an absolute necessity to avoiding suffering, it only becomes one when you create the life, so why create it?

Right to die.

Simply put, I support the right to make the decision to die based on the same reasons why I think it is wrong to create sentient life in the first place.

When you don’t exist, you can’t be harmed, existence on the other hand presents you with constant harms in need of being resolved.

If someone makes the decision to be euthanized, they will avoid whatever suffering that they currently experience, or future suffering that they will experience.

Pro-lifers and pro-natalists object to this that this also robs the future person of future joy, happiness and pleasure, but I’d argue that anyone rational would reject this as a stupid concern, because obviously dead people don’t miss joy, happiness and pleasure.

They clearly don’t care, because they’re dead, you don’t see too many dead people upset about not receiving any more pleasure, show me one dead person that wants to come back to life.

Once you exist as a conscious being, you will have to chase pleasure, relief of suffering, or otherwise you will clearly be subjected to suffering, this is quite a burden to impose on someone, that is what you do when you bring someone into existence.

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.
You don’t sleep, you fatigue.
You don’t socially interact, you get lonely – use whatever example you like.

So by obtaining any good, happy moment in life, you are always compensating for a state that would otherwise be defined by some form of suffering/dissatisfaction, and you have no absolute guarantee of fairness that you will always get what you need to stop horrific suffering.

Not coming into existence in the first place solves the problem of pain/suffering for the individual, and the absence of future pleasure will not be a problem for the non-exister. Being euthanized solves the problem of pain for the individual, and the absence of future pleasure will likewise not be a problem for the non-exister.

To use an analogy – it’s just like not getting cancer (unfulfilled desire) in the first place solves the problem of cancer (unfulfilled desire) for the individual, and the absence of future chemotherapy treatment (desire fulfillment) will not be a problem for the non-exister.

Having the cancer tumor (unfulfilled desire) excised (receiving assisted suicide) once it exists also solves the problem of cancer (unfulfilled desire) for the individual, and the absence of future chemotherapy treatment (fulfilled desire) will likewise not be a problem for the person that no longer has cancer (unfulfilled desire).

You could also use the example of having a knife stuck in you, the knife=unfulfilled desire, painkiller=desire fulfillment, pulling the knife out=death.

Unfulfilled desire is a constant problem, and there is really no rational reason why someone shouldn’t be allowed to rid themselves of it permanently – it would only start to make sense to me if you could prove that dead people can actually be negatively affected by being dead, still in a state of unfulfilled desire.

If you actually showed me an example of a dead person who regrets having died and desperately wants to come back, then you could argue death is a harm, but the reality is that death is prevention of all future harm, conscious life on the other hand entails constant trivial harms with the possibility of falling victim to greater harms at any moment.

Why exactly is everyone expected to keep living? Society allows people to make decisions that they can regret, but not a decision that can never be regretted, which is being dead.

Possible life apologist objections and points:

If you wanna kill yourself, you’re by default irrational.

This one is usually just circular. No one is saying that you can’t believe you want to die because you have another delusional belief prompting you to do so, i.e I believe a demon is threatening to rape me, so all I can do is kill myself before it happens.

But viviocentrist fascists are circularly arguing that one is always irrational for wanting to end your life, because you want to end your life, so you’re irrational.

And why are you irrational? Because you want to end your life. And why do you want to end your life? Because you’re irrational.

It’s like saying your tastebuds are obviously deficient for not liking chocolate ice cream, and the reason why you don’t like chocolate ice cream is obviously because your tastebuds are deficient, so we need to force feed you chocolate ice cream in order to make you healthy again.

”But you hurt your family and loved ones by killing yourself!”

But you could similarly hurt them by making any other decision in your life that they disagree with, for example leaving the country permanently and never coming back.

The family will miss the person just like they could miss them if they knew this person left the country forever and is never going to return or call them again, and for the dead person, we can agree that being dead is not going to be a problem.

Also, they are of course also causing immense suffering by enslaving someone to their desire to see them continue living, if they really respected them, they should be glad that this person was freed from suffering. Similarly, not all people have friends or family either.

You could make this argument in specific cases where someone is directly dependent on the suicider, i.e child and a parent, but if the child is able to live independently there’d be little to no reason to deny the parent the right to die, it would be the same as saying ”I’m offended” by any other choice someone could make in their life.

”But someone could be talked into dying when they don’t want to!”

Same issue, someone could really be talked into anything, but we don’t just outright ban an option to do something simply because some people are easily manipulated.

I could be manipulated into doing x – playing lottery, joining a football team, going to church, etc. So ban everything because sometimes it is the result of coercion and force? No, that just means we should ban coercion and force, not the activity itself.

There’s also more reason to worry more about literally any other subject where someone is being manipulated into doing something they don’t want to do, because at least dead people never regret not being alive anymore. It’s still an issue, but no more of an argument for banning the right to die than to ban other rights to do things that one could, but doesn’t have to be manipulated into, the list of said things is pretty much endless.

”But if you really want to die, you can just kill yourself on your own!”

But if you really want a certain cosmetic surgery, you could theoretically learn how to perform it on your own. If you really want to get gay married, you can just have a homosexual ceremony in the comfort of your own home and call it marriage on your own.

Of course you could theoretically do many things on your own, but why deny someone the right to do them in a safe and consensual manner when there are more than enough people who would offer the service? Why is the fact that they could do it on their own a justification for criminalization? Should people who want to get cosmetic surgeries be criminalized because if they really wanted to, they could just learn to do it on their own somehow?

”Well, whatever, but I’m never going to support right to die for perfectly healthy people that should be glad to be alive, I might support right to die for terminally ill and chronic pain, but that’s it!”

All pain is the same in a sense – it’s all created by the brain, this mental and physical distinction is ultimately non-sensical. Pain is not caused by cancer itself, obviously a braindead body could have a cancer tumor and it would not cause any pain, the pain is still created by the central nervous system, by a conscious brain.

Similarly feelings of aversion, pain are created when it comes to someone feeling traumatized, depressed, tortured by something other than a cancer tumor, something directly observable. There is no ”false pain”, if you feel it then you feel it, doesn’t matter if it’s caused by something that would not cause someone else the same amount of pain.

”But maybe we could still improve their life, we can get them treatment and all that and palliative care, why throw it all away?”

Being dead terminates the need for improvement, no dead person craves to improve anything. If you have a cancer tumor we can still cut out, we can give you chemotherapy and let it in, or we can cut it out. If you have a knife stuck in you, we can keep feeding you painkillers, or we can pull the knife out. If you have unfulfilled desires, you can work on (maybe) fulfilling those desires in the future, or you can terminate the desires permanently by getting euthanized.

Why insist on suffering existing just for the chance of in the future converting some of that dissatisfaction into satisfaction, when you could just take away the need for any and all satisfaction by killing yourself as painlessly as possible?

And it is inconsistent to only show this attitude in this one context. When someone has an old shitty car they want to throw away, yes, we could still fix some parts on that old shitty car, maybe we can fix the tires and it’ll still drive.

But it is questionable, why should someone be so focused and forced to repair their old car? What if they simply don’t want it anymore? What if they will be better off throwing it away? Why does some third party have the right to tell me when I’m allowed to throw my car away, especially if someone else bought it for me (just like life) and I never had any say in it?

In conclusion, I think dying can be a perfectly reasonable decision. It prevents all future pain, and the missing pleasure won’t be a problem for the dead person who won’t miss anything that could have happened in the future because they’ll be dead anyway.

I could even argue anyone is done a favor by being painlessly euthanized in their sleep in that sense, and giving people the right choose euthanasia on demand is simply a bare minimum requirement the pro-lifers are failing to meet.

No one consented to receiving the life gift, so if a gift is really making you miserable, you should be allowed to give it up again. Buying something random for someone when you have no idea if they’re going to like is already a dumb idea, forcing them to keep it even worse.

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.

Sentient life is useless.

Antifrustrationism is an axiological position proposed by German philosopher Christoph Fehige,^[1] which states that “we don’t do any good by creating satisfied extra preferences. What matters about preferences is not that they have a satisfied existence, but that they don’t have a frustrated existence.”^[2] According to Fehige, “maximizers of preference satisfaction should instead call themselves minimizers of preference frustration.”^[2]
What makes the world better is “not its amount of preference satisfaction, but the avoided preference frustration.”^[3] In the words of Fehige, “we have obligations to make preferrers satisfied, but no obligations to make satisfied preferrers.”^[2]
The position stands in contrast to classical utilitarianism, among other ethical theories, which holds that creating “satisfied preferrers” is, or can be, a good in itself.
The moral philosopher Peter Singer has in the past endorsed a position similar to antifrustrationism (negative preference utilitarianism), writing:
The creation of preferences which we then satisfy gains us nothing. We can think of the creation of the unsatisfied preferences as putting a debit in the moral ledger which satisfying them merely cancels out… Preference Utilitarians have grounds for seeking to satisfy their wishes, but they cannot say that the universe would have been a worse place if we had never come into existence at all.^[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifrustrationism

I think that the strongest argument against the perpetuation of conscious life is that all we’re trying to do all our lives is trying to reduce suffering, but the only way to truly achieve zero suffering is by not existing, so it can never be a good idea to create it.

By which I mean that ultimately, by achieving any good, pleasure, happy moment in life, you are compensating for a mental state that would otherwise be suffering, all your life you’re trying to reduce your levels of suffering to zero, when the only way to truly reach the zero is to not come into existence in the first place.

Before we exist, we are not suffering in a pre-birth deprivation chamber, hoping to exist, feeling pain as a result of not enjoying chocolate cake, but once you exist, you’ll have to chase what we call good, pleasure, happy in order to avoid pain, suffering, misery.

If I don’t eat, I suffer hunger and/or appetite.
If I don’t drink, I suffer thirst and dehydration.
If I don’t defecate, I suffer constipation.
If I don’t ejaculate, I suffer tension, stress, pressure.
If I don’t sleep, I suffer fatigue.
If I don’t breathe, I suffer suffocation.

There is never a neutral point in between, I think most wrongly imagine pain and pleasure as pain, neutral, and then there is some kind of profit beyond that, when in reality you are just suffering, and then trying to go back to neutral, and in that process, we have what we call pleasure.

I imagine it as being trapped on a treadmill with suffering on one side and pleasure on the other, the treadmill always pulls you into suffering, you have to keep running to achieve pleasure/relief.

Once you achieved pleasure, you’ll either be pulled back into suffering or the treadmill extends and now there’s pleasure in front of you again, and the pleasure you just obtained will soon crumble and turn into suffering again. This happens your entire life, until at the end you’re usually more intensely pulled into suffering and then you die.

All our lives as sentient organisms, we’re experiencing desire, deprivation, craving, suffering (whatever you want to call it) and try to reduce it to zero again. If you somehow to fulfill all your desires and keep them permanently fulfilled, you’re just back to the same level of deficit as before you were born – a total sum of zero.

I chase satisfaction, relief, because if I fail to obtain it, I will start to feel dissatisfied. You could also imagine it as always sinking into a hole, and then you have to struggle to climb up to the surface to get a fresh breath of satisfaction, relief again, if you fail to do it, you’ll be punished, so you keep doing it.

Once every urge that could push me to eat it, be it hunger, if not, then to avoid appetite which is also a form of suffering, since some will say this is too reductive, we don’t just try to avoid suffering, we eat when we’re not starving too, but appetite is still suffering.

A prisoner can suffer from not being able to eat their favorite dessert anymore, that is the appetite left unattended for a while, when they’re unable to get partial relief from simply fantasizing about grabbing their favorite dessert from the fridge, because they know it’s unrealistic, they’re sitting in prison.

If you eat and you’re not getting rid of hunger, neither of appetite, then it might just be boredom, another form of suffering we seek constant distraction from, even if the food doesn’t even satisfy hunger or appetite anymore.

I desire, I fulfill desire – now I’m just back to as neutral as possible, the same as before, I don’t suffer anymore – for a moment until it comes back, either a new one will pop up, or the old one returns.

And this is what we’re doing our entire lives – a function of punishment is installed and we’re trying to avoid it as much as possible.

Upon birth of consciousness, you’re thrown into the deprivation hole. Now suffering always comes on its own, you have to work to climb up to the surface of the hole to get a fresh breath of pleasure, but you’ll inevitably fall down again because it’s a wet slimy hole. The only way to not be in the hole is to never be born or die.

You’re getting whipped (desire), and sometimes you’re getting whipped less intensely in between (fulfilled desire), but the only way to fully escape the whip is to never be born or die as soon as possible. This will rid you of the pleasure you gain from sometimes avoiding the whip, but is ultimately irrelevant, because you’re not getting whipped anymore.

You’re burdened with a vulnerable welfare that now constantly needs to be maintained in order to not crumble and degrade. The closest metaphor I could think of would be kind of like having to work to obtain money, and then it automatically starts being taken away from you again without you having spent anything on anything. You work to fulfill your desires, and then they empty again or new ones will inevitably pop up.

Even if you fulfill all your desires perfectly, you still suffered in between the moment of them being unfulfilled and fulfilled, and you would have still avoided suffering more efficiently by being aborted before you became conscious. Breathing air to avoid suffocating is less bad than suffocating, but not needing to breathe air to avoid suffocating in the first place is still less bad.

Of course, you would no longer get the pleasure/relief from the fresh breath of air either, but can you really see that as such a big tragedy if you know fully well that you wouldn’t experience suffocation as a result of that either? That is what I’m doubting.

Not existing solves every problem, including our need for any degree of pleasure. Even if you make a child that will grow up to be the scientist that cures cancer (which is unlikely), the cure for cancer is only valuable if suffering organisms that have cancer exist, but if we stopped production of sentient organisms that can get cancer, this would no longer be a problem.

The good doesn’t justify the bad, because the good is just the getting rid of the bad again until it comes back anyway and you have to avoid it again, which you don’t need to, if you don’t create the bad in the first place.

This is what makes the idea of the good things in life justifying the bad absurd, which is a favorite go-to argument life apologists bring up when it is pointed out to them that causing life to exist causes unnecessary torture.

Since the good is just compensating for a bad, to say that it’s good to create the bad for the good of then compensating for it would be like saying that I could do you a favor by:

Setting your house on fire for the good of extinguishing it again.
Throwing children into the sea for the good of saving them from drowning.
Breaking your legs for the good of giving you a painkiller.
Give you AIDS for the good of giving you treatment for AIDS.
Stabbing you in the chest for the good of putting a bandaid on it.
Shitting on your floor for the good of wiping it off again.
Throwing you in a hole for the good of you climbing out of it again.

The good is just making it the same as before. I desire to eat an apple – I’m now in a state of suffering. I temporarily neutralize and avoid that suffering by eating the apple, now it’s the same as before, which means I don’t suffer as a result of not having an apple anymore, until the urge to obtain an apple comes back.

So while it may be good to fulfill unfulfilled needs and desires that already exist, it can’t be good to create unfulfilled needs and desires just for the good of then trying to fulfill them with no guarantee of being able to, just like it can be good to save an already drowning child from drowning, but it’s not good to throw the child into sea in the first place, just for the good of then trying to save the child from drowning with no guarantee of being able to.

A non-conscious fetus is not hungry for anything, so it cannot be upgraded by having hunger, desire, suffering injected into it, it can only be degraded, made into a pleasure addict, and then hopefully get its new pleasure fix always just in time before the suffering of not having that pleasure gets out of hand, which not all of them will, there are many unfulfilled desires in the life game, which then makes it even more absurd.

To say that the fulfilled desires, pleasures of some subset of sentient organisms justify all the unfulfilled desires, suffering of other sentient organisms, would in the metaphor be like saying that it is a perfectly good idea to walk around and set people’s houses on fire for the good of extinguishing them again, even if many of those houses burn down with children inside, because that is perfectly compensated for by extinguishing other houses.

It’s good to throw children into the atlantic ocean for the good of saving them from drowning, even if 50 have to drown and die painfully here and there, because that is perfectly compensated for by the pleasure that the children you actually manage to save from drowning feel when you save them from drowning, we need to keep throwing children into the ocean because otherwise we would lose the pleasure of saving them from drowning, they’ll lose the pleasure of being saved from drowning.

Make children addicted to heroin for the good of then satisfying their addiction, their suffering for heroin, a completely inefficient and unproductive idea to begin with, and then you don’t even give of all them the heroin, some are just left in their state of deprivation to be tormented.

As in the life game, you don’t really manage to fulfill desires permanently, to make the metaphors even more accurate, we could practically say the good is more like pulling the child’s head out of the water in between, not saving it from drowning.

But even if we perfected the game and had some kind of technological endless orgasm utopia scenario, then we’d still just be perfectly fixing pre-existing damage, which is still not better than not creating it in the first place, you still cannot benefit the organism by putting it into the utopia, creating its desire to be endlessly jerked off, and then endlessly jerking it off.

Installing the threat of a negative and then perfectly avoiding it is better than failing to perfectly avoid the negative, but not having it installed into you is still the greatest win.

It would be like having the cure for AIDS. Yes, it’s good to perfectly cure AIDS, but I still cannot be benefitted by being given AIDS, and then being given the perfect pill to cure AIDS afterwards, I just got back to the state of not having AIDS, which I didn’t have before it was given to me, so I didn’t really win anything.

In conclusion, sentient organisms can do nothing except trying to solve problems created by them being sentient – need, want, desire, and then erase that deficit again, fulfill the need, want, desire.

Then they avoid that suffering for a moment, but they still didn’t avoid it more efficiently than by never being born, they just got back to a non-bothered state and felt bothered in between, which isn’t superior to never feeling bothered by anything at all.

Life is useless, at best you’re always just getting back to a more neutral before the pain becomes unbearable, that’s a so called good life, which is rare.

Life apologists believe that this then somehow justifies all the organisms that fail to avoid the pain before it becomes too bad, which is about as absurd as to justify stabbing 50 people in the chest to do them the favor of pulling the knife out of only 10 of them.

It’s good to make 50 people addicted to heroin and then deprive 40 of it, because you gave 10 of them all the heroin in the world, that they now need after you deliberately made them addicted to it.

All we try to do is prevent harm, and we can prevent all harm most efficiently and permanently by simply not making conscious organisms.

All we lose is all pleasure, which is irrelevant, because non-existent children don’t feel pain as a result of not having pleasure like actually existent sentient organisms feel pain as a result of not feeling pleasure, the rush of satisfying an addiction becomes irrelevant once you don’t have the addiction.

The universe is not a sentient entity that suffers if we don’t put sentient life in it, there is to my knowledge no ineliminable pre-birth deprivation chamber or unborn purgatory in which non-existers are writhing in agony over not being put into flesh suits on earth, so the existence of any suffering is unnecessary in the grand scheme of things.

Even if the universe were sentient of course, then its suffering would also be unnecessary, futile, better off not existing as well. But then we could at least argue that there’s a practical reason why we need to keep existing to alleviate the suffering of the universe, which we don’t have to though.

Fetuses and future value.

In abortion discussions, pro-lifers obviously frequently make the argument that a fetus is a human, and a life, so it’s bad to kill it. So the fair question comes up, what about sperm? It contains human DNA, and it is also alive. Life starts in the testicles, sperm lives and sperm can die, it can live up to 3-5 days in a moist and warm environment.

Some then reject this argument, because the sperm could not on its own (i.e by leeching off of a female’s reproductive system for 9 months, so not really on its own) grow into a child later on, by which logic they’d only have to be against the morning after pill, because it prevents an already ejaculated sperm from fertilizing an egg on its own.

Even if the egg is not fertilized yet, which some pro-lifers will point out to make it seem like abortion is worse than taking the morning after pill, the morning after pill still prevents the sperm from fertilizing that egg by their definition of ”on its own”, without our help. Once the sperm is ejaculated into the vagina, it will fertilize the egg on its own, unless you stop it from happening.

But the implication is always kind of obvious in these arguments, they appeal to the great possibilities for the future of that fertilized egg, and think that it is a horrible loss to not transform a non-conscious organism into a conscious organism. The fertilized egg has a great future ahead of itself they’ll say, but the sperm does not, it would not grow into a conscious child on its own, some have written books about the subject, such as a future like our’s by Don Marquis.

This argument that the fetus will have a future is still pretty bad though, because obviously it doesn’t care about its future any more than a sperm, so that point still stands, here I think it’s best to bring up Benatar’s asymmetry again to make that point.

Preventing a suffering from happening is arguably always a good thing to do, I would think it’s important that you prevent a child that will suffer chronic pain everyday, even if that child has not been born yet and will not appreciate that its horrible disease has been prevented.

But I’d see it as absurd to whine about the fact that now that child will not experience any pleasure either, because there is no one in pain who needs pleasure to begin with before they come into existence, if I’m not hungry, I don’t need to eat, if I’m not aroused, I don’t need to cum.

Preventing a pleasure is only problematic conditionally, if someone feels deprived of it, you likely wouldn’t say that making new children that will eat ice cream and be happy about it one day is as important as preventing a severely disabled child that’ll be in chronic pain every single day from being born.

Sentient organisms experience needs, and they have to fulfill them to avoid suffering, non-sentient organisms don’t have needs, so they don’t have to fulfill them to avoid suffering.

Lamenting that the fetus never became sentient, experienced deprivation, so that then they can alleviate that deprivation again is about as non-sensical as lamenting that you never got cancer, so you never experienced the pleasure of treating it with chemotherapy. If the fetus doesn’t have desires because it isn’t sentient, they don’t need to be fulfilled, because they don’t exist, just like you only crave the chemotherapy if you already have cancer.

You cannot possibly deprive a purely asexual person of sex, because they are obviously not interested in having sex, so the absence of sex in their life never manifests as a problem, as a harm, lacking sex can only be an issue if you desire to engage in it. If you don’t like chocolate because you find it to taste like dog shit, I can’t hurt you by taking it away from you.

Fertilized eggs and sperm feel the exact same way about being killed – nothing.

A fertilized egg or non-sentient fetus obviously has absolutely zero desire to become a sentient child in the future, it doesn’t care about its future any more than the sperm did before it fertilized the egg, so the fact that it will become sentient in the future is completely irrelevant, it’s no more affected by its abortion than a tomato being turned into ketchup.

The effect here is in essence the same as never being born. If you are ejaculated into a tissue and flushed down the toilet, you never suffered a loss. If you are being aborted before you become conscious, you never suffered a loss either, it caused the exact same effect – no harm, no pain, no suffering whatsoever, except in delusional individuals who project their desire to cling to life onto the non-sentient fetus.

If you have the potential to become a professional athlete, plus a wish to do so, I can hurt you by cutting your legs off. A fertilized egg has the potential to become sentient, but no wish to do so, so you can’t hurt it by aborting it, just like the purely asexual person can’t be deprived of sex because they are not interested in it to any degree.

Here pro-lifers will then often times use unfair examples to try to demonstrate that the absence of pleasure can be a problem, even if no one feels deprived of it, the deprivation still somehow manifested itself.

One example would include someone wins the lottery, but you don’t tell them that they won the lottery, they don’t miss the money, but you still deprived them of it.

This isn’t a fair comparison, because the person still had a desire to do something for which the money would have been required, the person was already sentient, thus had an already existent quality of life, and this quality of life is impaired by not obtaining the money, they want to do things to which this money will be an instrument.

So yes, in that scenario, you are holding them back by not giving them the money. Already sentient person already has a desire to buy a new car, so you are hurting them by refusing to give them the money. The fetus on the other hand, again, has absolutely no desire to buy a new car, so you are not hurting it by refusing to turn it into a sentient child that will be able to buy a new car one day.

What if someone drops a gift in front of your door while you’re on vacation and I take it away? You didn’t know I took it away, but you were still deprived.

But that is again because you’re an already sentient organism whose already existent quality of life would be improved by receiving the gift, you would feel worse without the gift than if you were to receive the gift, and I’d be at fault for keeping you in this more negative state by taking away the gift, it can’t be applied to the fetus because the fetus has no quality of life at all.

Same would apply to a school education, they may say a child does not initially feel deprived of its school education, but obviously the implication they’d be making would still be that the child still needs it in order to do things in life later on for which said school education would be a prerequirement, again, the non-sentient fetus on the other hand wants no future, so you are not hurting it by refusing to instill consciousness into it.

Pro-lifers might bring up suicidal individuals, i.e John doesn’t want a future anymore, so why not just stab him in the throat right there on the spot?

Chances are, John still has an interest in avoiding pain just like any other sentient organism though, so obviously just brutally murdering someone can still be argued to be a bad thing, if it were indeed a consensual euthanasia, there would be absolutely no rational reason to oppose that, why torture someone by entrapping them in a circumstance they don’t wish to be in?

It’s a not well thought through point, similar to how some pro-lifers bring up people with CIP syndrome to defeat the sentience argument.

Obviously someone with CIP syndrome can still feel fear, depression, existential dread, they are just less sensitive to certain types of pain, so it’s not as if a person with a congenital insensitivity has as little of an existent welfare as a living, but non-sentient fetus that is pretty much on the same mental level of a living, but non-sentient tomato, carrot, eggplant, they just can’t help but to ascribe feelings to non-feeling things.

This is just a typical outdated, primitive understanding of pain, ultimately pain and suffering are the same thing, they are both generated by the brain, pain in your arm isn’t really only in your arm, the effect is still created by the brain, just like ”emotional pain” (which is all pain, obviously, all pain is emotional, i.e a sensation).

What about coma patients though?

They equally bring up this future value argument when it comes to coma patients, indicating that they think it’s wrong to kill the unconscious because they’re going to have a future, not taking into account that this could be based on the past, rather than the future.

The reason why we can realistically say that chances are, it’s worse to kill an unconscious coma patient than to kill an unconscious fetus has more to do with the past rather than the future. If we legalized just pulling the plug on someone once they fall into a coma, they would be upset about that before they were to fall into that coma, because they were already conscious.

The thing is, the fetus was never conscious beforehand, so in that case, we don’t have that problem, when the fetus was a sperm, it was never bothered by the legal status of abortion, thinking to itself:

”So if I were to fertilize an egg one day, some asshole could just abort me? This hurts my feelings PROFOUNDLY, I always wanted to turn from a completely non-conscious sperm into a conscious child. So my life has no value just because I’m not sentient??? You think you can decide over life and death you monsters??? SPERM LIVES MATTER!”.

Which would be the emotional effect that it might have on people if we were to legalize just pulling the plug on them if they drop unconscious one day. Frankly, I think we can say that this often times delusional as well, there is really no rational reason to just be scared of non-existence per se, obviously it’s going to be no different from before you were born – you won’t miss out on fulfilling your needs, wants, desires because you’ll no longer have any needs, wants, desires.

If you lead a productive life and try to reduce suffering in other organisms, perhaps have some sort of obligation, like taking care of someone else, we could argue it’s good to wake you up again, but just the loss of life itself I don’t think could rationally be argued to be a tragedy if it causes no pain, because again, the non-sentient do not feel deprived of anything, if we just made your sleep permanent, you wouldn’t mind.

But that is a slight distinction and practical complication to this issue with coma patients, if anything, I don’t think you should wake up the coma patient because he has a future, more because not doing so might scare others before they fall into a coma.

A last retort you’ll sometimes hear in response to this is ”what if the person has no memory of their past?”, which I fail to see how that is meant to disprove anything, if they wouldn’t have any memory of their past after waking up again, they still experienced the past when it was the present, and in that present moment, they perhaps felt bad about it being legal for someone to pull the plug on them if they were to fall into a coma, so this would be an irrelevant question.

In conclusion, I think it ultimately all deals back to the first fundamental issue of them projecting certain emotions onto the fetus, I won’t call it anthropomorphism because the fetus obviously contains human DNA, so it is human.

They’re not pretending it’s human, they are basically pretending it is equivalent to a conscious organism who worries about their fate, and even if it never was conscious before, it will somehow experience harm as a result of not being made into a conscious being.

They imagine ”not having been born” from the perspective of ”I’m here right now, and then I would be really upset if no one brought me here, lamenting my non-existence from the depths of the unborn purgatory, for which I have absolutely no evidence that it actually exists”, often revealed by them also asking the question ”how would you feel if you were aborted?” as if you could actually feel anything about that.

Even if the thought made me feel uneasy in this moment, I can still rationally comprehend that it would have never harmed me if I were never born, so there would be no reason to be upset about it. If you don’t exist, you don’t need to exist.

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?”