Tag: suffering

Eating animals because they’re less intelligent.

The argument for humans rights is the same argument for animal rights, other animals possess the characteristic that makes it important to be put into the category of organisms that have rights, which is sentience – the capacity to feel things.

It is not my white skin color that makes it important for me to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat, as I could be braindead, still contain white skin color, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not the white skin color that makes avoidance of a knife in my throat into an important priority.

It is not my penis that makes it important for me to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat, as I could be braindead, still contain a penis, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not penis that makes avoidance of knife in my throat into an important priority.

And finally, it is not my human DNA that makes it an important priority to avoid having a knife shoved in my throat either, as I could be braindead, still contain human DNA, but it could not possibly matter to me if I had a knife shoved in my throat, so this proves that it’s not human DNA that makes avoidance of knife in my throat into an important priority.

There is absolutely no reason why it would be in any way worse to pull the plug on a braindead person, any more than to pull the plug on a computer, the only reason why it could ever possibly be bad to do so is because it affects another sentient organism, like a family member or friend of their’s that has some kind of emotional attachment to the braindead body, but if that family would indeed be more upset by someone destroying their computer than the braindead human, then it would be worse to destroy the computer in fact.

Speciesists are under ingroup favoritism/bias, just like racists and sexists, i.e I am important because I can feel things, that is understood, but this other creature is not important despite being able to feel things just like me, because it doesn’t share group membership with me, you’re not in team white, team penis or team human, so we can torture you.

An other difference that exists between humans and animals, that does not as severely exist between whites and blacks, or men and women, is the different level of intelligence, it is true that pigs, cows, chicken are much less intellectually capable than humans, whereas there’s no such extreme difference between blacks and whites, or men and women.

  • However, then we run into the mental retardation problem.

There are of course severely mentally disabled humans that aren’t much more intelligent than pigs, cows, chicken, definitely not chimpanzees, so would any of these speciesists sign me a contract that states that if they were to get into a car accident tomorrow and end up on the same level of intelligence as a pig, cow or chicken, I am allowed to treat them as a pig, cow or chicken?

Let’s say you are no longer able to add 50 plus 50, and cannot read books, so now I can cut your nuts off with no anesthesia, stick my arm up your asshole and throw you into a meatgrinder once you are of no more use for me to rape and exploit? Is that perfectly fine? I couldn’t get any more milk out of that retarded bitch’s tits, so I beat her to death with a sledgehammer. Why not?

  • ”BUT THEY’RE STILL HUMANS!!!!!”

Saying that such disabled humans are still human though, even if they’re not as intelligent, so they’re still granted rights unlike the other animals is nothing but a cheap cop-out, because if the speciesist specifically states intelligence to be the reason why humans have rights unlike animals, and we already established that human DNA in and of itself is worthless (braindead vegetables contain human DNA but can’t feel shit), then obviously if there’s a human that does not possess such a level of intelligence, they don’t deserve rights, plain and simple, it’s logical consistency.

It would be analogous a sexist saying men are granted rights because they’re stronger than women, but then, when we find these sexists a man that is just as weak as the average woman, they say ”but he still has a peepee!” to justify why this man has rights, but women don’t, because the very reason they stated as to why penis havers deserve rights is because they’re stronger than women, this man is not, so he doesn’t deserve rights according to said sexist.

They basically want to attempt to say that even if this retarded person is no more intelligent than a pig that they justify eating based on said pig’s lack of intelligence, they should still be treated the same as other humans, because they share one characteristic with them, which is being human.

This is completely irrational and arbitrary, by that sort of rule (treat the minority the same as the majority based on sharing one characteristic with them), I could say most people are not rapists, Ted Bundy is a serial rapist but also a person, so therefore, we shouldn’t arrest Ted Bundy, because he shares the characteristic, which is personhood with non-rapists.

Speciesists don’t really have any coherent excuse for this, here they frequently just try to make it sound more complex than it is, by appealing to extrinsic factors that may in practice, not in principle be different about causing harm to an unintelligent creature, or use other concepts to describe intelligence and say that animals lack these capacities, like rationality, reason, the ability to reciprocate morals and social contracts, etc.

So they might say if you assault the retarded person, the family of the retarded person would be upset, if you assault the cow, no one would be upset, except the cow of course.

Great, then just rape a retarded orphan child that no one knows on an abandoned island, or in a society of psychopaths that all join in and rape the retarded orphan child too. You’d sign the contract then that says if you end up retarded, we can treat you like that? No.

The pig on the other hand was just bred for meat, the retard wasn’t! Great, then let’s just explicitly breed pig IQ humans for the purpose of turning them into mince meat then, that surely makes it a lot better, as long as you breed someone for the sole purpose of exploiting them it’s alright, slavery is only a problem if you weren’t bred for it and your IQ is over 70.

Of course, they’d mock even the idea of a cow being assaulted or raped, because the cow is supposedly not intelligent enough to understand the concept of assault and rape (i.e in our differently verbalized language, they still feel what is happening), the cow cannot spell the words assault or rape. So therefore, supposedly you can’t assault or rape them because they’re too dumb.

Although, they would of course be completely fine with calling the assaulting and raping of a human female on the IQ level of a cow assault and rape, it’s hypocritical on every level, perhaps they’d even say ”OH MY GOD THIS IS RAPE” if they walked in on some guy inserting his arm into their tied up pet dog’s anus, that is no more significantly intelligent than a cow either.

Or speciesists may dress it up in other abilities that are related to intelligence to make their bigot argument sound more complex, some examples would include:

  • ”Ability to understand morals and reciprocate the social contract.”

Same problem applies, some humans cannot adequately reciprocate ethics, here a favorite dishonest weasel tactic is of course to appeal to violent mentally handicapped humans that have been locked away for the sake of public safety to demonstrate how these individuals lost their right to freedom as well, but we’re not talking about their violence, just their retardation, and there are harmless retarded individuals that don’t need to be locked away, just like pigs, cows, chicken are harmless.

  • ”Ability to understand and speak in our language.”

Hilarious one too, that retarded mute cunt couldn’t talk back, so I just kept raping her.

  • ”Ability to write poems, philosophize and make scientific discoveries.”

Even average humans often can’t do that, so turn them into mince meat?

  • ”Ability to do math.”

So a calculator or a computer has more rights than an average human child?

  • ”Ability to think and plan ahead for the future.”

Same problem, not to mention that many animals can do this, but that’s a less important point.

And so on and so forth, ultimately it all boils down to the same concept – intelligence, and very obviously, intelligence is not why you want to avoid pain, if you legitimately believe that, you are delusional, psychotic, fundamentally disconnected from objective reality.

A butthurt attempt at downplaying the suffering of animals is then often times also that because these other animals are less intelligent, therefore can’t comprehend how to act rationally towards one another, we’re somehow allowed to be just as retarded, even when we know better.

  • ”Ha! Silly vegans, you all try to save the animals, but the fact is, these animals would eat you too if they got the chance!!! Look at nature, dog eat dog world, the lion is eating the zebra too so why shouldn’t we do the same???”

You are appealing to what retarded creatures that don’t know any better are doing, to justify you doing the same, even though you know better.

Imagine the following scenario, I work in a facility for mentally retarded humans, sometimes these disabled individuals are sexually assaulting and beating each other, because they lack the ability to think about and contemplate the ethical implications of their actions.

What would be the ethically responsible thing to do here?

  • 1 – Prevent them from sexually assaulting and beating each other.

Or:

  • 2 – Joining in and brutally raping a mentally disabled girl too because they did too.

Look, these retards don’t know any better, they would sexually assault you as well, so you might as well just join in and sexually assault them too. No problem.

Not to mention, other animals are largely completely harmless to you as well, pigs, cows, chicken generally don’t assault humans in some kind of dangerous manner, so that makes it even worse.

It’s not as though we’re talking about a lion attacking you, which we could analogize to a big, strong retarded person sexually assaulting you, we’re talking about a chicken that can’t seriously harm you, so this is pretty much like some sociopathic rapist saying you are under no obligation to not violently assrape a 3 year old with your fist because a 3 year old kicked you in the nuts once.

The 3 year old has no obligation not to punch me, so I don’t have an obligation not to punch the 3 year old either, checkmate you anti-child abuse idiots. You don’t punch 3 year olds? Well guess what, they would punch you because they don’t know any better, so I should do the same!

You get the point, ultimately supporting animal abuse because animals have a lower IQ is not a rational stance, it’s an irrational stance, and none of the dishonest tactics that speciesists use to justify this stand up to scrutiny in any way.

We all share the same motivation.

Something that inevitably comes up in most ethical discussions, especially when you point out to someone that they are supporting suffering, or that they are irrationally opposed to something that doesn’t result in suffering, is that they simply have a different ethic, so they can’t be criticized or held accountable for anything.

  • ”But I simply value something other than suffering, so I don’t have to care about anything you say, everything is relative, everyone just has a different opinion, I don’t care about suffering, and I’m entitled to my opinion, so now I’m gonna gass some jews and you can’t stop me!”.

I think this intellectually lazy type of argumentation misses a very fundamental point about the behavior of sentient organisms – we all share the same goal of avoiding harm, pain, suffering, negative sensation and the rules we make are just extensions of that first fundamental interest in avoiding negative sensations.

A deontologist is just a deluded consequentialist, who believes their particular moral rule/law to be conducive to the achievement of better consequences, i.e less suffering, if said deontologist did legitimately not believe the rule to be conducive to ultimately creating better consequences, they would not believe in their rule.

Take for example a religious terrorist, who believes he has to self-detonate in the middle of a gay pride parade, if you point out to someone like that that this is bad, because it will cause a lot of unnecessary (to prevent any greater sort of) suffering, he’ll likely say so what, suffering is not always bad or the main issue to be concerned with here, there are certain rules you just don’t break, and it’s simply against god’s rules to take a dick up your ass, full stop bro.

But that still doesn’t answer why he thinks he has to do the terrorist attack, a law/rule just doesn’t come out of nowhere, if you dig deep enough, chances are you’ll find that the terrorist is still motivated by a wrongly perceived threat of suffering.

He might think that if he doesn’t do the terrorist attack and eradicate the sinners, he’ll go to hell, which is a place of suffering, and if he does the terrorist attack, he’ll go to heaven, which is a place absent of all suffering. He might think that the sinners he’s about to attack are a threat of suffering, and if we accepted homosexuals, society would be infested with AIDS and rape.

So ultimately, he’s still acting based on (wrongly perceived) consequences, he’s not a real deontologist who believes in a moral rule for the sake of believing in said moral rule at all, he’s just a delusional consequentialist who made a false calculation about what will most efficiently eliminate suffering, because he believes in something unrealistic, a fable story with no evidence behind it and likely received wrong information about homosexuals his entire life.

Even if he would proclaim to be perfectly rational and wanting to kill the homosexuals because being gay is ”just wrong”, then he’s still motivated by suffering reduction, this feeling of ”just wrongness” is a form of suffering, and he tries to prevent it by doing what feels ”just right”.

Even if he’s just a sadistic sociopath who wants to cause suffering to others and uses his religion as an excuse for doing so, then he’s still motivated by the goal of suffering reduction, i.e he suffers from an urge to inflict suffering onto others for his pleasure, and the suffering of this urge is alleviated by inflicting suffering onto others, so then he’d still be motivated by the goal of reducing suffering, just also logically inconsistent in not thinking of suffering in the other organisms as just as worth preventing, because it’s the same thing – suffering.

It’d be like saying water from water bucket A should be used to water plants because it’s so perfectly wet and watery, but water from water bucket B should not be used to water plants, although it’s just as wet and watery. If suffering in meat suit A is worth preventing because it has the property ”it feels bad”, then so is suffering in meat suit B worth preventing, because it has the same property. If our terrorist thinks suffering is worth preventing when it happens to him because it feels bad, he should think the same way when it happens to everyone else, because it feels just as bad.

It’s bad when suffering is happening to you because suffering itself is bad, not because it’s happening to you in particular and you’re somehow more important than everyone else, if suffering were only bad when it happened to you, then so would pleasure be bad if it happened to you, because it’s in the same exact category – ”things that happen to you”.

  • If someone really believed that a rule had no utility, then they would not believe in said rule, we believe in rules because 1. they are or 2. we falsely believe them to be conducive to the reduction of our suffering in some way.

Pro-lifers, pro-choicers, authoritarians, libertarians, theists, antitheists all have the same goal, they all want to avoid suffering, it just happens to be the case that they all have different ideas about what will most efficiently achieve the goal of preventing more suffering in the grand scheme of things, authoritarians believe strict hierarchy will lead to a less chaotic society that will produce less suffering, libertarians believe in maximizing freedom because being locked in a cage causes suffering, the motivation is the same.

But once we’ve established that preventing suffering is the goal, it is possible to draw correct and incorrect conclusions about what will achieve the goal, and then we can definitively tell a pro-lifer that aborting a living, but non-sentient fetus doesn’t create any more suffering in the fetus than in living, but non-sentient vegetables when you chop them up and turn them into salad, their threat detection system is simply deficient, they just have to understand that if they were aborted, they would have never missed out on being alive from the unborn purgatory.

If I really abducted anyone of any religious or political orientation, locked them into my basement, tortured them for an extended period of time by putting their hands on the stove top until their hands are disfigured, beat them with a sledgehammer repeatedly, put nails up their asses, etc, and I made it crystal clear to them that this is for absolutely no compensation, no greater good or payment whatsoever for anyone at any point, they wouldn’t want that.

So to be clear, the game is not called ”push your hand onto the stove top until it’s disfigured for 5$ an hour to be donated to starving kids in Africa”, it’s just ”push your hand onto the stove top until it’s disfigured for no reason whatsoever”, they would universally try to escape, no doubt about it.

Unless they’re the one in a thousand extreme, Albert Fish-type masochists that get off on having nails shoved in their asses, in which case, there’d be a benefit and utility to be derived again – to reaching an orgasm, the relief of tension. So it’d still be an attempt to avoid suffering, no way around it.

So the point is, everyone acts based on suffering, we believe in rules because we believe these rules to be conducive to the reduction of our suffering, if we didn’t believe that to be the case, we wouldn’t believe in them anymore, rules are a mere result of consequences, an attempt at avoiding harms/pains/sufferings. No consequences – no need for rules.

And because thinking and calculating utility of actions requires more brain power than sticking to a simplistic, dogmatic rule, many stick to a dogmatic rule, going against the actual goal without noticing it in due time, e.g.

  • The pro-lifer may observe that generally taking human life results in suffering, so they’re against taking human life, even when it causes no suffering in a non-sentient fetus.
  • The jew-hider may observe that lying generally results in suffering, so they’re telling the nazis they’re hiding jews in their basement, even when it causes more suffering to happen than it prevents.
  • The conservative police officer may observe that breaking the law often results in suffering, so he thinks he’d doing something good by harassing someone for smoking marijuana, even when it causes more suffering to happen than it prevents.

It is delusional behavior. Imagine a hypothetical alien species that could also feel pain, and what they had to do in order to alleviate pain and achieve pleasure, relief, alleviation is wank their left tentacle, every action that they take could be boiled down to the masturbation of a left tentacle somewhere and somehow, or ultimately even, just the reduction of suffering as well of course, but let’s say jerking the left tentacle is instrumental to achieving that – without exception.

These aliens would also self-unawarely say things like:

  • ”I don’t only want to jerk off my left tentacle, you think I’m a mere pain and pleasure vessel??? You vulgar idiot, I’m but a very sophisticated alien, I also value watching plasma TV, taking a great long walk on the beach and buying a great, high quality block of swiss cheese. I have civilization, I have class. You think I’m just some dumb animal!?”.

But then when you observe this creature, all that it is doing is wanking its left tentacle in front of the plasma TV, digging a hole at the beach to stick their left tentacle in, and the swiss cheese, it also just sticks its left tentacle in its holes to shoot its alien jizz inside it.

The conclusion is obvious – these aliens are completely deluded about what the underlying motivation of their actions is, they have deluded themselves into believing that all sorts of different things have value, when the only value is in the experience itself, they’re just trying to jerk off and overcomplicating it.

And this is exactly how humans behave, they’re for some reason desperate to believe they’re not just simplistic organisms feeling pain, trying to avoid feeling pain, they are somehow much more sophisticated for valuing all sorts of different non-sense that the other primitive animals can’t understand, when in reality, they only value it because it in some way helps or they believe that it helps to achieve the goal of reducing pain.

  • What is value without suffering even supposed to mean?

What is ”I value x” even supposed to mean? When I say, ”I value eating potatoes” for example, all that that really means is that for some reason, eating potatoes reduces some sort of condition of suffering in me, maybe it is hunger, maybe it is appetite out of boredom, and eating the potato is conducive to reducing this condition of suffering, but obviously the potato itself is not valuable, the potato cannot create value as it simply doesn’t have a brain that can produce a sentient experience like I do, the good is the reduction of my suffering, not the potato itself.

I value the potato=I suffer if I don’t eat it.

I need/want/desire the potato=I suffer if I don’t eat it.

I have a personal preference for the potato=I suffer if I don’t eat it.

The objects themselves have no value, so to speak. An almong is neither good or bad, it might produce negative sensations in someone with an almond allergy, and in someone without an almond allergy but with a peanut allergy, almonds might cause pleasure, relief of suffering, whereas peanuts would cause the negative sensations, but the negative sensation is the same, it’s negative. So these objects, almonds and peanuts are neither good or bad, they only have extrinsic value to something else, i.e our experience, our experience is the only real value event happening.

  • The potato has no real value.
  • The almond has no real value.
  • The garbage truck has no real value.
  • The lamborghini has no real value.
  • The money has no real value.
  • Gold has no real value.
  • Platinum has no real value.

They only have extrinsic value to your experience, no real value. So if someone says something like ”you might value reducing animal suffering, but I value eating bacon much more!” – we can analyze and point out their mistake.

They only value eating bacon because eating bacon reduces the suffering of an urge to eat bacon inside them, the bacon itself is not a good because it doesn’t have a brain that can produce sensations with labels like good and bad, it’s the reduction of their suffering from an urge to eat it that is the real good, but if the reduction of the suffering itself is the good, and buying bacon obviously causes more suffering to pigs than it causes reduction in suffering in yourself, then obviously the better option for you would be to stop buying it to reduce even more suffering.

In conclusion, as stated before, a deontologist is just a deluded consequentialist, no one acts based on rules alone, rules are a result of the existence of consequences, if the problem of suffering did not exist, we wouldn’t have to make rules to mitigate against it and prevent it from happening.

If you have some kind of strict moral rule, like ”never fuck a corpse”, chances are you only believe in that rule because you believe the fucking of corpses to result in harm somewhere along the way, imagining someone fucking your dead mother right in front of you or something, then feeling offended by witnessing that incident, you don’t just believe it to be ”just wrong” without perceiving a threat to welfare first to motivate this feeling of ”just-wrongness”.

Things can be ethically wrong only according to a certain set of rules, and the only reason why rules are made is because there are consequences – suffering, and that is why we use the rules as a tool to try to avoid it, if the rule doesn’t serve that purpose anymore, then the rule is wrong, it fails to achieve the only pre-established purpose that it could possibly ever have.

That’s why it’s absurd when someone uses whatever right or rule they established as an excuse to not care about the harm they cause to others – ”it’s legal to rape my wife so it’s no problem”.

The reason why we crave laws in the first place is because suffering exists, so we make laws to protect ourselves and mitigate against it, if the law does not even achieve that goal though, then it’s essentially worthless, it doesn’t achieve the only goal that a sentient organism is even capable of having anymore.

Non-sentient bacteria have no laws but that is also completely irrelevant, because bacteria is not sentient, so the absence of laws and rights in a culture of bacteria not to be cannibalized by another bacteria is not a problem. The reduction of suffering is good, not the law itself.

Suffering, badness itself is the only bad thing in the universe, sentient experience is the only value creating thing in the entire universe, the objects, rights and entitlements on a piece of paper by themselves have no value, you eat the chocolate cake because it reduces your suffering, your urge to eat it, not because the chocolate cake itself is somehow a good, because it doesn’t have a brain.

If all sentient organisms went extinct tomorrow, chocolate cake would have absolutely zero (extrinsic) value, all chocolate cake can be liquidated forever, it would not matter, thinking otherwise would be completely delusional.

There is no goal for any sentient organism on this planet except to avoid harm, and if it no longer wants to avoid harm, it is no longer a sentient organism. You don’t have a different opinion at the core than any other organism, the nature of our disagreement lies in having different strategies to go on about our established goal of preventing suffering, and in this game, it is possible to judge your actions as correct or incorrect, you are bound by it, there is no way for you to escape the game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Not to forget the imposition aspect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The idea that suffering can be good.

An idea often espoused in response to hearing about antinatalism or just in general as a delusional coping mechanism with life is that suffering can be good sometimes, individuals like Jordan Peterson for instance get celebrated for speaking to people with this type of ”tough love” approach, and telling them that life is suffering but it’s all worth it, we shouldn’t just stop the production of suffering-capable organisms.

The idea behind this general idea of suffering supposedly being good sometimes and we shouldn’t just prevent it all from happening by stopping the production of sentient, suffering life (e.g. humans, other mammals, insects, not necessarily fruits, vegetables, fungi) right away is that basically when you suffer, it builds character, strength and resilience that you will need to deal with aforementioned sentient life, or it might be a warning signal of some sort.

The issue with this should be obvious though – negative sensation itself is by definition bad just like water is watery, it is literal badness, a negative sensation/experience of some sort, the fact that sometimes one suffering is required to avoid an even greater suffering doesn’t prove suffering itself to be good. Suffering, badness itself, is bad.

For example, if we have to torture one person to prevent a billion from being tortured just as intensely and there’s nothing else we can do about it, then it’s the lesser of two evils, but the torture itself still feels bad, it’d be better if we could prevent it by cutting up an apple instead. If you say negative sensations can be positive, you might as well say wet is dry or hot is cold, it automatically cannot be anything but contradictory, good suffering is an oxymoron.

Sometimes in life, you have to experience one suffering to avoid an even greater one, but that doesn’t mean that suffering itself is good, that just proves it’s less bad than the more intense form of suffering that otherwise would have happened.

An example would be the painful vaccination in order to avoid a much worse disease you’d otherwise be prone to dying of, but you’re getting it exactly because suffering is bad, because suffering from an illness would be worse than one little needle prick in your arm for a few uncomfortable seconds. If you could snap your fingers in order to obtain the immunity, you would do that instead. The pain itself is bad, the good is the immunity to the illness.

Pain is a warning signal is also something that defenders of suffering will often say, i.e you feel your hand being burned on the stove top so you pull it away.

Again, we can demonstrate again that it’s not the pain itself that is good, but the avoidance of the greater pain, if you could be informed of the danger by something else without the pain, like someone standing next to you who notices it quicker always simply reminding you you’re about to burn yourself before you accidentally leave your hand on the stove top for too long, you would go for that instead of burning yourself to any degree at all.

So we can notice a pattern here in all of these situations where suffering is supposedly good, the person only falsely identifies it as good because it later on results in the prevention of an even greater form of suffering, and if the person could prevent the greater suffering without having to inflict a lesser suffering onto themselves, like snapping their fingers instead of getting an injection, then they would take that less painful option.

Why would you need a warning signal to prevent the worse pain of completely burning your hand on the stove top from happening instead, if pain is not a problem? You wouldn’t, so suffering can have instrumental value to the avoidance of a greater suffering sometimes, that doesn’t prove negative sensation itself to be simultaneously positive.

Suffering makes you stronger they say, but why do you even need to be stronger? Right, only to avoid more suffering associated with being weaker, thus vulnerable to more suffering in the future. If suffering is only ”good” because it helps you to avoid more suffering in the future, then that if anything proves that suffering is bad, because you’re only bearing said suffering to avoid even more of it in the future.

The only reason why you even need more character, strength and resilience built out of suffering in your life to begin with is to later on deal with more potential suffering emerging in your life, to not fall into deep despair upon being faced with adversity and challenges, so it actually doesn’t prove suffering to be good, it proves suffering to be bad.

When your hamster died of cancer, it was ”good for you” because it desensitized you to you later on seeing your mother die of cancer.

  • But why is it good to be desensitized to your mother dying of cancer?

Only because otherwise you’d suffer even more intensely from witnessing that incident, which is bad, it’s the avoidance of that suffering which is the real good which the suffering of seeing your hamster die has only been instrumental to achieving, not the suffering itself, suffering itself is always bad, just like all water is watery and all shit is shitty.

Negative sensations are indeed not positive. Going with the lesser of two evils doesn’t make it no longer feel bad, just less bad than the other bad. The needle in your arm still produced a negative sensation, it’s just that getting a disease would hurt even more, if you could snap your fingers to grant yourself immunity to illness, you’d probably do that instead.

If someone holds a gun to your head and forces you eat either one bucket of horse shit or ten buckets of horse shit, that doesn’t mean that one bucket of it suddenly tastes good, it just tastes less bad than ten buckets of horse shit.

The fact that suffering sometimes happened prior to a good event doesn’t mean that it is good, if a fire burns down your house in the winter and now you’re sitting in the cold, that doesn’t prove fire to be cold. Now you might be sitting in the cold, but the fire burned your house down exactly because it was hot.

  • But what about masochists?

Even a masochist ramming a needle into his urethra or a depressed individual cutting their arm isn’t enjoying suffering – they are enjoying the relief of a suffering they are already experiencing, merely using a pain to eliminate a greater pain.

A masochist will experience intensified sexual frustration if he doesn’t inflict pain onto himself, then leading to him becoming more tense and pressurized, thus ultimately more suffering in the long run.

A depressed person will experience intensified depression or other negative states if they don’t cut their arm, so they cut their arm to blend out the worse pain with the pain in their arm, so to speak.

If I told anyone beforehand who has absolutely zero masochistic preferences that I’m a magician and could it make it so that by snapping my fingers, they won’t be able to have an orgasm anymore unless they cut their eyeballs out and rub some chili sauce in their sockets, set their pubic hair on fire and extract every tooth they have with a plier, they wouldn’t want me to do that.

Perhaps they would even use lethal violence to prevent me from doing that, they would rather be able to cum without having to inflict intense suffering onto themselves, because all suffering is bad, just like all water is watery, all shit is shitty, if the masochist could get the exact same relief without the pain involved, they would do so.

Sometimes, some extreme masochists may find themselves in a situation where they have to do these things to avoid sexual frustration, which is a form of suffering, but if you could choose beforehand to get the exact same amount of pleasure from something else, you wouldn’t want to be the one who has to extract all their teeth with a plier in order to cum.

So what is happening here is essentially that as a delusional coping mechanism, when suffering is experienced by people, they observe that it is sometimes the lesser of two evils to bear one suffering over another even worse form of suffering, like the sensation of the needle pricking your arm to avoid a worse illness like small pox.

Then, they fall victim to the delusional conclusion that this now means that even when the suffering in question is not required to avoid a greater suffering, it is still good, because somehow, bad feelings can somehow be good, wet can somehow be dry, hot can somehow be cold.

I get that it’s a delusional coping mechanism which might help some of them to get through the day, but it’s a problem that they even have to get through a day where they require such a coping mechanism to begin with, and it certainly becomes a problem when this coping mechanism is used to justify all sorts of suffering that isn’t required for the avoidance of any greater problem.

  • War? Whatever, pain is a warning signal.
  • Factory farming? Whatever, suffering creates great wisdom.
  • Children dying of starvation in Africa? Pull yourself up by the bootstraps.
  • You have terminal cancer? Whatever, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

It’s being used as an excuse for not fixing problems.

The problem with this ”suffering is good” approach in the context of reproductive ethics (natalism vs. antinatalism, to procreate or not to procreate) used by pro-natalists and pro-lifers should also be rather obvious – there is no unborn purgatory from which children need to be rescued, no one is spared from a worse fate by being reproduced.

It’s true that once you exist, you sometimes have to tolerate one suffering to avoid an even greater one, but obviously before the child actually exists, the child doesn’t actually exist, so it’s not somehow worse off, suffering in an unborn purgatory, lamenting that their parents that don’t reproduce them are somehow subjecting them to worse suffering in the unborn purgatory than by subjecting them to life on earth.

You’re just creating a pain machine to be motivated by that pain to try to avoid that pain again, there’s nothing efficient or productive about that, the suffering caused by reproduction is not instrumental to avoiding some kind of greater pain that exists in the universe.

So if we use the vaccination example again, the child might need the vaccination to avoid a much more painful illness once it exists, that is true, but obviously, before it existed, it didn’t need to become prone to that illness it now needs to be vaccinated against in the first place, it wasn’t sitting around in the unborn purgatory thinking:

  • ”I wish I became prone to small pox so that I can get a vaccination against it one day! Why do I have to suffer from an urge to obtain an urge to avoid illnesses?”

That the child is prone to illness in the first place is the fault of the parents that produced it, so it would still be perfectly rational for the child with a fear of needles to blame their parents for even creating its proneness to illness in the first place without knowing whether or not the child will be fine with that later on.

This same line of reasoning is then of course even used to justify more child abuse on top of reproduction:

  • ”The child needs to be spanked!”

Why?

  • ”To learn discipline!”

But why does the child need to learn to be disciplined?

  • ”To toughen up and compete with others, get a good job! Hardship builds great character!”

But why do they need to be resilient and successful in life? Right, because otherwise they will fail to acquire resources to fulfill certain needs, wants, desires in their life, they won’t be as fulfilled and satisfied, perhaps not achieve their goals in life due to said lack of discipline.

  • And who’s to blame for that?

You are to blame for them experiencing those needs, wants, desires they need to fulfill to avoid being tortured by them, because you imposed those needs, wants, desires onto them by reproducing them in the first place, non-existent individuals don’t need, want, desire anything.

It’s like I create a some sort of sadistic game, call it torture and the carrot, where I’m locking you in my basement and tell you that in order to obtain food for further survival, the carrot, you have to saw your left hand off. Then I can justify cutting your little finger off, because that will get you used to pain and desensitize you to later on getting your entire left hand cut off, which you have to do to obtain the carrot or starve to death. See, I’m actually doing you a favor I could say, I’m helping you get closer to the carrot!

See the problem? The problem with this is that I created that problem of you being in need of the carrot in the first place. It’s true that sometimes children have to learn to be disciplined (though highly questionable if beating them will achieve that) to not fail later on in life, but they only have to do that in the sense that if they completely fail at life, they’ll fail to fulfill needs, wants, desires that the procreator instilled into them by not aborting them before they became conscious.

The procreator creates the sick torture and carrot game, sometimes the child now has to endure hardship to get to the carrot, so the procreator justifies giving the child a spanking so it’ll be more desensitized to the more intense hardships and adversities later on in life, but all of this is only a problem if the procreator puts the child into this torture game where you have to bear torture to avoid even worse torture in the first place, which they still haven’t explained why anyone should think that’s a worthwhile endeavor.

If little billy is not created, he doesn’t need to be spanked harder to be more disciplined in order to obtain a good job requiring his emotional resilience and strength later on in life in order to avoid suffering from a low income and being a loser, non-existent little billy does not suffer from an urge to obtain an urge to obtain a job to obtain enough money to fulfill his needs in life from the unborn purgatory in this very moment.

So first you abuse the child by imposing the threat of deprivation on it – need, want, desire, i.e do x or suffer, and then you justify making the child suffer as a necessary evil by disciplining it to desensitize it to later on facing even more intense suffering which will be instrumental to avoiding only some of the suffering you have imposed on it by creating the threat of deprivation in the first place, that seems rather absurd.

Bullying is another great example of this flawed thought process of ”good suffering”.

First you were all skinny and weak, were called a faggot and beaten up in school every day, every girl denied you access to her vagina, then you started working out, taking steroids and beating the shit out of everyone and now you’re drowning in pussy because now you’re much stronger.

  • Totally proves that negative sensations must be good, right?

Wrong, because again, even if the suffering helped you toughen up which then later on resulted in you staving off the suffering of sexual frustration by finally being tough enough to be sexually selected for by some females, the suffering itself you experienced was still bad, the experience of getting bullied was not enjoyable regardless of whether or not it helped you to avoid an even more unenjoyable experience at some point.

Now you exist, so now you need to stick your peepee in a vagina to avoid even worse suffering from not doing so, but when you didn’t exist, you were not trapped in an unborn purgatory, needing to need to stick your peepee in a vagina to avoid even worse suffering, thinking to yourself ”Man, I wish I had to stick my peepee in vaginas in order to avoid suffering sexual frustration, unfortunately my parents won’t impose sexual needs onto me by reproducing me”.

You need it now, but you didn’t need to need it, your parents put you in need by reproducing you, it’s a net negative, you didn’t want to want it before you wanted it, you didn’t desire to desire it before you desired it.

So ultimately, whilst you already exist where you have to tolerate negative sensations from time to time to avoid an even higher amount of negative sensations in the future, the negative sensation itself is always bad, just like water is always watery and shit is always shitty, and before sentience evolved in this universe, the universe was not somehow worse off without us, starving for sentient organisms to be put inside of it.

  • There was no pre-existing damage to fix, we are the damage.

The faulty idea that suffering is good is largely used to justify its continued infliction, it might help one as a coping mechanism to get through the day once in a while to believe it’s all happening for some kind of greater good, but the fact that you even need to get through a day to begin and tell yourselves these lies is a negative, a problem – you are in need, you’re in desperation.

And if we don’t start being more honest about the fact that suffering is bad, procreators will keep putting organisms into situations where they have to tell themselves that suffering is good to cope with life.

The reason why you need that coping mechanism in your life to begin with is because procreators keep creating problems, in an emotional state where they themselves are falling victim to the exact same coping mechanism, thinking:

  • ”Suffering is good, might as well breed, if my children suffer horribly and die of cancer, it’s gonna be real good somehow, it’s just gonna toughen them up!”.

Once suffering exists, it can be necessary to bear one suffering to avoid an even greater one, but the existence of suffering itself to begin with is unnecessary in the grand scheme of things, the universe was never somehow worse off without sentient organisms inside it, our suffering serves absolutely no greater good.

On retributivism and punishment.

Eye for an eye notions, retributivism and punitivity are profoundly intuitive to many, the idea that we ought punish someone for the sake of punishing them, that once you’ve done x, you deserve to have x punishment done to you, the idea that we shouldn’t without restraint harm a child rapist who is no longer a threat and sitting in a prison cell all day offends them deeply.

They may say something like:

  • ”Why shouldn’t we shove a broomstick up this evil rapist’s asshole, why would that be bad to do that if he did the same thing?”

The answer is obvious – for the exact same reason why it was bad when he stuck his dick up the child’s ass – because it causes pain and suffering, which is always bad.

Sometimes you may tolerate one suffering to avoid a greater one, like getting the vaccination to avoid the greater suffering of a deadly disease, or tolerating a boring workplace to obtain money, which you also only need to obtain resources that help you prevent some condition of suffering in your life in one way or another, but suffering itself is always a bad thing.

Even a masochist hurting themselves for sexual pleasure or a bipolar individual cutting themselves for emotional relief are not enjoying negative qualia (it is impossible for negative qualia to be enjoyable) – self-harmers are already experiencing suffering, so to blend out that worse suffering, they have to inflict pain onto themselves, using pain to eliminate a greater pain, for the masochist it would be sexual frustration, for the cutter it might be depression.

So if harm (negative qualia) is always bad, then it can never be the better option to inflict it, unless it prevents an even greater, more intense harm, i.e you see the child rapist raping the child, so you push him off that child to prevent more harm.

The problem with this in the context of punishment is that when the harm causer is being punished, they are usually already detained, that’s kind of implied in the act of punishment – it is an act of violence against the harm causer after the threat the harm causer poses has already been deactivated, otherwise it would just be an act of defense. It might be perceived as punishing by the harm causer, but it’s not for the sake of retribution, punishment.

So while it is perfectly justified for you to defend against the rapist whilst he is raping the child to prevent harm, it would be illogical to insist on punishing him after he has already been stopped and is already spending his whole day in a prison cell where he can no longer assault children anyway.

It was bad when he raped the child because it caused harm, plus he didn’t need to do that in order to defend himself against some kind of greater threat posed by the child, the child was not a threat, but for that exact same reason, it’s now arguably also bad if you shove a broomstick up his ass after he has already been stopped from raping the child, it’s the exact same negative qualia experienced by different subjects, and that negative qualia is not good.

Eye for an eye notions of retributivism are frequently based in human bigotry, cognitive biases, narcissism and delusion, they essentially believe it to be bad to harm feeling things for the wrong reason on a very instinctive, primitive, emotional level, which is why they then fail to acknowledge it as just as bad when abuse is happening to criminals in prison.

So for example, when your mother gets brutally murdered, you may have some kind of gut feeling telling you that this is only bad because it happened to your mother in particular, in which case, it’s not a problem if it happens to the murderer of your mother, because he isn’t your mother, so it wouldn’t be bad to harm him like it was bad when he harmed your mother.

But in reality of course, what happened to your mother was bad because she is a sentient, suffering-capable organism and it doesn’t get any more complicated than that, if it were only bad because it happened to your mother, then it wouldn’t be bad if it happened to literally anyone else who is not your mother, which is simply untrue, it would still cause negative sensation to have a knife in your throat, even someone didn’t give birth to you.

But, that’s of course also why it’d be bad if the murderer of your mother had a knife in his throat, because he’s also a sentient, suffering-capable organism.

Or when a pretty, cute girl gets brutally raped, you may have some kind of gut feeling telling you that this is only bad because she’s pretty and cute, in which case, it’s not a problem if it happens to her rapist, because he’s most likely not that pretty and cute, so it wouldn’t be bad to harm him like it was bad when he harmed the pretty girl.

But in reality of course, what happened to the girl was bad because she is a sentient, suffering-capable organism and it doesn’t get any more complicated than that, if it were only bad because it happened to someone pretty and cute, then it wouldn’t be bad if it happened to literally anyone else who is not pretty and cute, which is simply untrue, it would still cause negative sensation to get raped even if you’re ugly.

But, that’s of course also why it’d be bad if the rapist of that girl got raped, because he’s also a sentient, suffering-capable organism.

Obviously none of these factors that people ascribe some kind of superficial value to are ultimately important to them, the point here is that the harm itself is bad, it’s not bad based on your nepotistic delusions of it only being bad when it happens to your family, women and/or children that elicit some kind of primitive instinctive reaction in you.

If I put any sentient organism in an isolated cell where it cannot possibly pose a threat and torture it, it’s going to be unambiguously bad, no matter what, it will produce negative sensations, no way around it.

It’s usually done for the fleeting emotional pleasure that the victims or angry mobs derive from punishing someone, in which case they then grant the harm causer the right to justify his deeds based on the fleeting emotional pleasure he derived from causing harm.

  • ”But what if the rapist raped your sister? You’d want him dead too!”

But what if you were the rapist? You’d want to rape too!

If you would be the person that wants to do x, you would want to do x too, therefore, doing x is now justified, that seems to be the idea here.

If you want to put Ted Bundy on the electric chair for the purpose of jerking off to it, then so can he consistently keep justifying violently killing women for the purpose of jerking off to it, it’s the same exact justification, you’re both arguing it’s ok to inflict torture so you can jerk off to it.

In many cases, retributivists then justify this sort of behavior by arguing that it is necessary:

  • ”But he could still attack a prison guard!”

In which case, that problem could be solved by just sending more than one prison guard to his cell the next time, rape and murder remain unnecessary harms, because these harms are not required to detain the threat being posed – unless it legitimately happens in a moment of defense against the criminal.

  • ”But he could escape prison!”

Unlikely, but if it’s true, that problem could be solved by just building more steadfast prison walls, rape and murder remain unnecessary harms, because these harms are not required to detain the threat being posed by the criminal.

  • ”But that costs money!”

Which is the least harmful method of defending yourself against the threat. Some individuals cause a lot of harm, so we put these individuals into a home where they cannot cause a lot of harm anymore for the purpose of public safety. I think paying a certain amount of money generally produces less harm than being forced to wait to be executed.

Some may argue that life in prison is actually worse than being executed, but the point is that once a criminal is detained, there is no reason to not consult them on this matter first, I am not against the right to die, it’s just unnecessary to take the ability to decide their fate away from them, plus, again, prisons don’t have to be torture facilities that make someone suicidal in the first place.

If they wanted the death penalty, it wouldn’t be a penalty anymore, it would just be making use of the right to die, which we can have regardless of our criminal status.

  • The only good argument for punishment would be deterrence.

So let’s say we just took the concept again of taking any sentient organism, putting it in a cell and torturing it, but it had to be done just once to prevent an even more intense harm from befalling everyone, let’s say everyone going to hell and burning alive over and over again eternally. In that case, it would still be bad, but it would obviously be less bad than not doing it.

The problem here again though is that it’s usually far from being this clear cut when it comes to crime and punishment. And the distinction between guilty/criminal and innocent/non-criminal remains insignificant, if anyone had to killed to save 1000 others from torture, and there were nothing else we could do about that, it’d be the better option to kill one regardless of their criminal status.

  • Detainment is still deterrence.

No sentient organism wants to be restrained in any way, again, unless it releases another restraint they already experienced, like a masochist being more tense and frustrated if he doesn’t inflict pain onto himself, and you have no way of knowing the exact preferences of all potential criminals. A reduction of your freedom is still a deterring factor, to some it may be a greater one than death, to some it may not be.

  • You don’t necessarily always know if you’re going to prevent a greater harm.

Unlike in the aforementioned hypothetical scenarios I just pointed to, you don’t necessarily know if you’re going to prevent more harm than you cause, perhaps you stick a broomstick up someone’s ass but all the harm you prevented from happening was 5$ being stolen, that’d be bad.

Let’s say you know for sure you could prevent a lot of people from stealing a potato by cutting their hands off and burning them alive in the streets, just the infliction of that punishment would be worse than a potato being stolen once in a while.

  • Althroughout human history and to this day, draconian punishment has been inflicted and crimes have still been committed.

We’ve inflicted torturous draconian punishments on prisoners but their optimism bias was still strong enough for them to believe that they’re never going to get caught, then got caught, tortured to death, and people still committed crimes thinking they’re never going to get caught, optimism bias and overestimation of one’s own invincibility is strong in many humans in general, criminal or non-criminal, but especially when you’re committing a crime (exception of some calculated criminals of course), you might already be in a rather impulsive mental state.

  • You don’t know what exact effect the punishment will have on each potential future criminal. Perhaps it demotivates them to commit crime, perhaps it leaves them neutral about their crimes, perhaps it motivates them to commit even more crimes.

In fact, countries like Norway where prisons look like hotel rooms seem to have the lowest crime rates, whereas a lot of countries that punish rather severely seem to have much higher crime rates.

What if you threaten a potential serial rapist and killer whose goal it is to bring all whores to justice with death, then he rapes and kills even more whores out of spite, then shoots himself, whereas if he were only to be threatened with a debate about whether or not raping whores is good or bad in a 5 star hotel, he would turn himself in to tell us all about it? You threaten the enraged school shooter with death and then he wants to shoot everyone even more for what he thinks is doing the right thing.

We stick a broomstick up the rapist’s asshole.

  • Rapist 1 one stops raping because he wouldn’t like to experience that.
  • Rapist 2 with poor impulse control just jizzes on her belly instead of her pussy next time and runs away in disorientation.
  • Rapist 3 is pissed off for first being denied the pussy he wanted and now wants to take revenge against society for threatening him with torture for intruding vaginas that he considers his private property.
  • Rapist 4 is in addition to being a sadistic rapist also a masochist who wouldn’t necessarily mind having a broomstick shoved up his ass.
  • Rapist 5 gets an adrenaline rush from the fact that we now stick broomsticks up people’s asses for raping, that makes the whole rape game and trying not to get caught even more exciting.

Retributivists often have an irrational belief that criminals are ”just evil” with no explanation for it and all you got to do is just threaten them with death, they can’t be suicidal because that would mean that these monsters have feelings, when in reality, they’re of course ”just evil” out of nowhere.

They devalue criminals, so chances are they’re not even deeply contemplating the emotions and what could possibly motivate them. In that mindset, if they feel that alienated from them, of course they’re going to think it’s as simple as carry some garlic around and the evil vampires won’t attack you.

Punishment for the sake of punishment is bad anyway because all harm itself, the state of being harmed is bad, doesn’t matter if it’s a cute little girl or some fat ugly serial rapist, so pure retributivism is a failure, it’s an irrational concept.

If it’s done to prevent a greater harm, it’d be better to have the information on whether or not said punishment is actually efficient at preventing future harm, which in practice seems almost impossible to tell beforehand.

Therefore, for all intents and purposes, in practice, it still seems more sensible for the default position to simply be not to inflict harm on someone once you’ve stopped them from causing harm, unless you can demonstrate in that specific scenario that it will prevent a greater future harm, if it’s clear cut, i.e cut one hand off to stop a thousand hands from being cut off, nothing else you can do, then you cut one hand off, but in real life it usually simply isn’t that clear cut.

Pedophobes and the argumentum ad baculum fallacy.

There is absolutely zero evidence for the hypothesis that sexual experience in childhood or youth is inherently harmful, there is at best proof that there is a correlation between sex in childhood and trauma in societies that are unaccepting of sexual relations between children/minors and pedophiles/adults, no proof whatsoever that sex in childhood or youth in and of itself causes the trauma.

Because pedophobes irrationally feel disgusted and threatened by the topic, they immediately think of certain harmful factors when they try to process it, like manipulation, blackmail, force, anal penetration, STDs, pregnancy, etc, which are all things that are not inherently connected to the act of having sex with a child/minor though.

Children have genitals and can obviously find out about the existence of sexual pleasure by exploring them on their own, without somehow needing to be fooled or violently coerced into doing so, there’s no evidence and/or reason to think it’s the result of some kind of evil scheme by some underground pedophile cabal misleading children through propaganda.

So if a little girl wants to simply experience the same pleasurable sensation from rubbing herself against a pillow by rubbing herself against a pedophile’s leg, and the pedophile isn’t some kind of violent psychopath that does something to her that she doesn’t want later on, like anal rape, there’s no evidence that such an encounter would be harmful to children unless society reacted negatively to it.

There is zero conclusive scientific evidence that children that voluntarily received sexual relief even in societies where pedosexuality was acceptable felt traumatized by sex, and there are zero reliable or coherent explanations from pedophobe professionals as to how this magical process of trauma just poofing into existence out of the great nowhere is supposed to work, even if the child initially engaged in the sex act without having been manipulated or otherwise forced into it and society simply stopped reacting negatively to it.

Pedophobes just like any other group of bigots assume that because they could prove a correlation between sex in childhood and higher depression rates in adulthood, it proves that it’s caused by the pedophilic sex act itself.

It is similar to how a homophobic bigot would assume that if they see some questionable study that says children of gay parents are more likely to suffer from depression, they assume that it’s directly caused by the fact that the parents are gay and definitely nothing else, the child is depressed because their father sucked a dick, not because the bigots are raising their children to harass children of gay couples.

It’s just a post hoc fallacy, correlation equals causation – B happened after A, therefore, A caused B. The child had sex, the child is traumatized by society’s negative reaction to it, so therefore, sex causes trauma, that’s the faulty idea here. The child left the house while it was raining, the child was wetted by the rain, therefore, so leaving your house causes you to be wetted.

When it gets to that point in the discussion, the pedophobes sometimes simply like to commit another fallacy to prove their point by then simply appealing to the extrinsic harm caused by the harsh social reaction that they themselves are creating in response to such sex acts and say something along the lines of:

  • ”Even if having sex with children is not inherently harmful, in our society, there are still consequences to this perverted behavior either way, so it’s still just as harmful to the poor child in the end, they’ll feel ashamed later on! Why does it matter by what exactly the trauma is caused? No excuses!”

It is ultimately an argumentum ad baculum fallacy – because it’s an entirely self-created consequence. Instead of proving something to be harmful, society, which you are forming part of, is causing harm to someone for engaging in an activity you don’t like, then pretend that the activity they engaged in is harmful because you harmed them in response to engaging in the harmless activity, frequently followed with standard moronic phrases like ”don’t drop the soap LOL”, i.e if you’re a pedo, you get raped in jail, so therefore, pedo=bad.

Argumentum ad baculum (Latin for “argument to the cudgel” or “appeal to the stick”) is the fallacy committed when one appeals to force or the threat of force to bring about the acceptance of a conclusion.[1][2] One participates in argumentum ad baculum when one points out the negative consequences of holding the contrary position (ex. believe what I say, or I will hit you). It is a specific case of the negative form of an argument to the consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_baculum

Let’s say you like to wear red hats. I don’t like that, so in response to you wearing a red hat, I cut your head off and set you on fire. Does this prove that wearing a red hat is harmful? No, it does not, it just proves that I harmed you in response to wearing a red hat, but it does not actually prove the wearing of red hats to be intrinsically harmful.

The pedophobe at this point in the discussion is just appealing to a consequence that they themselves are creating.

They pretty much admit that child sex is not intrinsically harmful, they just appeal to the consequences bestowed by the bigoted society they form part of, such as for example:

  • The child and the pedophile being separated.
  • The child being screeched at by their hysterical parents.
  • The child being sent to a similarly delusional therapist.
  • The child receiving strong social pressure to ”accept their rape”.
  • The child hearing they now ”lost their innocence” and this is a great problem.
  • The child seeing the pedophile tormented/beaten in front of them.
  • The child feeling responsible for the pedophile going to prison.

This is no better than any other bigot althroughout human history just using force and threat to explain why the behavior they are bigoted against is somehow bad.

  • Don’t be a homo or else I’ll beat you up for it, therefore, gay sex is harmful/bad.
  • Don’t be a whore or else I’ll rape you for it, therefore, prostitution is harmful/bad.

Just that the pedophobe is essentially saying:

  • Don’t be a pedo or else I’ll beat you up for it in front of the child you gave an orgasm, thereby traumatize the child, then attribute that trauma to the orgasm rather than my uncivilized primitive conduct, therefore, child sex is harmful/bad.

It is akin to a homophobe in Saudi Arabia arguing that even if the homosexual activity itself does not cause harm, when you, as a bigot, set the homosexuals on fire for having homosexual sex, they are still harmed by it, therefore, somehow the sex (rather than the consequences you inflict on homosexuals for having sex) is still harmful, so homosexual sexual relations ought to be outlawed because otherwise you’ll burn these faggots!

It’s ironically the argument of a rapist while pedophobes pretend to be so anti-rape, like saying you can’t go outside dressing like a whore, it’s bad, because if you do that, he’s going to rape you, this proves how harmful it is for women to not wear a burqa, there is a consequence for not wearing one, a consequence which the rapist himself is creating, which is that he’ll rape them for it.

It might even become circular reasoning, i.e it’s harmful to have sex with the child, because if you have sex with the child, we’ll harm you (and by extension through this whole drama the child too) by imprisoning you for it, and why do we harm you for it? Because having sex with the child is harmful, you sick pervert! – That would be circular.

As an example to illustrate just how absurd appealing to self-created, extrinsic harm to demonstrate that an act is harmful is, let’s say society acted about harmless sexual encounters between children and pedophiles about any other pleasure-seeking activity, like eating ice cream.

They all believe that because children don’t have fully developed brains yet, a child can never possibly consent to buy ice cream you sick monster, it’s a crime even if it really seemed like the child consented to taste the ice cream, that’s not real consent because they haven’t reached the age of consent yet where society has decided the child is allowed to consent to eating ice cream.

Whenever there’s an ice cream salesman and the child agrees to buy it, some psychotic lunatic father has a meltdown in front of the child.

  • ”OMG this is my daughter you sick fuck, one step closer and I shoot! I don’t care that there’s no actual evidence whatsoever that eating ice cream in childhood in and of itself causes lifelong trauma, once I’ve beaten you pervert to a bloody pulp right in front of my little girl, she’s still traumatized, so that proves that ice cream is indeed very traumatizing, I’m doing this protect your precious wellbeing, little Suzie! You can’t consent!”

The child is then pressured by society to accept that they have been horribly wronged by having been sold exactly the ice cream flavor that they wanted, if they don’t, they’re just the poor dumb child that can’t understand how horribly violated it was by having been sold ice cream and the therapists won’t stop harassing her.

She also hears others joke how the guy that sold the ice cream is now going to prison and has Big Bubba shove his chocolate ice cream in his asshole, teehee, violent anal rape for a completely victimless crime harming absolutely no one, it doesn’t get any funnier than that!

At some point now, little Suzie is kinda sad.

Society concludes – ah see, ice cream is very harmful to children indeed! Doesn’t matter if selling ice cream isn’t ”intrinsically harmful” or any of this weird science and philosophy shit jargon, I’m a simple man, fact is, little Suzie is harmed, so no ice cream! NO ICE CREAM!

  • Has this society legitimately proven how bad the selling of ice cream is by harming the ice man in response to selling a child ice cream, have they made a great consequentialist argument as to why selling ice cream to children is always bad?

No, it hasn’t, they just demonstrated themselves to be primitive barbarians in need of psychiatric institutionalization that for some irrational narrative harm others in response to selling ice cream to children, anyone who has not been indoctrinated into their cult can fully see through their non-sensical notions of right and wrong behavior.

That they are in fact just suffering from a delusion that the selling of ice cream is harmful, and then attribute the harm that they cause in response to ice cream being sold to the selling of the ice cream rather than their uncivilized, backward, moronic behavior.

The vast majority of humans on this planet, neurotypicals, the neurologically typical are socially imitative animals that have a strong tendency to conform to many rules that are taught to them without questioning, this had certain benefits of social security at some point in our evolutionary history, but is also why humans can be indoctrinated into believing things that are completely disconnected from reality or fail to understand science like the earth being round, when their society keeps insisting that it is flat, it produces discomfort to go against their tribe.

Just like someone can be indoctrinated into believing that god is real but allah isn’t rather than to acknowledge that god is just as real as the easter bunny – someone can also be indoctrinated into believing that one particular age of consent, like 18 instead of 14 is the only correct one, and feel uneasy and repulsed whenever this delusional perception of their’s is challenged to any degree at all, although they most likely exactly see the delusion for what it is if they witnessed someone who believed in a special number that were even higher than their’s and thought that sex under 21 is never possible without resulting in harm later on.

Of course the lower we go, the more likely someone might be to be manipulated into having sex, the point is that it is being treated like a religion. Just because someone is more likely to be manipulated into sex, that doesn’t prove that when they have sex, it must be the result of manipulation, it could be, but doesn’t have to be, rape is the problem which can still be illegal regardless of the age of consent, but many pedophobes have a religious mindset in that they would pretend that all sex under the holy age is rape no matter what.

So does this problem apply to the ”victims” of ”rape” (wanting to get raped is an oxymoron, if it’s wanted it ceases to be rape) that they initially wanted to engage in when they were children, obviously, if a social animal is being put under excessive social pressure to pretend they got raped, then they will more often than not simply start to go along with the narrative to avoid being labelled as the poor, dumb rape victim that doesn’t even understand how raped it truly is.

Pedophobes would see their behavior for what it is if were to be manifested in someone else, like the hypothetical society that demonizes particularly selling ice cream to children, they would just as clearly detect that it’s not the selling of the ice cream itself that causes the harm, but the complete overreaction to it of sending someone to prison for it and pressuring the child to accept how it has been wronged.

Yet when a pedophile gives a willing child that discovered sexual pleasure and now wants to receive a pleasurable sensation in the form of an orgasm rather than ice cream (which is probably even healthier in the long run), they torment the pedophile in front of the child, then attribute the resulting trauma to the harmless pleasurable sensation of relief from sexual frustration rather than their fundamentally irrational, psychotic behavior.

Of course, you could even argue that because in response to ice cream being sold, the cult reacts in this violent manner, it might be somewhat negligent of the iceman to sell ice cream when he knows that the reaction has the chance of in some way emotionally harming the child from seeing the iceman being harmed in front of them, but the harm still lies in the reaction.

The social reaction doesn’t need to exist in the first place, so it would still be better to simply get rid of the reaction, just like in the cases of pedophiles and children exchanging sexual pleasure, obviously the real problem at hand is that you’re castrating and shooting people in front of children for selling them ice cream, not the selling of the ice cream itself.

Antinatalism and the question of a hypothetical utopia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Would it be worth it to create conscious life then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So:

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

But:

zero suffering > perfectly alleviated suffering in utopia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promortalism and the ”just kill yourself” argument.

When you exist, you need to constantly chase relief in order to avoid suffering, you need/want/desire. Eat or hunger, drink or thirst, defecate or constipate, masturbation or sexual frustration, breathing or suffocation.

You obtain relief, or you are forced to keep suffering, that is the fundamental mechanism. When you never come into existence, you don’t obtain any relief from your suffering, but I would say that that’s not a problem, because you never exist, so you won’t feel bad about it.

By not reproducing any conscious lifeforms, we prevent all harm/suffering, all relief/pleasure as well, but again, also all harm/suffering, so there would be no one to feel bad about not eating favorite dish anymore when they don’t exist.

What comes up in these discussions is sometimes the question of promortalism. If this reasoning is used to justify not giving birth, doesn’t it also justify killing someone to put them out of their misery?

  • ”If life is so bad, aren’t we all just better off dead then, doesn’t this justify killing everyone?”

The answer is in principle – yes, in practice – no.

  • In principle:

As long as a sentient organism lives, it experiences suffering, that is bad.

If you never exist, you don’t feel pleasure, but you also don’t suffer, so it’s no problem. If you die now, you won’t feel pleasure once you’re dead, but you also won’t suffer, so it’s no problem, unless you felt suffering in the process of dying.

By obtaining any given pleasure, you’re always minimizing a greater loss/negative, no neutral point in between. If you don’t eat, you’ll suffer hunger, if you don’t drink, you’ll suffer thirst. No pleasure, then suffering. But just like never being born in the first place would solve this problem perfectly, dying as soon as possible would solve this problem of needing constant gratification for you as well.

So as long as the dying process is entirely suffering-free, let’s say in your deepest sleep, I simply painlessly lethally inject you with a substance that of course also causes no distress in any way, then I would say there’s no intrinsic harm – you didn’t see it coming and you didn’t feel it when it happened.

Your departure was painless, I prevented all future suffering, you are not going to wake up later on as a ghost in non-existence and lament that you still needed to do x (just like you didn’t before coming into existence), but now you are being deprived of life because you are dead.

Even if you say you can rationally recognize that this isn’t the case, you’re not going to be a ghost afterwards, you can still feel threatened by something even if you know it’s not going to harm you later on, just like I could feel scared by a spider even if I know it’s not going to attack me. As as long as you’re sentient, the alternative to not obtaining pleasure, the relief of suffering, is suffering, you might still have a stupid intuition that you’re going to suffer from not obtaining pleasure once you’re dead – could be. I think people often don’t think of death as the end, they think of it as some kind of second life where they feel tormented over missing out on their life.

Dying may be bad, but death, non-existence is the absence of all badness, the absence of all needs that even demand to be fulfilled, the thing we call wellbeing is no longer needed once you’re dead, so you can’t conclude rationally that death is a problem because it lacks wellbeing any more than to conclude that never being born in the first place is bad because it lacks wellbeing. The underlying philosophical idea here is antifrustrationism, and from that follows both global antinatalism and promortalism in principle, not fulfilling a need isn’t a problem if the need doesn’t even exist. Feed the hungry, but don’t make the hungry to feed them.

  • In practice:

There are some factors that complicate just killing yourself or someone else, it isn’t too easy to just kill someone entirely painlessly without them noticing it.

  • By killing yourself, you may cause more suffering to yourself or others than you would experience from staying alive.
  • By killing someone else painlessly in their sleep, you may cause more suffering to others than you would prevent by ending their existence.

I would not be too sure that it does always cause more suffering to end life though, right now, even terminally ill individuals are denied the right to die to maintain the delusion of religious idiots that life is always good even when you’re being tortured 24/7, because it’s life, so it must be good.

Equally, many do nothing but cause harm to others, you’d likely save a million farmed animals from being tortured by euthanizing some people painlessly, so I don’t particularly always trust their evaluations of how horrible it would be to end a life.

Arguably, the strongest argument against just ending life is that once a sentient organism exists, there is the potential for them to reduce and most importantly prevent suffering for other sentient organisms. So whilst being alive is worse than not being alive, it is currently instrumental to achieving the reduction or prevention of suffering, we have extrinsic value to that goal.

The cessation of anyone’s, of any suffering, negative sensation whatsoever is obviously a good idea, but in our current world, being alive is instrumental to convincing others of the fact that life is fundamentally flawed, so you can try to prevent more suffering than by just preventing your suffering by killing yourself, it would be even better than just ending your suffering.

So see it like this – if you’re in a senseless war, you don’t end the war by just killing yourself, there is more utility to staying alive and stopping the radicalization of more soldiers, so that as many as possible other soldiers stop thinking there’s some kind of greater good to all this suffering, and as such minimize harm/cruelty caused in the war by other soldiers, perhaps the soldier can even go back home at some point and start writing books about why exactly they disagree with the cause of those that initiated said war and try to convince people that it’s a bad idea, dedicate life to becoming an anti-war activist.

Whilst you are alive, you can convince others of the idea that sentient life should be brought to an end on a global, not just individual scale, and prevent other harms from befalling the other organisms around you, chances are there’s always a problem to solve. But you only need to do that because they exist in the first place, so this is not an argument for making new life, only for staying here whilst you’re already here.

If we were already all convinced that life is a failure, we’ve already managed to sterilize or painlessly euthanize the other animals, then indeed it would be questionable why we should stay alive, at that point I’d simply say it depends, will committing suicide cause you more suffering in a single instant than you will experience from staying alive and needing, desiring, wanting until dead?

You being dead certainly wouldn’t be a problem anymore, if everything is fixed, there needs to be no problem fixer anymore, because there is no problem left, except you.

So if I could painlessly evaporate all life by snapping fingers on my left hand and my life by snapping fingers on my right hand, there’d be no reason not to snap the fingers on my right hand after I’ve snapped fingers on my left hand.

In conclusion, as stated before, I think life can be worth living in practice, but not in principle.

Now let’s also address what the pro-natalist asking this question ”why not just kill yourself?” could mean as an argument against antinatalism and demonstrate how those arguments fail.

  • ”Because everyone has the option to commit suicide, it is totally fair to bring a child into existence, they can just kill themselves if they want to! You can always opt out! It’s a perfectly fair deal, take it or leave it!”

Giving someone the chance to commit suicide doesn’t diminish the harm you caused them, if they want to kill themselves, it’s already too late, you already fucked them over.

The underlying logical structure of this argument is essentially:

  • ”If the subject has the ability to free themselves from x harmful circumstance, it is justifiable to impose x harm circumstance onto the subject.”

By this standard, if a rapist locked a girl into his basement and raped her every day, he should walk free just as long as he gave her a rope to hang herself with, the judge would have to say:

  • ”Well, you could have committed suicide, so therefore, as long as your rapist gave you a rope, it’s all your fault pretty much anyway. Free the offender, forcing girls to suck your dick at gunpoint is fine because they can just choose to die if they don’t want to suck your dick, that seems sensible!”.

This is exactly the attitude the natalist is demonstrating in this scenario, it’s ok to cause potentially severe harm, because after all, your victim can still commit suicide if they don’t like it.

This can be applied to every single harm that anyone could take issue with. Don’t like being sexually harassed? Just kill yourself. Don’t like not having certain freedoms in life? Just kill yourself. Don’t like being hit by me drunk driving? Just kill yourself, I’m never going to stop!

Just like any other harm causer, natalists sometimes excuse the pain they cause by pretending that if the victim did not commit suicide yet, that proves that they actually secretly enjoyed getting raped repeatedly. If they really didn’t like it, they would have killed themselves by now.

Considering that life supporters frequently also oppose the right to die, the right for victims of their imposition to escape, we have to add even another factor in: she has to commit suicide at a time when the rapist isn’t in the house to monitor what she’s doing, otherwise he’ll lock her in a cage and take away her ability to free herself from the circumstance until she pretends to enjoy the rape.

  • ”You’re a hypocrite for not killing yourself immediately if life is so bad, therefore, antinatalism is wrong, only consistent antinatalist is a dead one!”

This again fails to take into account that life itself is correctly identified as the problem and cause of all harm, not just one life.

The underlying logical structure of this argument is essentially:

  • ”If you dislike/disagree with x circumstance, it follows that you therefore would immediately try to escape from x circumstance.”

Which is simply untrue. You can dislike the circumstance of drowning in a swamp, but still think it’s worth getting in there again to save two drowning children from it, you can be repulsed by life, and still think it’s worth staying in it to prevent more life from being created.

This does not in any way imply or mean you support life any more than thinking it’s good to jump into the swamp again to save the children means you think drowning in a swamp is a good thing, and we should throw more children into the swamp.

To go back to the basement rapist example, it would be like the rapist has three girls in his basement, and one managed to escape, then went back to the house to save the other two, and then the rapist concludes that this means she secretly thinks his basement is really cool and rape isn’t a big deal, because she returned to the basement, but that is only because the rapist is too selfish and myopic to understand that others can understand that not everything is about them.

This wondering about why someone wouldn’t just commit suicide likely follows from a myopic delusion that only one’s own suffering is bad and thus worth preventing, not understanding that it isn’t only about your suffering but suffering in general, it’s the same thing, it’s no better in someone else, so obviously you can do better by saving more than just yourself.

It’s also just an appeal to hypocrisy, similar to saying that a drug isn’t harmful because the person who points out that the drug is harmful is taking the drug as well.

  • Just replace ”life” with ”crack” for a moment.

Let’s say some crack addict is forcing children to smoke crack, another addict points out that crack addiction can be harmful. Is ”but you smoke crack yourself, if it’s so bad, then why don’t you just quit?” a good counterargument?

No, because that doesn’t diminish any of the negative effects of crack, you don’t have to quit crack yourself in order to know that your addiction has negative side effects, it’s perfectly fair to point out that forcing others to smoke crack is a bad idea.

Similarly, antinatalists are still correct for pointing out that life is harmful, even if they themselves are on some level addicted to it, the pro-natalist is simply trying to distract from their bad behavior of forcing life addiction onto other organisms.

Whether or not I quit life has nothing to do with whether or not it is a bad idea to start it, ”starting smoking is a bad idea” is a perfectly fair statement to make, even if you’re smoking cigarettes yourself.

Why exactly reproduction is a harmful act, explained step by step.

  • Suffering is bad.

Unpleasant sensation is not pleasant, sometimes in life we are forced to endure suffering to avoid even greater suffering, but that doesn’t mean that suffering itself is good which is a misconception many then seem to come up with to justify it, it just means that it is the lesser of two evils, i.e if you have to torture one person to prevent a million from being tortured just as intensely, it’s arguably the lesser of two evils, but it’s still going to feel bad regardless.

The vaccination is painful, but dying of the illness it grants you immunity to is more painful, or going to school might be painfully boring, but being homeless and without money in the future would cause you even more suffering, or standing in a traffic jam might be a suffering-inducing experience, but not arriving at the amusement park would cause you even more suffering.

So to prevent the greater pain, you take the stabbing sensation of the needle as the lesser of two evils, this doesn’t mean that the stabbing of the needle no longer produces negative sensation. If you could snap your fingers and grant yourself immunity to illness, you’d probably do that instead.

Even those that inflict pain onto themselves are still trying actively to avoid harm. If the masochist didn’t already experience sexual frustration leading to him feeling more tense and pressurized in the long run, he wouldn’t pour the hot sauce into his pisshole to alleviate that tension, if the bipolar person didn’t already experience emotional pain and depression, they wouldn’t slice their arms to alleviate that pain.

If I told you right now that I’m a magician and could by waving my magic wand make it so that you won’t be able to have an orgasm anymore unless you cut your eyeballs out, you likely wouldn’t want me to do that, maybe you’d even use violence to stop me, as you’d rather be able to ejaculate in a less harmful manner. And even if you’d want me to wave my magic wand, you’d just be a transmasochist who is suffering as a result of not being turned into a masochist similar to how a trans-person can suffer from not having a different set of genitals, so then by waving my magic wand I’d be alleviating your desire to turn into a masochist.

Suffering can at best be instrumentally required to avoiding an even greater suffering in the future sometimes, but suffering in and of itself is always a bad thing, the good thing about the painful injection is not the pain of the needle being stuck into your arm, but the avoidance of the illness.

Humans experience suffering and as a delusional mechanism to deal with it mistake the fact that they sometimes have to tolerate one suffering to avoid an even greater one to mean that bad now somehow is equivalent to good, wet is equivalent to dry, cold is equivalent to hot, so that they can rationalize all the suffering they experience or inflict on others as some sort of greater good. Good suffering is an oxymoron, similar to dried wetness, or cold hotness.

  • By creating (sentient) life, you cause suffering.

The deal of sentient life is always the same, suffering is created, if a state of deprivation is not alleviated, the suffering will intensify, if it is alleviated, two things could happen:

  • Option A: Another deprivation pops up, e.g. after hunger has already been alleviated, appetite, aching for taste satisfaction becomes more insatiable, now the subject has to eat just not to suffer an increase in boredom.

Built to chase satisfaction, not to be satisfied, imagine the desire as an irreparably broken pipe, when you fix one hole, another spot bursts open and it starts to leak out of that new hole.

  • Option B: The initial deprivation, hunger, will return in time and you will have to eat again to prevent greater suffering.

You experience unfulfilled desire, and if you fulfill it, another one pops up that will have to be fulfilled as well to avoid suffering, or the other one will simply go back to unfulfilled, then you’ll have to fulfill that initial desire again to avoid suffering.

We lock you into a factory where you receive a tank and you get whipped, you have to fill it up with water or you’ll get whipped more intensely. If you fill it up, you get another tank and get whipped less intensely. But if you don’t fill that new tank up in due time, the older tank will be emptied and you’ll get whipped more intensely again.

You can keep filling the tanks and the whipping will get less intense, but it never fully stops, at some point you just don’t receive a new tank and the last one you filled up will slowly be re-emptied. You can also stop filling the tanks, but then the whipping will get unbearably intense in a short period of time. Itch, then scratch itch, then new itch comes up or old itch comes back in time, rinse and repeat.

There are probably various suffering prevention measures you constantly take in your everyday life that you don’t even acknowledge as such anymore, like breathing air to avoid suffocation, eating food to avoid starving, drinking water to avoid dehydration, working a job for certain resources to avoid poverty, having house, bed and clothes to avoid freezing.

  • There is no pleasure disconnected from relieving/eliminating suffering.

You are constantly itched by different urges and compulsions, the pleasures in life consist of fixing said conditions of suffering again and again, so the idea that suffering is not necessarily guaranteed would be non-sensical, it is intrinsic to life that you constantly experience needs/wants/desire you have to fulfill.

  • If you don’t eat (good), you experience hunger (bad).
  • If you don’t drink (good), you experience thirst (bad).
  • If you don’t defecate (good), you experience constipation (bad).
  • If you don’t orgasm (good), you experience tension, pressure, stress (bad).
  • If you don’t socialize (good), you experience loneliness (bad).
  • If you don’t sleep (good), you experience fatigue (bad).
  • If you don’t breathe (good), you experience suffocation (bad).

There are just some examples, it doesn’t have to be just hunger that is relieved when you eat food, as some will say here that if eating is just good because it prevents the suffering of hunger, then they’d only eat old, hard bread or something rather tasteless to avoid hunger, I’m being too reductive in my description.

But, if we locked that person in a prison cell, gave them only old, hard bread for the rest of their lives, forced them to abstain from ever eating their favorite foods again, they would experience suffering as a result of that, appetite – when it actually goes unalleviated for a while and you can’t obtain a partial relief from fantasizing about grabbing another snack, because you know it’s unrealistic, you’re sitting in prison, easily it’d turn into non-trivial suffering.

And if we starved the subject long enough of course, then indeed just flour mixed with water would start to taste good, the more suffering we add, the better the subtraction is going to feel, water tastes best when you’re just about to die from dehydration, but once we’re back to 0% suffering which pretty much never happens in life, there will be no more pleasure to derive either.

A metaphor similar to the previous tank metaphor that I sometimes like to use for this would be you being on a treadmill with suffering always behind, whereas pleasure is in front of you. When you fulfill a need/want/desire/reach pleasure, the treadmill either extends further and now there is pleasure in front of you again while the pleasure you just reached will slowly turn to suffering, or the treadmill doesn’t extend and you’ll simply be pulled back into the suffering behind you if you don’t keep running.

  • So I would argue that it’s fair to say you’re harming someone by bringing them into existence.

You initiate a constant source of harm/suffering so to speak, the mechanism is simply that pleasure/relief will always have to be chased after, or else the victim will be subjected to more suffering than before.

More pleasure=less suffering, just like more bright=less dark, more wet=less dry.

So you create this suffering organism, make it addicted to pleasure/happiness and if it doesn’t obtain it it will suffer worse, it is similar to making someone addicted to a drug without guarantee that they’ll be able to obtain the drug, the object of their addiction, causing them severe suffering.

Yes, if you don’t create the organism, then the organism will not experience any pleasure/happiness, but the organism also won’t be addicted to pleasure/happiness in the first place, because it won’t exist.

So to bemoan that ”state” of non-existence would be like saying ”if we don’t make you addicted to heroin you won’t be able to enjoy the rush when you satisfy your addiction to heroin with a new injection” – though even worse arguably, because a person that already exists could at least already be depressed and thus benefit temporarily from taking drugs, they might already be dissatisfied and in need of some form of alleviation.

But when you don’t exist, you don’t need/want/desire any improvement whatsoever, not being born is experientially just like being a rock or being a chair, you won’t feel anything, neither pleasure nor suffering.

Similarly I would say that a rock or a chair not experiencing pleasure is not a big deal, but I would advise people against making a rock or a chair suffer if it were somehow possible, i.e if we had both hypothetical pleasure liquid and torture liquid that we could inject into inanimate objects in order to make them feel either intense pleasure or intense suffering, I would also say that injecting the torture liquid into things is a bad thing to do, but simply not injecting pleasure liquid into things is not a problem, if the object never becomes sentient it won’t be able to miss pleasure.

On suffering – part 2, antifrustrationism: positive vs. negative utilitarianism.

“Positive utilitarianism recommends the promotion or maximising of intrinsic value, negative utilitarianism recommends the reduction or minimising of intrinsic disvalue. At first sight, the negative kind may seem reasonable and more modest in what it recommends. But one way of ending human misery is by putting all human beings out of their misery. This course of action is usually considered unacceptable. This has led to a search for reformulations of negative utilitarianism, or to its rejection.”

https://www.utilitarianism.com/posutil.htm

A fatal flaw here is that most assume that the maximization of wellbeing and minimization of suffering are two different things, when in reality, pleasure is essentially just a relief sensation you get from resolving suffering, and if you take it away again, you suffer more.

Name a pleasure, most likely we will be able to name a form of suffering that it serves to alleviate. So very simple examples would be:

  • eating food (pleasure) – hunger (suffering)
  • drinking water (pleasure) – thirst (suffering)
  • defecation (pleasure) – constipation (suffering)
  • ejaculation (pleasure) – pressure (suffering)
  • sleep (pleasure) – fatigue (suffering)

and so and so forth. If you maximized wellbeing by eating food, you just reduced the suffering of hunger, no way around it. We put a weight on you, then we take it off again, this is what a good feeling is, the alleviation of a pressure that has been put on you. Put knife in, take knife out, not being harmed is what feels good, but once all harm is taken away, there’s no more pleasure.

You can get a small relief from resolving a small suffering, or a greater relief from resolving a greater suffering, workouts would be another example, it can be stressing and painful at times, but it ameliorates another pain, another form of tension in you, so that then in the end one is more relaxed than before, otherwise you’d never feel pushed to work out anymore.

Once every torturous urge that could have pushed you to eat it is extracted from you, be it hunger, appetite or boredom, the food no longer tastes good, the good feeling is what happens when we’re extracting the minus points, there are no plus points.

You can only get your head up to the surface of the hole, but you cannot crawl out of it, you’re just struggling to crawl up to the surface of the hole. You’re always sinking, and then you have to pull yourself up again, in this process, you feel pleasure, but once we’re at neutral, pleasure will stop and you’ll start sinking deeper into the hole again.

Positive utilitarianism makes this assumption that somehow our goods in life are somehow unconditionally required and important, that it could be a good action to throw someone into the hole for the good of them then crawling up to the surface again.

It’s important to fulfill desire in the sense that it prevents unfulfilled desire, but in and of itself, there is no point to creating unfulfilled desire in order to then fulfill it, e.g. if you for some reason already have an urge to stare at a red painted wall, then I may do you a favor by painting walls red for you to stare at, but I am not doing you a favor if I could hypothetically give you a pill that made you crave staring at a red painted wall, just to then paint it red (unless of course, you already had a desire to have that desire, in which case giving you the desire has instrumental value to achieving the absence of your desire to have that desire, but that desire to have that desire would still be a problem).

This realization is sometimes also referred to antifrustrationism:

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]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifrustrationism

If there is need, then it can be good to fulfill it, but there is no good in creating the need to begin with, just to then fulfill it, even if you fulfill it, it’s not better for the victim than never having happened at all, similar to if there is already a knife stuck in someone’s chest, then it can be good to pull it out, but there is no good to sticking the knife in someone’s chest to begin with, just to then pull it out again, even if you pull it again, it’s not better for the victim than never having happened at all.

Let’s say I have a car, I can make it into a sentient, suffering car that goes ”I NEED TO HAVE GASOLINE INSIDE ME, I WANT MORE MORE MORE, FUCK ME HARDER!” by snapping my fingers, can I improve this car by snapping my fingers?

I would argue no, because the only predictable good to come from that would be to afterwards make it content and unneeding of the gasoline by pouring gasoline into it again, to ameliorate its urge to have gasoline put into it, but it is already perfectly unneeding of the gasoline, so I can’t possibly make an improvement here by snapping my fingers and putting it into emotional distress over not having enough gasoline in it.

And the same reasoning consistently applies to a human or any other fetus, you cannot upgrade a non-conscious thing by turning it conscious, you can only degrade it by doing so, it’s a minus, not a plus. You create need/deficiency conditions, and then in the best case scenario you manage to erase all of them again, but chances are you’ll make more minuses than before.

A graphic demonstration that can be used to showcase this reality is also David Benatar’s axiological asymmetry from his book better never to have been:

If unfulfilled desire, suffering is the alternative, then fulfilled desire, pleasure, is important. But if there is no pain anymore, then there is no need for the pleasure anymore either, here one could use many different examples to demonstrate that point. This is another example from the book:

  • X exists: forest fire.

Forest fire=bad.

Fire extinguisher=good, because there’s a forest fire.

  • X doesn’t exist.

Preventing forest fire=continues to be good.

Preventing fire extinguisher=not bad, because there is no forest fire to extinguish.

  • X exists: cancer.

Cancer tumor=bad.

Chemotherapy=good, because you have cancer.

  • X doesn’t exist.

Preventing cancer tumor=continues to be good.

Preventing chemotherapy=not bad, because there is no cancer tumor to treat.

Preventing a harm is always good, but preventing a pleasure is only conditionally bad, i.e if someone is already in pain. There’s no problem with all chocolate being liquidated if no sentient organisms are left on planet earth, because no one who wants to eat it would suffer from its absence.

But by not creating the creatures that need the chocolate, we can still efficiently prevent their craving and addiction (suffering) for chocolate, just like if they were to actually exist and crave the chocolate, the chocolate would then be preventing their craving for chocolate. So the benefit of prevention is the same, you eliminated the craving for the chocolate either way.

If you prevent me from ejaculating, I’m suffering intensified pressure and tension as a result of that, but I’m not hurting my ejaculated sperm by flushing it down the toilet, refusing to turn it into a child that will one day be able to alleviate tension and pressure by ejaculating just like me, that can’t possibly be an issue for my sperm that I flushed down the toilet, and that’s the point.

When you bring a sentient being into existence, you just create suffering, a constant addiction to pleasure, which if not alleviated will result in intensified suffering, and even if you alleviate it, it’s still not better in the sense that it didn’t prevent suffering as efficiently as never creating it to begin with.

Saying the good in life justifies the bad is absurd because it’s just an alleviation of bad, it’s like saying it’s a good idea to stab people because then you can pull the knives out of them again and give them painkillers afterwards, some victims don’t get painkillers, but that’s justified because some of them do, the fulfilled desires justify the unfulfilled desires.

Supporters of positive utilitarianism think it can be good to create a new sentient organism, when in reality, it’s just the creation of a lifelong problem, a deficit bundle, a need and desire mechanism that constantly needs to be alleviated for it to not result in even more intense suffering than it started off with.

By gaining in pleasure you are relieving your suffering, it doesn’t get rid of suffering as efficiently as preventing it from existing in the first place though, a lifeless planet is the best (or least bad) planet by virtue of it containing zero suffering. It’s better for an already existing addict to get their next fix, but it’s even less bad if no suffering ever pushed them to chase the object of addiction in the first place.

This is a conclusion many find too repulsive to accept, so they point to supposed absurdities about the antifrustrationist view, which fall apart with the information that I just previously layed out and won’t seem quite as absurd, such as:

  • The painless genocide/benevolent world exploder button.

If preventing suffering is the only thing that matters and you had a button you could push to painlessly end all sentient life in an instant, it would be the best thing to do, you’d have to take that option, all suffering ended forever.

This is supposed to make you feel instinctively repulsed and then say ”oh no how horrible, this is like Adolf Hitler!!!”, failing to take into account that they didn’t actually establish any kind of coherent argument against pressing such a button.

Of course, if every good in life is just the relief of suffering, which it is, then it is the best possible thing you could ever do to press this button, whether you like to admit that or not, that doesn’t change the facts of the reality and its value relations we occupy.

If I press this button, I will end all suffering, I will also end all pleasure, but that is completely irrelevant, because the pleasure is just a relief of the suffering, if I have already extinguished all hunger and starvation from this universe, then there by default can’t be any problem with there being no more food to enjoy either, the need for it no longer exists, but no one who has no access to food is starving either.

I solved all suffering, the lack of pleasure isn’t a problem, that’s called a win win situation, no way around it.

If anything, it’s absurd to be opposed to pushing such a button based on the fact that it will deplete future wellbeing, it would be like saying that it’s bad to push a button that destroys both cancer and chemotherapy, because then all chemotherapy is gone.

The reason why you want to go through chemotherapy is to get rid of the cancer, so if the chance of cancer is destroyed, we’ve already achieved the goal efficiently. The reason why you chase satisfaction is because otherwise you would become dissatisfied, so if we push the big red button resulting in eradication of all dissatisfaction, we’ve already achieved the goal efficiently, you don’t need to have a relief from suffering if suffering doesn’t even exist.

  • Cancer tumor – unfulfilled desire.
  • Chemotherapy – fulfillment of desire.
  • Cancer tumor excision – painless death resulting in depletion of unfulfilled desire.
  • Knife in chest – unfulfilled desire.
  • Painkiller – fulfillment of desire.
  • Pull knife out of chest – painless death resulting in depletion of unfulfilled desire.

This of course equally applies to the question of euthanizing others painlessly. If I still want to do x, and you euthanize me in my deep sleep painlessly, then I’m not going to wake up in the thereafter non-existence and still be left wanting x, but now I can’t obtain x because you just painlessly euthanized me, taking away my wanting.

Death is not an intrinsic harm, it can only be an extrinsic harm, i.e family members and acquaintances might miss the painlessly killed person, if we legalized this act, it would scare others they might be next, perhaps you prevented someone who was interested in reducing suffering in other sentient organisms from doing so.

But there is nothing inherently harmful about you simply not being there anymore, this might be offensive, but is true nonetheless, no matter how repulsive you find that fact.

  • The pin prick of harm.

Let’s say there is a near utopian scenario where everyone’s needs are being perfectly satisfied. Perfect meals, perfect defecation, perfect sex, perfect sleep, etc, perfect eternal orgasm on morphine whilst eating chocolate cake or perfect whatever you want, but it satisfies everyone’s needs.

In order to get there though, we must give one person a tiny pin prick of harm, one needle prick in their little finger, if you don’t do this, everyone will be confined to a life of just eating old hard bread and potatoes with no seasoning, mediocre jerking off into a tissue at best, no morphine, no eternal chocolate cake.

If reducing suffering is the only thing that matters, then you shouldn’t be giving this one person a pin prick, right?

No, exactly wrong, because this misguided objection again completely fails to take into account that increasing wellbeing is directly entailed in reducing suffering in the organism, as pleasure is a relief of suffering, the increase in everyone’s pleasure is the same as a reduction in suffering. If you don’t give this person a pin prick, you will increase suffering of boredom, if you give this person a pin prick, you will greatly reduce boredom.

But this still doesn’t make life worth starting in the first place, and that’s the point this argument misses completely.

There is no unborn purgatory in which children that do not get to experience the pleasures of life are suffering from not experiencing the pleasures of life, so there’s still no life worth starting for future pleasure. Yes, if I am hungry for it, then I would take a pin prick for a 5 star gourmet dinner, but if I did not in any way need or desire it, then I would not take the pin prick for the 5 star gourmet dinner, and that’s the point.

Non-existence best describes the state of not needing the 5 star gourmet dinner, it is just nothingness, there can’t possibly any kind of problem with nothing, it’s nothing, there’s no nothingness chamber where a child is somehow tormented from not being a something.

The reduction of suffering is good, if you decrease suffering in the organism you increase wellbeing and if you decrease wellbeing in the organism you increase suffering, the only difference here is that positive utilitarians insist that pleasure must exist regardless of whether or not someone suffers from its absence, whereas I don’t see the absence of pleasure as tragic if no one is missing it, suffering from not having it.

Part 1: On suffering – part 1, value realism: utilitarianism vs. deontology.