Ingroup favoritism and the capacity to suffer.

What all forms of discrimination like racism or sexism, but also speciesism and nepotism have in common is that they are just different forms of irrational ingroup favoritism that deny that the reason as to why it’s bad to be discriminated against is the capacity to experience suffering itself, not membership of the particular group, it’s discrimination based on an irrelevant factor.

Adherents to more socially acceptable forms of ingroup favoritism, like speciesists like to claim that comparisons to the holocaust, racism and sexism are unfair when one is talking about what is done to non-human animals, because that’s unfair to humans that have been dehumanized by the racists and nazis, not understanding that this is just another irrational ingroup bias on their part, assuming that if something is not human, it is fine to harm it anyway without needing further explanation.

Speciesism is bad for the exact same reason that racism and sexism are bad.

A simple enough question to ask, what is the characteristic that makes it important for you to be put into the category of things that have rights (e.g. a right not to get randomly assraped with a chainsaw)?

Is it your skin color?
Is it your genitalia?
Is it your particular family origin?
Is it your country?
Is it your species?

The answer is no to all of these, the reason why you want to avoid getting anally raped with a chainsaw randomly is because you are sentient, that is the characteristic that makes it important to be put into the category of things that have rights, sentience, the capacity to feel things, not skin color, not gender, not species.

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.^[1] Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as “qualia“).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience

P1: Sentience is what makes it possible and bad to be harmed.
P2: Most non-human animals are sentient.
C: It is bad when said non-human animals experience harm.

If one is sentient, one can produce sensations, and sensations are of different qualities. They can be better/less bad, e.g. I’m in a blanket and this feels good because it protects me against the cold, or worse/less good, e.g. I poured gasoline all over myself and set myself on fire, this is a little too warm.

On the other hand, if you were a completely braindead human vegetable on the same level as literal vegetables like carrots or broccoli emotionally, you wouldn’t care if I set you on fire even though you would still contain human DNA and be alive, that’s because you wouldn’t be sentient, so it doesn’t feel bad anymore, it doesn’t feel like anything, so this proves that it’s not the possession of human DNA that makes the avoidance of harm an important priority.

A speciesist ignores this and downplays the suffering, just like a racist slave owner ignores the capacity to suffer of the black slaves. Like the other ingroup favoritists, they pretend that the characteristic that makes it a really important priority to avoid being harmed is membership of their ingroup, when obviously the characteristic that in reality makes it an important priority to avoid being harmed is simply the capacity to experience harm itself.

”You can’t call it rape!”

That is something that speciesists sometimes insist when it comes to cows getting restrained and forcefully impregnated, because it’s a human concept supposedly.

How so, why exactly do they think that is a sensible definition? Rape at its core describes having your preference not to engage in a sexual activity or especially to be penetrated violated, particularly the unwanted penetration of your sexual organs, otherwise it can also be referred to as a molestation.

Human DNA is not the enabling function of a preference, sentience is the enabling function of a preference, that is what creates preferences that can either be alleviated or frustrated.

Can I rape a braindead person that has absolutely no preference not to get raped? Is it not rape if I were to restrain a dog in a rack and stick my arm up its asshole? I’m sure if any of these speciesist bigots walked in on someone violently fistfucking their cat, they would be perfectly comfortable saying ”that guy raped my cat”.

You could dishonestly refer to what dairy farmers do as ”just artificial insemination”, but if they have to be restrained because they don’t want to be artificially inseminated, that entirely fails to capture the aspect of forcing yourself on someone else, it’s not as though the cow is consensually making a doctor’s appointment to be artificially inseminated.

These ingroup favoritists that proclaim to be against against racism and sexism but get offended when one discusses the non-human animal holocaust have learned nothing from past mistakes of humanity, they foolishly think racism and sexism were only bad because it harmed other humans, how horrible, as if that is somehow a relevant factor.

Smashing a braindead human with a sledgehammer is by itself not any worse than doing it to a car or a computer, it could only produce some amount of badness in the sense that it affects sentient organisms that care about said braindead human, if the family of said braindead human cared more about their plasma TV than the braindead human, it would be worse to smash that plasma TV with a sledgehammer.

That’s the only reason why it could ever possibly be bad to destroy a braindead human, if some other sentient organism, like their family were to be negatively affected by it in some way, human DNA in and of itself is absolutely worthless, just like skin color or genitalia.

In reality the reason why black slavery was bad was also only because blacks were sentient, not because they contained human DNA, if really all the blacks had been braindead it wouldn’t have mattered that whites enslaved them, and that’s why it’s also bad to enslave pigs, because they are generally not braindead.

In fact, it wouldn’t have even been slavery anymore of course, because again, in that instant, if there is no sentience, there exists no preference/desire not to be enslaved either, you cannot enslave a rock, this entire concept of raping or enslaving something that has no will is absurd.

It’s absurd how those humanist bigots that criticize racism and sexism are offended by the racist and sexist analogies because they feel that it downplays the suffering blacks and women go through, when in reality it’s the exact other way around if anything, comparing what they go through in the first world downplays the suffering of non-human animals.

The last time I checked black men aren’t getting castrated without anesthesia, immigrant children aren’t being thrown in a meatgrinder, women aren’t being kept in a cage and repeatedly forcefully impregnated, then have their offspring ripped away and slaughtered.

This doesn’t mean they can’t face any problems, but certain non-human animals have not and are not even considered as subjects under the law for the greatest part of history, blacks and/or women are generally not considered property under the law anymore, it’s fair to say their sensibilities are almost always considered less important, by default.

They make it out to be like someone getting called a fat cunt or receiving an unwanted sexual compliment whilst walking down the street is simply inherently worse than getting raped multiple times, then having your offspring ripped away and slaughtered, then having your throat slit open once you can’t produce any more milk, because one happens to a lifeform that contains human DNA and the other one doesn’t, as if that actually means anything to how much suffering is being produced any more than which skin color or set of genitalia you have.

Completely distorted priorities stemming from a psychology that is ironically no better than that of the racists and sexists they like to criticize, it’s the manifestation of their ingroup bias, they are acting no better than the nazis and fascists they take issue with.

Of course, some animals may have a lower capacity to suffer than humans, so if you were forced to throw either an animal of lower sentience or one of higher sentience in a meatgrinder, it would be more rational to throw the animal of lower sentience into it, but this is not an irrational discrimination based on species membership alone.

It’s not more important to protect a human than a cockroach because the human is part of the human species, it’s only more important in the sense that the human has a higher capacity to experience suffering upon being thrown into the meatgrinder, so you throw the cockroach instead of the human infant.

In fact, were the human entirely braindead, or were we talking about a human embryo that is likewise not sentient, some variation of human that is less sentient than cockroach, then at that point it would become the more sensible option to throw said human vegetable in a meatgrinder than the cockroach, it would generate less suffering, better squash a thousand human embryos than one cockroach, it would cause less negative sensation to be produced.

You don’t want to avoid suffering because you have human DNA, just like you don’t want to avoid suffering because you have white skin color, you want to avoid it because suffering is simply an inherently negative experience, that’s why you put on the seatbelt and get anesthesia during a surgery, that’s why both speciesism and racism are a failure, you fully know you wouldn’t want to be that thing you discriminate against when it’s experiencing harm.

Same principle applies to nepotism as well, another more socially acceptable form of bigotry, which is all it ultimately is as well – bigotry, this tendency already starts with your family, because I know that some bigots are so deep into their bigotry that they would answer the typical vegan question of:

”Why pet the dog but eat pigs?”

with simply more narrow-minded bigoted rhetoric like:

”But, I also treat my child better than every other child, nothing hypocritical about that at all.”

Is the fact that someone’s child is someone’s child really what makes it important for the child to avoid harm though? No.

It is not the fact that your child is your child that makes it bad for the child to suffer, it is bad simply because suffering itself is bad just like water is watery, even if it happens in a different vessel that is not your child, water in a different bucket is still just as wet and watery.

You don’t want whether or not you have a right not to be tortured based on whether or not others are positively biased towards you, so it’s still hypocritical to say that the dog’s value is dependent on you being positively biased towards it.

Or did you only care about avoiding harm as a child because you were of some use to some nepotistic bigot, is that what determined your value? No, of course not, even if your parents died when you were 5 years old, you would’ve still tried to avoid it if someone tried to set you on fire, you wouldn’t have volunteered to be burned alive, saying:

”Well, I’m given no extrinsic value by my parents, so therefore, I’m but a worthless object, go ahead and set me on fire all you want!”

As if the whether or not an experience is bad is dependent on how someone else (in this case parents) feel about it, so if the parents think that the child feeling bad is good, then the negative sensation the child experiences is somehow simultaneously positive (a direct contradiction).

The experience generated by an orphan child about which no one cares being burned alive is bad regardless of whether or not some nepotistic bigot thinks it is bad, if someone tried to set you on fire when you were 5 years old, you would have still tried to run away, even if you didn’t have any parents that cared about you.

You should ideally care about your child only because it is a sentient organism capable of suffering, not because it crawled out of your vagina in particular – caring about it only because it crawled out of your vagina is bigotry just like speciesism, which is bigotry, just like racism.

And if you were faced with the meatgrinder scenario again, and your child or 50 other children would have to be thrown into it, then it would be more rational to throw your child into the meatgrinder, because harm to your child is bad because it is harm itself that is bad, not because it is your child, but if 50 were thrown in a meatgrinder instead, it would generate more harm, so if you throw your child in there, it’s less harm, less bad, it would be less bad in that scenario if one of the two things had to happen either way, no matter how offensive to common human intuition that is.

Ultimately any kind of narrow focus on the rights of a subset of sentient organisms is delusional – black, white, men, women, human, animal, etc rights, what makes it an important priority to have rights to be protected from suffering is never being part of those particular ingroups, it’s the capacity to experience suffering itself, once you make it about the group in particular, it becomes non-sensical.

All that matters is that you’re part of the sentient group so to speak, if you’re not, we can’t possibly even harm ”you” by treating ”you” a certain way, you wouldn’t want to face the discrimination farm animals face unless the trait sentience/consciousness/suffering-capacity would be absent in you, it’s not about being human or not human or how attached others are to you.

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

Utilitarianism:

Utilitarianism is a family of consequentialist ethical theories that promotes actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the majority of a population.^[1] Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different characterizations, the basic idea behind all of them is to in some sense maximize utility, which is often defined in terms of well-being or related concepts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

Deontology:

In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, “obligation, duty”) is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules, rather than based on the consequences of the action.^[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics

I would argue all deontology is ultimately a waste of time because if you keep questioning long enough, the motivation for the deontology/rights based position is always of an inherently consequentialist nature to begin with.

No deontologist can explain why they ultimately care about upholding any rule without having to appeal to the sensations guiding our behavior: suffering and pleasure.

Don’t murder, murder is bad!

Ok, why is murder bad?

Because it’s against the law!

Ok, and why is that bad?

Because it destabilizes our society!

Ok, and why is that bad?

At some point, you’ll have to admit:

because it simply results in suffering – negative sensation.

There is no other way to explain why something is bad. What is bad is simply bad sensation itself, there’s no great way to describe it any other way, if something is bad, then it’s better for it not to exist, unless it prevents an even more intense bad.

We value different things and ideas, but only because they are or we believe them to be conducive to the reduction of our suffering in some way. If you’re sentient, you try to avoid bad, if you don’t avoid bad anymore, you’re no longer sentient.

You value the chocolate cake you say. Fine, but why? Would you still value the chocolate cake if whenever you ate it, you would feel like someone just stuck a knife in your eye?

We make rules to avoid suffering, we don’t avoid suffering to avoid breaking rules.

If consequences didn’t exist, we wouldn’t make rules to mitigate against them, the reason why some rules are then good is simply because they have utility, if they are no longer useful, the rules become worthless, rules are a result of the existence of consequences. There are no real deontologists, just delusional consequentialists.

Suffering is always bad and the core motivator of all our actions, it’s universally the goal of every sentient organism to avoid suffering.

Sometimes, you may be forced to decide between a lesser suffering and a greater suffering, but that doesn’t make the experience desirable, e.g. the vaccination is painful, but dying of a disease is worse, so you get the injection even if the needle hurts. This doesn’t mean suffering can be good, just that it is the lesser of two sufferings, two evils in this case. If you could snap your fingers to grant yourself immunity to illness, you’d probably do that instead.

Even those that inflict pain onto themselves intentionally aren’t enjoying pain, they are just using the pain to eliminate a greater pain. A masochist is already sexually frustrated when inflicting pain on himself, a depressed person is already in emotional turmoil when cutting their arm, if suffering didn’t motivate them, they wouldn’t hurt themselves to blend it out with another suffering.

If I were a magician and could make it so that someone who has absolutely zero masochistic desires right now won’t be able to have an orgasm anymore unless they cut their eyeballs out, they wouldn’t want me to do that (unless they already had a desire to obtain such a desire they had to fulfill to avoid more suffering, of course), you’d rather be able to get an orgasm without having to inflict intense, excruciating pain onto yourself.

Badness really exists, it’s a sensation and not only up to one’s personal interpretation, if a gang rape is taking place in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it still generates badness in the rape victim, no one has to point their finger at it and deem it bad first for negative sensations to start being generated in the rape victim, likewise, the negative sensations do not become positive by you randomly walking by, deeming it a good event and starting to jerk off to it.

That is what badness is, it is produced in a brain, and that brain is real, and the sensation is really being generated by it, and that is not just in someone’s opinion. You may not be able to put the badness in a petri dish and analyze it in a laboratory, but it can be experienced.

It may be produced by different objects in different subjects, but the sensation is the same, i.e the almond itself isn’t good or bad, it generates negative or positive sensation in the subject, in someone with an almond allergy, it generates a negative reaction, but the sensation itself is of negative quality, and in someone else with a peanut allergy it’s caused by peanuts, but the experience is equally bad, and the peanut, just like the almond, is neither good or bad by itself.

With that knowledge, we can in theory basically determine what the best and worst outcome would be in all situations objectively. I cannot necessarily compel someone to stop doing something bad, but it remains a fact that what they are doing leads to the production of badness, and that is not just so in my opinion.

”Anally raping an infant with a jackhammer results in badness” is an objectively correct statement to make.

It may also be a correct statement that stopping said rapist from engaging in this activity of anally raping infants with jackhammers will generate negative sensations in him too, sexual frustration, but if it’s a simple either or question, then chances are very likely that not raping is a better option than raping, being forced to not rape an infant with a jackhammer very likely causes less suffering than being raped.

Or, the infant rapist could demonstrate evidence to the contrary, let’s say hypothetically satan existed and said that if our infant rapist in question doesn’t rape this one infant with a jackhammer, then 10.000 other infants will get raped with a jackhammer in hell and there is absolutely no other way to prevent it, then in that case anally raping one infant with a jackhammer would lead to the better outcome indeed.

Humans have plethora of false beliefs about where badness is located and where badness is not located, that is what essentially makes up all deontology, but that is all it is, a false belief about where badness is manifested, because it’s obviously easier to just think one holy moral standard saves everything than to painfully evaluate the utility of each action in each situation, it requires more analytical thought processes.

All sentient organisms share the same goal, it is universal that they try to avoid badness. There is no difference of opinion, they simply all tend to have various false beliefs about where it is and where it is not. We are all enslaved, getting whipped, punished with suffering, it’s just that sometimes different tasks have to be done to avoid suffering, and then we often generalize and falsely to come to the conclusion that it’s only one specific moral standard, that’s the deontologist mindset.

We believe in things because they either help us to reduce our suffering, or we’re under the delusion that they do, as in, a religious person believes in following god because they believe we’ll go to heaven for it which liberates them from all suffering or be rewarded for it in some other way, libertarians want freedom because being locked in a cage causes suffering, authoritarians want the law to never be broken because they believe it’ll result in a chaotic society with more suffering.

A girl got raped by a man in a position of authority over her once, now she associates authority with suffering, and abolition of authority with abolition of suffering, even when she sees a consensual relationship between two people where one has more power than the other, she falsely assumes a brutal rape is taking place.

Her little brother saw the police arrest the rapist, so now he associates law with reduction of suffering, becomes a police officer and violently harasses people for minor crimes that don’t really harm anyone like smoking a joint and pissing against a tree in public because law=always good! Law saved my sister after all!

They all believe in their specific rules because they believe it is conducive to the goal of reducing suffering in some way, but if I told anyone that I’m just going to push their hand onto the stove top for an extended period of time for no financial or other benefit of their’s or anyone else’s, they wouldn’t want that, unless they’re the unfortunate ones in a 1000 that can only have an orgasm if they burn their hand on the stove top, in which case there’d be a benefit again, the orgasm.

The avoidance of the suffering is ultimately the only goal, it’s just that because it’s simple, sometimes humans make strict rules out of intellectual laziness to not have to evaluate the utility of every action in each situation, like ”don’t lie” and then wrongly believe they did something good when they told the nazis they’re hiding jews in their basement.

Even if in a situation where you’d have to lie to save us all from going to hell for all eternity, and you didn’t lie, you’d still be acting as a consequentialist. For some reason, lying makes you hugely uncomfortable, so by resorting to your ”never lie” deontology, you are preventing your discomfort of coming to terms with a utilitarian solution.

Deontology is an intuitive, rather than strictly analytical way of processing the situation. Take the typical trolley problem for instance, two individuals tied to the left track, one to the right, the trolley is rolling down the left track, you can pull a lever to switch to the right track and hit the one instead of the two.

Because generally you learned that taking away someone’s right to life will result in suffering, you may shudder at the thought and say it’s bad to pull the lever, but the only reason why taking someone’s right to life away could be bad is obviously because it could result in suffering, badness, otherwise it couldn’t possibly be it.

No one gives a shit about the absence of a right to life in a culture of bacteria because bacteria has no suffering-capacity, so unless you’re actually psychotic enough to think bacteria is sentient, you wouldn’t worry about a bacteria being eaten by another, having its life destroyed.

In this situation, not taking the person’s right to life away will result in more suffering though, so obviously it’s better to do it, less badness is better than more badness.

It doesn’t take as much cognitive effort as to evaluate in detail to adhere to a strict law based, dogmatic morality, that’s all, but with deontology you end up with wrong calculations about how to avoid the greatest amount of harm all the time.

Sometimes, you may be offended by the utilitarian calculation, but that does not prove it to be wrong. For example, it’s a fact that some rapes in theory do not cause harm, we could hypothetically make up a case where a rape is not bad.

Let’s say:

The person consented to being anesthethized and sedated before a surgery.

They are sufficiently unconscious.

The doctor performing the rape has a micropenis.

We are not talking about the act of legalizing this act of rape, just the act itself.

This doctor is not some psychopath who would rape anyone that could notice it.

Then in that case, that rape is pretty much harmless, it doesn’t produce any badness.

You might be offended by the fact that that rape is not harmful, but are you by being offended by the fact that that rape is harmless proving it to be harmful?

No, you are not, you are just proving yourself to be offended by the fact that that rape is not harmful. That is all, doesn’t mean that the calculation ”this rape does not generate harm in the raped person” is somehow incorrect, just that you are offended by this fact.

I would argue it cannot even be called rape anymore, just giving it the benefit of the doubt. This is because rape implies a violation of desire not to engage in the proposed sex act, if that desire is in that moment not even being generated by a consciousness by a brain, then it cannot be violated because it is not currently even being generated anymore. If rape is just defined as absence of consent rather than direct violation of consent, it would also be rape to fuck a sex doll.

So whenever the calculation makes you uncomfortable like that, you may feel the urge to resort to deontology again and say:

”But it’s still bad to rape in that case because you shouldn’t exploit someone for your own selfish pleasure!”

But then inevitably, if I ask you again why it is bad to exploit someone for your pleasure, you will either be able to demonstrate that it generates bad sensations in the person or you will not be able to do so, and if you are not able to do so, then it is objectively incorrect to claim that it is inherently bad to rape them.

Rape, like anything, is bad because it causes suffering. If rape were something that did not cause suffering, then rape would not be a problem. Reality and its value facts exist regardless of your opinion on it, if something does not cause suffering, badness, is therefore not bad, and you say:

”To me it’s still bad!”

that doesn’t change anything, it still doesn’t generate negative sensations where you located them (only in you, because your threat detection is working wrongly). And likewise if something does cause suffering, badness, is therefore bad, and you say:

”To me personally it’s not bad!”

that doesn’t change anything, it still generates negative sensations in the victim of the act we are discussing.

”But what if I think suffering is only bad if it happens to me but I don’t care about the suffering of others?”

Then you are being irrational, suffering is not only bad when it happens to you, if negative sensations were only negative because they happen to you, then it would also be bad if pleasure happened to you, by virtue of it happening to you.

You try to avoid it because it’s bad, that is what qualifies it as worth preventing, so if harm happens to someone else, you are logically inconsistent in not thinking of it as just as worth preventing, if you only thought it is worth preventing because harm is happening to you, you’d try to avoid the pleasant orgasm as well, because it’s in the same category – ”things that happen to you”.

Suffering in meat suit A is bad and so is suffering in meat suit b, just like trash in trashbin A is trashy and so is trash in trashbin B.

It’s like you’re a toilet cleaner and the argument is that when you see excrement in toilet A, you flush it down because it is so shitty, so you press the button. If that is the reason why it’s worthy of being flushed down the toilet though, why shit is being put into the category ”worthy of being flushed down”, then obviously it’s just as worthy of being flushed down when you see excrement in toilet B, because it is also shitty – same category.

If you see excrement in toilet B and suddenly say ”no, that isn’t real shit, or even if, somehow I shouldn’t flush it down like in toilet A, I should just let it sit there”, you’re irrational.

If you want to say that excrement in toilet A is only worthy of being flushed down because it sits in toilet A (the ”suffering only matters because it happens to me”– approach), then you would flush down your credit card, one billion dollar lottery ticket and jewelry if it fell into toilet A too, but you’re saying it’s worthy flushing shit down toilet A because it is shit, so if shit is in toilet B, it is just as worthy of being flushed down. It’s about the content of the toilet, not about in which toilet it’s sitting in.

”You” are just one of many qualia containing toilets, the product, which is suffering, is the same. If suffering is worthy of prevention when it happens because it feels bad, then it’s just as worthy of prevention when it happens to anyone else, because it feels the same way, i.e bad.

When suffering is in a different vessel, it is bad for the exact same reason why it is bad when it happens in the ”you” vessel, the sensation itself is negative, so it’s going to be negative regardless of where we put it in. To explain why exactly this bad sensation is created we’d have to go deeper into biology, but the quality of the sensation simply remains negative and you cannot change it, whether it happens in vessel A or vessel B is irrelevant to that fact.

Take an example you are more disconnected from to see the absurdity to see value in preventing only your suffering, not suffering in general.

Let’s say we have two bugs, bug A and bug B, one of the two has to be squashed in order to prevent the entirety of all other organisms on planet earth from going to hell and being tormented for all eternity, squash bug A or bug B, the harm experienced by either will be roughly the same, they have the same suffering capacity.

Which should you squash and what would be the rationale for favoring one bug over the other? You could say if we squash bug A it’s different because bug A will personally feel it, but if we squash bug B then bug B will personally feel it, but the feeling it the same, so what’s the difference? All you can really do is flip a coin here.

A negative sensation is negative no matter where it is manifested and the motivator of all our actions, we make rules because they help us to or we believe they’ll help us to reduce our suffering, and if we label the sensation as worth preventing when it happens to us because it’s bad, then it’s logically inconsistent to not see it as just as worth preventing when it happens to anyone else.

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

Wildlife suffering.

The argument for antinatalism of course also applies to other animals, sentient organisms try to avoid suffering their enitre lives and the best way they can achieve that is by not being alive in the first place. Suffering is always bad, sometimes in life you might be forced to bear one suffering to avoid even greater suffering in the future, like a vaccination to avoid a more painful disease, or a boring school life to get a good job liberating you from poverty later on, but suffering itself is always a bad thing.

By creating sentient life, you create suffering of everyday needs and urges, such as hunger, thirst, constipation, sexual frustration, fatigue, all kinds of little irritations and proneness to much worse suffering in the future, e.g. car accidents, drug addiction, cancer, etc, the list goes on and on, for animals in the wild it might be being eaten alive or having parasites in your asshole.

Life also contains good experiences, but you would not have suffered from missing them if you simply never came into existence.

When you exist, you need to chase pleasure, or you are punished with suffering, but when you simply don’t exist, while you won’t experience pleasure, you will not experience any suffering as a result of it either.

Eat or get hungry (or experience appetite or boredom, also suffering, someone can suffer from being put in prison and no longer being able to eat their favorite dessert).
Drink or get thirsty.
Shit or constipate.
Cum or get tense.
Sleep or fatigue.
Socialize or get lonely.

So on and so forth.

Meeting your needs is good, but is it a problem if your needs simply never exist to begin with? No. You can perfectly stitch up a wound, that doesn’t mean you’re better off than never having been wounded in the first place, that’s the game you’re in once your instantiation of consciousness exists, always trying to heal a wound/preserve yourself.

You can fulfill your needs, you can avoid suffering temporarily, but never as efficiently as by just never becoming conscious in the first place. Creating unfulfilled need, want, desire for the good of fulfilling them, creating suffering for the good of alleviating it is about as absurd as to give someone an illness for the good of then treating that illness.

It’s true your victim avoided the pain of a stabwound going untreated, better a bandaid than no bandaid, it’s true that they obtained a sensation of great relief from getting a painkiller, but you could have still done better by just not sticking the knife into their chest in the first place.

Neither is speciesism in any way a more coherent viewpoint than racism, it’s bad to have certain things happen to you, like having a knife pushed in your throat, because you are sentient, you can feel things, it’s not your white skin color, gender, or even your species that makes having a knife pushed into your throat into a problem.

It’s bad to get stabbed, because it simply produces bad sensations, it’s not bad because you contain a certain skin color or human DNA, as you could be braindead and still contain said skin color or human DNA, but it would no longer produce badness if someone stabbed you, so both racism and speciesism fail, they’re just as irrelevant in determining whether or not it’s bad to get stabbed.

Sentience is the only important characteristic here, destroying non-sentient things cannot produce badness, unless it is of course in another sentient organism, i.e a family member might be offended that you destroy a braindead human with a sledgehammer, but it doesn’t produce any badness in the braindead human, but if the family members indeed care much more about their plasma tv, it’s arguably worse to smash that plasma tv in with a hammer.

So the conclusion is that creating sentient life is bad, and so is being a speciesist who only apply antinatalism to human animals.

Ideally, both humans and other animals would stop reproducing, and indeed, when we look at other animals, we can see that in a lot of ways they’re suffering a great deal as well, that’s because they are less intelligent and therefore not as able to work toward reducing suffering.

Many are dependent on the nutrients in the flesh of other animals.
Hyenas eat their prey alive.
Lions dominate other lion groups and often brutally kill off the lion cubs.
Many female spiders, some octopuses kill and eat the male after the mating ritual.
Ducks commit organized gang rape.
Chimps sometimes fight brutal wars where they rip each others body parts off.

Here even many animal rights supporters are indeed complete hypocrites, they’re still suffering from a pro-nature and a pro-life bias, they don’t wish to interfere with nature to stop the suffering of wild animals or as much as with farmed animals, which already frequently becomes apparent when carnists ask them (though in that case most likely with dishonest intent) why it is ok for the lion to kill a zebra for flesh, but not for us to kill a pig for its flesh.

There is actually no great answer to this, the common rebuttal is that:

The lion doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to acknowledge it is harming others, humans are harming others intentionally, other animals don’t.

If that is the issue, then there would be no point in stopping a mentally retarded person on the IQ level of a lion from brutally raping someone, to make it more similar, let’s say it’s his mentally retarded sister on the IQ level of a zebra. But the intelligence level of the harm causer doesn’t diminish the harm they cause, the outcome, suffering, is still bad nonetheless.

Why don’t these nature apologists offer themselves to be eaten by lions then, if the fact that lions don’t understand what they’re doing makes what they’re doing not bad?

Intent is ultimately irrelevant, if a rapist with severe mental retardation, schizophrenia or multiple personalities raped you, you’d still want it to stop. If you were the one eaten by the bear, you’d still want it to stop. If you were tortured by a virus or machine with no intent, you’d want it to stop.

The lion is a carnivore by nature, needs the flesh of others for survival.

Then again, why don’t these nature apologists offer themselves to be eaten by lions, the lion needs (nutrients in) flesh to survive, so they should have no problem with being eaten by one, the lion derives nutrients from human just like from gazelle flesh.

There should be no problem with a hypothetical, physically stronger (than human) carnivorous alien species hunting or farming us for our flesh, because they’re naturally carnivorous, so that somehow makes the suffering we experience no longer relevant, as long as the aggressor is deriving nutrients from it, it’s acceptable.

Pain is not any less bad by it being caused or experienced by those that aren’t able to grasp what they are caught up in or just because someone is deriving nutrients from their victim, it’s in fact irresponsible of us not to interfere with this completely unfair game, we’re the only ones that can really do anything about it.

It’s the pain in and of itself that is the problem, not the intent to cause it. The only reason why we care about bad intent is because it tends to lead to a bad outcome later on, e.g. a serial rapist and killer in solitary confinement may have bad intent to cause harm to others, but it’s not a problem anymore, because he’s unable to do it, a virus has no intent to cause harm but you’d still try to prevent it from infecting you.

To a wild boar it doesn’t matter whether it is torn apart by a wild predator or tortured by some sociopathic factory farm worker, the suffering is just as bad, if not worse in many cases, torture in the wild has been going on for much longer than in factory farms and there’s no harm mitigation whatsoever, no rules against eating someone alive.

When it comes to wildlife suffering, all the arguments that they refute when carnists make them suddenly come out of the woodwork.

It is what it is.
That’s just nature, therefore it’s good.
That’s how it always has been.

Often times in discussions about what is done to non-human animals by human animals, hypotheticals involving mentally handicapped humans are utilized, as one of the great differences between humans and other animals are their different levels of intelligence, but obviously being less intelligent doesn’t make being harmed no longer bad, so if it’s bad to torture humans that are no more intelligent than pigs, then it’s bad to torture pigs as well.

A good way to demonstrate the horrors of the dairy industry would for instance be to just imagine I’m doing what they are doing with a mentally handicapped human female.

Forcefully impregnate her, steal her kids that are due to their young age no more intelligent than cows anyway, tie them up so they can’t move for their flesh to stay tender, then slaughter them all. Yes, they are all less intelligent, but it’d obviously still be bad if I did that, it would generate negative sensations.

The thought experiment for nature and wildlife suffering would just be leaving the severely intellectually disabled in a forest to fend for themselves.

Imagine we isolate all the severely intellectually disabled into an asylum into an abandoned forest somewhere, cut off by a wall or some such object from our general public.

They desperately search for berries in the forest, try to cannibalize each other when food resources are scarce, they die of all sorts of accidents or infectious diseases in said forest they don’t know how to prevent, and once in a while they manage to get on top of another and produce more having the overall same legacy.

This would almost certainly be seen as a problem, the same thing essentially happens in the wild, which is by most not acknowledged as a problem at all, even as something to be preserved, frequently justified by simply pointing to the fact that this is mother nature, therefore it must go on as it is, which is no better than justifying the forest experiment by simply pointing out that it is indeed the abandoned retard forest, so therefore, it must be good because it exists.

That’s just an is-ought fallacy – it’s like you discovered the torture chamber of a serial killer and didn’t call the police because the torture chamber exists, so you figured that what’s taking place inside it must be good, otherwise the torture chamber wouldn’t exist, it exists so it must be fine.

This is a faulty conclusion, because just because something exists, that doesn’t mean that it generates good outcomes for sentient organisms.

It exists, therefore it should keep existing, that’s the assumption.

The blinding difference here is human DNA again, but the suffering endured in the wild is the same as suffering endured in the abandoned retard forest, human DNA alone doesn’t determine your capacity to suffer, human fetuses prior to reaching consciousness and braindead human vegetables being the greatest examples of this, so there’s no reason why we should interfere with the forest experiment for such an insignificant reason but not nature in general.

Both contain tremendous amounts of suffering in the same way and no one is harmed by not being brought into existence, so we should interfere with both the abandoned retard forest and the jungle.

If any of these nature apologists had parasites in their assholes, they would insist on removing them. If we dumped them into the location they are defending, the wild, and they would still have parasites in their assholes, they would still insist on removing them, so in what exact location suffering is happening is rather irrelevant, it’s the suffering part itself that is the problem, regardless of its location.

If the big, strong, 6’5 tall, tiger IQ human sexually assaulted everyone the nature defenders would see it as a problem, even if he doesn’t know any better than to sexually assault everyone, even if he only assaults mentally handicapped girls that aren’t much more intelligent than zebras, you wouldn’t insist on creating more individuals like that because you understand the negative consequences of doing so.

When they a see a tiger causing harm, they get a big boner because it looks so majestic and has pretty tiger stripes too, so that’s different when the tiger is torturing a zebra to death, so we shouldn’t stop this from happening.

Conservation efforts focused on keeping these animals breeding forever are simply misguided (when we’re talking about something directly related to the welfare of already existent animals it’s a different story of course), wild animals will go through much more suffering if we try to preserve them at all costs, first off because they’ll be born which always results in suffering, need, want, desire, just as with humans, the global antinatalist argument based on antifrustrationism applies to both, secondly because of the particularly faulty and destructive manners they are wired to act.

Extinction is benign and should be seen as the end goal, there is no tiger or elephant right now in the unborn (non-human) animal purgatory lamenting the absence of more tigers and elephants roaming planet earth, you wouldn’t be doing these animals a favor by breeding more of them.

These animals first and foremost want to avoid suffering, just like humans by the way, it’s just that they don’t have any of the emotional complications and delusions going on that humans developed as a way to deal with suffering.

A wildebeast with its entrails ripped out of its asshole by a hyena isn’t laying around in the grass, hoping that no one comes to euthanize it because that would violate its religious belief that getting your entrails ripped out of your asshole by a hyena is god’s test and you must endure it to go to wildebeast heaven one day, these are idiotic coping mechanisms and rationalizations only humans come up with to justify all the suffering that surrounds them in life.

How one should go on about preventing all the other animals from reproducing as peacefully as possible for everyone involved is of course a different and more complicated question, but the first step certainly is to at least recognize that negative sensations aren’t suddenly less negative just because they’re being produced in a different location in the wild.

That seems frequently to be the attitude of both carnists and some number of vegans that seem to think non-human animal suffering is somehow only bad if it’s happening at the hands of humans, or worse, anthropocentric antinatalists, vhemt (voluntary human extinction movement) types that think somehow the other animals would be better off if just humans went extinct, which is about as idiotically irresponsible as thinking it’s a good idea to leave a severely mentally retarded person in a forest somewhere and move to a different country forever.

Antinatalism, family obligations and parental delusions.

An idea frequently instinctively held by society is that children ought to be grateful to their parents for having created and taken care of them, perhaps are even in debt to them in some way for that.

When you take into account the certain basic facts of life, primarily that:

all the goods in life, like food and water, are only needed once a need, a condition of suffering, like hunger and thirst via the creation of the child is created

that the child really didn’t exist before it actually existed, somehow worse off in an unborn purgatory, writhing in agony over not being alive

what the parents in reality did by creating said child is creating a desire machine that needs constant satisfaction, a deficit, not doing some poor child from the unborn purgatory a favor by finally forcing it into earth-bound existence

this whole viewpoint that children ought to be grateful for being given certain goods by their parents that are entirely at fault for having created the child’s need, want, desire to obtain those goods starts to seem rather absurd to anyone who is halfway rational.

A good analogy to use here is the fireman starting a fire to put it out again in order to play the hero.

You wouldn’t be grateful to a fireman for saving you from a burning house if he’s at fault for having caused the fire in the first place, of course, extinguishing the problem again after deliberately having created it is the very least he can do, virtuous would only be if he extinguished a fire that came about by accident or was set by someone else.

And breeders do a similar crime, they create a problem, a deficit by creating an organism with needs, wants, desires that it is at least at this young stage more or less incapable of fulfilling itself, then fulfill some of its needs, wants, desires and expect gratitude in return for it from their victim despite having caused that very problem of the child experiencing conditions of need, want, desire in the first place because they didn’t abort it before it had the chance to become conscious.

”But I fed them and put a roof over their head, so they should be grateful!”

But I saved the child from drowning in the sea after I deliberately threw it into the sea, so they should be grateful! But I pulled the knife out of that person’s chest after I deliberately stuck the knife into the chest, so they should be grateful!

Yes, after having created their need to ingest food and not freeze to death on the street, in a disabled state where they are incapable of even fulfilling those needs themselves, you fulfilled some of their needs that you yourself created.

So you essentially put someone into a degraded condition, then took care of the problem you intentionally caused, you defecated all over the floor and expect a medal for at best halfway wiping it off again (never fully because the children will experience needs, wants, desires with no failsafe guarantee of fulfillment until they are dead).

Your parents wiping the shit off of your ass after having created you in a disabled state of deprivation where you’re unable to do it yourself was the very least they could do, to let the shit rot on your asshole until you get some kind of disease would have just been worse than it already was to create someone in said state of disability and deprivation.

It would be like the fireman instead just letting the house he deliberately set on fire burn into the ground, so what do these narcissistic breeders expect, the nobel prize for altruism for not having committed an extra horrific violation like first creating a hungry child and then letting it starve to death on the streets afterwards?

”Some children don’t have parents that care for them so be more grateful!”

Some firefighters that set people’s houses on fire in order to play the hero by coming to the rescue and extinguishing it again afterwards, don’t actually even extinguish the fires that they deliberately set again, and just let the whole thing burn into the ground instead. I could have done that as well, ingrate, you should be thanking me that after I set your house on fire deliberately, I saved you from burning to death in it, I’m a true hero and wish to be acknowledged as such.

Children aren’t in debt to their parents, it’s the exact other way around, they have created the child in need of care, it didn’t create itself in that state and then offered the parents to sign a contract promising it will later on compensate them for taking care of the problem, so to brag about having taken care of it is essentially just like the fireman bragging about having extinguished the fire he deliberately created.

Parental arguments to instill obedience into their children in general are often times completely non-sensical, kind of highlighting the mentality of many procreators in fact and how they justify themselves, by might makes right, I can so I will, I’ll impose life and you have to take it in the ass.

”You live with me and I take care of you, so you have to do what I say, as long as you live in my house you have to abide by my rules!”

The parents again are at fault for the child living in their house due to age related inability to move out, which they are at fault for because they have created it with the knowledge that this stage of life will exist, and because they and the rest of parents probably also made a law that says the child can’t move out until a certain age, so what the parents/slave owners making this argument are essentially saying is that because they forced someone to be dependent on them, the slave should now do as they say.

By this argument, if I abduct you and lock you into my basement, you should be obligated to suck my cock, because you live in my basement that I have forced you to live in, from which you have little to no chance of escaping successfully and I’m taking care of you.

”If you don’t like my rules, 5 year old, then why don’t you move out? Oh, too bad, you can’t, so you have to do what I say!”

What kind of sadistic fascist gets off on playing this type of game, what kind of reasonably sensible and intellectually honest individual would think this is a good game to play?

The all known, apathetic towards the child’s suffering:

‘Life is not fair”

Also a great insight. Life is not fair, I created life, so basically all I’m saying is that I am unfair, I create unfair circumstances.

Sorry that you don’t always get what you want, I intentionally forced you into this state of constant wanting and needing without guarantee of fulfillment because I am entirely unfair, just in case this might be helpful information to you at some point. It’s life, not me, although I created it.

It always tends to be said with this subliminal tone as if it should just be obvious to the child, as if the child supposedly has agreed to life’s unfairness in some way, so then it would be reasonable to remind the child that this is what they signed up for, as if they are repeating the guidelines of a game that the child consented to by signing a contract before being born, and now that child is being irresponsible by not following the contract, so the procreators have to remind the child of the rules, that’s the risk the child took, now they have to deal with life being unfair, should’ve thought about that before you came out of my vagina.

When in reality though, of course no one ever agrees to be made conscious, because they’re not conscious before they become conscious, so again, it’s the procreators deciding to awaken the dead into a world that they may not like, so saying ”well, that’s just life, deal with it” in that context is pretty much like randomly shoving dog shit into someone’s face and then arrogantly saying ”well, that’s just dog shit, deal with it”, as if your victim knew what was coming for them and signed up for this treatment in some way.

”But kids have to learn that life is unfair and that they can’t always get what they want because life’s hard and they gotta deal with that when they grow up, little billy has to learn he can’t get the new toy so that then later on he won’t snap and rape a bitch when she refuses to let him stick his peepee in her pussy.”

So children have to learn to become desensitized to suffering, in order to avoid an even bigger amount of suffering that will face them later on, knowing how to deal with life’s suffering.

But why are they in a situation where they even have to try to avoid this bigger amount of suffering later on in the first place? A good question to ask.

Right, because you forced them into existence, you didn’t abort him before he became conscious.

And was forcing the child into existence necessary in order to help them avoid a worse form of suffering, like it is necessary once they exist and have to learn that life is unfair in order to avoid more frustration with this fundamental unfairness later on?

No, because as far as I know, we have absolutely zero evidence for the existence of an unborn purgatory in which children that are not brought into earthly bound existence are writhing in agony over not being brought into earthly bound existence, the suffering caused by procreation is not instrumental to preventing a worse harm from befalling the child.

It is only instrumental to solving some suffering in the parents, erasing one of their deficits, i.e their desire to have the child, so in the process of getting rid of that one deficit, they create a whole lifetime of deficits in an effort to fix one of their deficits, so it’s necessary for the child to learn to deal with the fact that life is unfair in the same way it’s necessary for you to learn how to deal with poverty because I just can’t give up gambling with your money, woe is me.