Real value vs. projected value.

Good and bad are real facts, not up to opinion. The reason why people think it is entirely relative whether or not something is good or bad is because different circumstances and objects produce different sensations in different subjects, so they end up falsely concluding that ”everyone just finds something different good or bad, it’s a matter of opinion”.

As in, person A experiences a negative sensation in response to almonds, because person A is allergic to almonds, person B experiences a negative sensation in response to peanuts, because person B is allergic to peanuts. So the value relativist says ”see, the person A thinks almonds are bad, person B thinks peanuts are bad, so what nut is good and bad is a matter of opinion”.

Wrong, almond is not good or bad, it’s a neutral object.

Peanut is not good or bad, it’s a neutral object.

What is negative is negative sensation, and in person A it’s caused by almonds, and in person B it’s caused by peanuts. So what is bad here? Very simple, negative sensation, nothing else. It’s not the almond or the peanut, it’s the sensation that is bad, just because it’s caused by different objects in different subjects, doesn’t mean that bad sensation is not objectively real.

Sometimes, two organisms die of different causes too, one of cancer and one of AIDS, that doesn’t mean that the answer to the question of ”did someone die?” is ”it’s just a matter of opinion”.

Sometimes, two organisms break their legs of different causes too, one by falling off a bicycle, one by falling off a mountain – but they both had a broken leg, that’s the same for both, it’s not up to personal interpretation just because the leg was broken by different circumstances.

This idea that we all just have different things that we find bad is a delusion, what is bad is always the same – bad sensation. You can feel bad and less bad, this function objectively exists in sentient organisms, it’s predetermined for you, you have no choice but to feel pain when someone attacks you with a chainsaw.

Then why is there so much disagreement over what is good and bad?

The reason why there are ”disagreements” in ethics is exactly because everyone ends up falsely detecting and identifying where harm is and where harm is not, but if everyone simply had a clear understanding that it is only harm itself which is harmful, then they wouldn’t have all these stupid supposed disagreements.

Different objects cause different sensations in different subjects, so the subjects end up falsely concluding that the object that brought them alleviation of suffering is the good, rather than the elevation of their sensation state from one negative to one less negative state.

For example, John experiences suffering reduction in response to the American flag, eliciting feelings of group membership and patriotism, John falsely ends up concluding that the American flag is now ”a good thing”, when obviously the American flag is just a neutral object, the real good was the elevation of his emotional state from one negative of feeling lonely and excluded to a less negative state.

Now John feels more empathy for the poor American flag being burned than a fully sentient chimpanzee being burned alive, because he illogically equates the American flag with his conscious experience of pleasure, so he concludes American flag=conscious being, if you burn the poor American flag you’re causing suffering to it!

Analyzing in detail all day what would best reduce suffering is more complicated of a task than simply generalizing and thinking that one holy rule like ”never break the law” saves everything.

And everyone is guilty of this to some degree, we can’t help but to some degree equate the object that brings us alleviation from our suffering with the alleviation of suffering, but it is vital to recognize that this is what prevents us from being perfect.

This type of intuitive, sloppy, lazy way of processing reality is exactly what leads to deontological ethics, where we start to stubbornly think that adhering to a given dogmatic rule is more important than preventing real life harm, because we stubbornly equate that one rule with the reduction of suffering and don’t want to go through the more complicated process of thinking what rule is appropriate for each and every situation that could possibly exist.

This could manifest in many different stereotypes:

The police officer who supports causing suffering to peaceful drug users because he observes that law is sometimes important to prevent suffering in society, maybe his sister got raped once and he saw that law mitigated against that suffering, the rapist got arrested, so now he subconsciously associates law with suffering prevention and harasses people for smoking weed and pissing against a tree because law=always good!

The irrational sex-negative feminist who has been sexually exploited by a man in a position of power over her once (maybe the sister of the police officer) and now she equates power with abuse and thinks no relationship where two parties have a different level of power is possible, it’s all rape, women are weaker so all sex is rape!

The libertarian who doesn’t think any rich person should have to pay taxes because they observe that being locked in a cage, being restricted causes suffering and misery, so they end up completely ignoring that never restricting anyone’s liberties and forcing them to share resources can also lead to extreme suffering and misery.

The corrupt con artist who thinks money is all that matters, because money can buy resources that can be used to alleviate suffering. But if money could not buy you resources to alleviate suffering, why would money be important? It wouldn’t be, so money itself isn’t important, suffering alleviation is the real good, and chances are their scams cause more suffering than they alleviate overall.

It’s a projection, the subject fails to comprehend that good and bad are just emotions, not located in objects around them. You suffer appetite, so you eat a piece of chocolate, the piece of chocolate alleviates your suffering – so if you really lack the critical thinking skills, I just need to give everyone in the concentration camp getting a tortured a piece of chocolate and you conclude ”what a wonderful place to be! They look happy! Piece of chocolate=good!”.

Pro-lifers are an excellent example of this, this type of thinking is exactly why people are so opposed to the idea of antinatalism. By stopping the production of all conscious life, we could end all suffering, we would also take away every moment of joy and happiness, but that’d be irrelevant, because people that are never born they don’t feel the need to acquire joy and happiness, just like if you’re not addicted to heroin, heroin has no value anymore.

Non-existers don’t need pleasure to avoid suffering, only disadvantaged existers need to obtain pleasure to avoid suffering, before I was born I didn’t enjoy a piece of chocolate but I also didn’t feel any appetite for the piece of chocolate.

But many don’t get this, because intuitively, we notice that when they don’t get a pleasurable experience, they suffer from not having that pleasurable experience, so they chase it, that is the nature of our sentient experience.

And they know that in order to have pleasurable experiences, one must be alive too. So they want humans to be alive, because in life they can chase pleasure in order to avoid suffering, suffering that did not exist before the life was created. It’s good to extinguish an already burning house, it’s not good to set it on fire for the good of extinguishing it again, that’s not a profit.

It’s like an immature child only seeing ”extinguishing fire=good” and now wants to play fireman, so they set the house on fire, so that then they can extinguish that fire again. Make a need/desire, so that then you can fulfill that need/desire, create suffering in order to avoid it.

In all of this, they simply fail to see that if we simply weren’t alive, then we wouldn’t need pleasurable experiences to avoid suffering anymore, you only need to achieve pleasurable experiences to avoid suffering once you’re already alive, and they are projecting their experience as a sentient organism onto the ”experience” of the fetus who literally has no experience whatsoever because it isn’t conscious.

It’s good to extinguish an already burning house, it’s not good to set it on fire for the good of extinguishing it again, that’s not a profit. But this applies in many areas of ethics, all deontology I would argue is tainted by this type of irrational projection.

We identify certain things as important, because they help us to or we’re under the delusion that they’ll help us to alleviate some form of suffering, that is the real underlying goal, but if we’re not constantly careful, we start to falsely identify the object itself as good and forget that it’s about the emotions, the piece of chocolate you just ate isn’t good, what is good is that it alleviated your suffering, you went from a deprived, negative to a less deprived, less negative state.

It’s impossible to even find a different example of this phemonenon, because every endeavor can be traced back to suffering avoidance. So for example, people value money, but I could argue that they don’t really value the money, they value obtaining certain resources with it, the money is only an instrument, so them thinking ”money is good in and of itself” is wrong, an identification error.

But ultimately, neither are the resources that are bought with it good in and of itself, we also only try to obtain those resources to alleviate our suffering, so that’s really all it ever boils down to – and humans constantly lose track of that and falsely start to identify the object that is used to achieve the end goal as the real good, when the real good is the end goal that they just lost track of.

Like the police officer thinking law is good because it prevents harm, but then causing more harm in the name of the law. Or the democrat thinking giving everyone a right to vote is good because it prevents the harm of dictatorship, but then causing more harm as a majority voting for a violent dictator. Or the corrupt thief thinking money is good because it prevents unfulfilled desires, but causing much more desires to be unfulfilled in the process of making the money.

Sensation=intrinsic value.

Everything else we proclaim to value=extrinsically valuable to improving intrinsic value.

On toughening up children.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See how this would be completely unfair?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s circular logic entirely basically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Possible answers and my responses:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.