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Location: "Silicon Valley" (part of San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA)
4,375 posts, read 4,089,202 times
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Yep, I agree with Braunwyn. It is an evil philosophy. Intelligent life is rare and beautiful, it needs to be protected and nurtured and perpetuated. Life is a gift that parents give to children. The vast majority of us live lives worth living.
I think if someone feels like they should never have been born, and they are depressed every day, it is possible they suffer from clinical depression, and this is something that needs to be diagnosed and treated by a psychiatrist. It is a chemical balance in the brain; the chemical imbalance can be corrected, and they will feel better as a result. They will suddenly no longer feel that they should never have been born.
Lady, it's you two who are nasty. Beyond nasty actually. I don't know if there is a descriptor for people that wish the demise for any species.
Braunwyn, you are the typical breeder suffering from cognitive dissonance. You simply cannot accept any good argument against your deepest beliefs. It makes you feel uncomfortable. Then you desperately attack everything as an attempt to invalidate the arguments. You also start rationalizing and denying everything that goes against your beliefs. This is simply cognitive dissonance.
Braunwyn, you are the typical breeder suffering from cognitive dissonance. You simply cannot accept any good argument against your deepest beliefs. It makes you feel uncomfortable. Then you desperately attack everything as an attempt to invalidate the arguments. You also start rationalizing and denying everything that goes against your beliefs. This is simply cognitive dissonance.
You need a grammar lesson. Your use of the word breeder is incorrect in the context you're trying to use it in. It also contradicts your finger pointing since calling people breeders is only meant to insult. Anyhow, an opinion is not an argument for the 100th time. Your personal experience of 80% misery and 20% pleasure in life as an argument for the end of a species is not rational. For your opinion to be an argument you would need to be an authority and you're obviously not any kind of authority. Further, I don't think i have made any statements about my beliefs, let alone beliefs that I think can be imposed upon others. That's your gig.
At most all you continue to demonstrate is that you lack the skill and desire to mange your suffering and that you are self involved to such a degree that you do not think anyone should exist anywhere wholly due to your personal limitations. That is all your rhetoric honestly amounts to from where I sit. To be clear, in no way am I arguing that you should procreate, continue to exist, or that your life is worth living for you. That's not my position about individuals, so don't jump to conclusions that I'm desperate for you to value your life or that your 80:20 plight is something I could help you with. I just don't think you have the right to drag people down with you.
But the universe doesnt care about whether or not a human child suffers. How can one be dragged down when suffering is the only truth and pleasure is an illusion?
There is no argument to Nill's philosophy, because it is the only true analysis of the cruel human experiment. Anything else is just perception and opinion because misery is the only reality.
Your personal experience of 80% misery and 20% pleasure in life as an argument for the end of a species is not rational.
At most all you continue to demonstrate is that you lack the skill and desire to mange your suffering and that you are self involved to such a degree that you do not think anyone should exist anywhere wholly due to your personal limitations. That is all your rhetoric honestly amounts to from where I sit.
Certainly I have had a bad personal experience. I wouldn't like that other people went through the same I have gone through in my life. But It's unethical to force some people to go through a life of suffering if they couldn't consent it in first place.
As I have said before the problem with procreation is the inability to give consent to potential risk. Life is nothing but an atrocious impostion on someone, for no reason other than the recreation of parents. Forcing someone into something is never justifiable, regardless if they are a minority.
Certainly I have had a bad personal experience. I wouldn't like that other people went through the same I have gone through in my life. But It's unethical to force some people to go through a life of suffering if they couldn't consent it in first place.
As I have said before the problem with procreation is the inability to give consent to potential risk. Life is nothing but an atrocious impostion on someone, for no reason other than the recreation of parents. Forcing someone into something is never justifiable, regardless if they are a minority.
Yet again, the bolded is simply conjecture. Opinion and fact are not one and the same.
You purport to be primarily driven to minimize human suffering, but here is where your interpretation of antinatalism breaks down. If your goal is the minimization of human suffering, then so be it; this is my ideal for the world. However, your first lament was that laws could not be enacted to stop people from procreating. When I posed that the only realistic, practical way for this law to have any teeth was via forced sterilization and pointed out that this would cause great human suffering, your only comment was that it was too bad that we couldn't create a virus that would result in human sterilization.
From these comments, combined with your opinion that you are a "victim" of a great crime, I can deduce that you are less concerned with the wellbeing of the humanity, as is your claim, so much as you are concerned with the eradication of the human species as a punishment for your unfortunate circumstances, whatever they may be.
If you were truly dedicated to the betterment of the human condition, then you would see the resultant suffering of the currently-alive seven-aught billion people upon realizing they were unable to procreate and this the last generation of humanity as an unaccepatble level of suffering. Considering that there are perhaps a few thousand out of many billions of people on the face of the earth who share your convictions, it would take at least a few thousand generations for the number of people with malaise towards existence to catch up with the number of people who believe that their existence is worth living and would not exchange it many more thousands of times over. This would be like starting World War 2 all over again because that jerk at the store double charged you instead of getting a manager to fix the problem correctly.
You say that "forcing someone into something is never justifiable, regardless if they are a minority," but then advocate forcing people into circumstances in which they cannot procreate, with the caveat that sometimes, injustices are necessary to protect lives. Then later, you invoke Nazi totalitarianism as an affront to all that is good in humanity, though this is basically one of the cornerstones of any fascist nationalism.
When I posed that the only realistic, practical way for this law to have any teeth was via forced sterilization and pointed out that this would cause great human suffering, your only comment was that it was too bad that we couldn't create a virus that would result in human sterilization.
This is an interesting angle. The desire to procreate is primal, and it is the highest aspiration of many to have children. The lengths to which people will go to have them even when their bodies protest by repeated aborting of fetuses (a colleague's wife recently confined herself to bed for months to carry a set of in vitro twins (almost) to term, for example) speaks to the strenuous desires of these folks.
And, parents often mourn miscarried / aborted children no differently than the death of children who were actually born.
To the extent that this hope / aspiration is pure and well-meaning, it is necessary to weigh the suffering of having one's dreams thwarted over against the likely harm of existence for the child(ren). I can't really fully credit this argument though, for several reasons, such as:
1) Much of this yearning is about as valid at the end of the day as the yearning for god, an intact (divorce-free) family, an absence of personal tragedy / misfortune, or any other seemingly worthy thing. Most of it is illusory, and in any case, this grasping and desire is just the sort of suffering that is harmful eventually to children if they manage to grow up, just as it's harmful to us. Everything on the above-mentioned list involves Other People and you can't control Other People. Spouses and children can fail you or outright betray you and misfortune comes when it will. Many a hand-wringing would-be parent has eventually found the parenting experience and/or the experience of their children's success in life to be wanting and ends up wondering what they were thinking. A non-existent child is pure unrealized potential but fantasizing about that demands nothing of the parent and, like all fantasizing, ends up skipping the nasty bits and visualizing the happy bits.
2) Parents are in the position of creator here, and I think the noble and refined subjective experience of desiring children doesn't really influence the morality of it in terms of preventing or creating risk of suffering, or the likelihood of suffering. Well, I suppose it slightly impacts the likelihood of suffering for the child in that if you have a parent going into the experience with strong desire and sense of meaning they are arguably more likely to be a good parent. But you could equally argue that they are setting themselves up for disappointment and frustration with such high ideals, too.
Having children is, in all the ways that matter, no different than any other decision. Like any other decision it has potential and near-certain consequences that must be weighed, and my only argument is that they are not just consequential for parents, but for the children they conceive. So I don't see the relevance of the prospective parent's subjective experience of wanting as being objectively relevant to the far more important consideration of the consequences for the child.
Certainly I have had a bad personal experience. I wouldn't like that other people went through the same I have gone through in my life. But It's unethical to force some people to go through a life of suffering if they couldn't consent it in first place.
As I have said before the problem with procreation is the inability to give consent to potential risk. Life is nothing but an atrocious impostion on someone, for no reason other than the recreation of parents. Forcing someone into something is never justifiable, regardless if they are a minority.
My life has not been an atrocious imposition and I'm grateful to my parents for making the extraordinary sacrifices of bringing me into this world. There is no good reason for you to point your finger at them or any parents other than your own. To reiterate what I said earlier, managing suffering is ultimately about choice. For you it's an unmanageable, out control crisis that happens to you. That is the card you choose to play, but it's not the path many others choose. While you may not respect that you have to accept it because it just is.
However, your first lament was that laws could not be enacted to stop people from procreating. When I posed that the only realistic, practical way for this law to have any teeth was via forced sterilization and pointed out that this would cause great human suffering, your only comment was that it was too bad that we couldn't create a virus that would result in human sterilization.
I believe we should find an easy way to sterilize people as painless as possible, such as through a sterilizing virus. It would be better than sending people who procreate to jail, or mass forceful surgical sterilization. I agree it would cause too much suffering. And this is even impractical.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 415_s2k
as is your claim, so much as you are concerned with the eradication of the human species as a punishment for your unfortunate circumstances, whatever they may be.
I am just against enslaving and sacrificing innocent children for the sake of creating a better world for distant future generations who don't need to come into existence.
If there is no human species, there is no suffering. Simple as this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 415_s2k
You say that "forcing someone into something is never justifiable, regardless if they are a minority," but then advocate forcing people into circumstances in which they cannot procreate, with the caveat that sometimes, injustices are necessary to protect lives.
I don't see the prohibition of procreation as injustice. It's a measure to prevent the injustice caused by parents, for bringing a sufferer into existence. Procreation is immoral. Why should procreation be free?
To reiterate what I said earlier, managing suffering is ultimately about choice. .
Why should people be forced into suffering in first place? Nobody could consent to participate of this life game. Problems didn't have to exist for a person. Suffering didn't have to exist.
It's simple not right to force a person into a situation of suffering and then say that this is her problem, and she has now the obligation to deal with it. This is simply not right. Violation of consent is a serious issue.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Braunwyn
For you it's an unmanageable, out control crisis that happens to you. That is the card you choose to play, but it's not the path many others choose.
Who told you is it always easy or even possible to solve some life problems? Sometimes suffering is inescapable. Sometimes it's not possible escape from predicament.
People have different sensibilities, different values. Why they should be forced to deal with suffering if they can't? Can't you see this is a violation of rights, and a disrespect to the value and sensibility of the potential child? Is it fair to make this imposition?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Braunwyn
While you may not respect that you have to accept it because it just is.
This is simply not right. This is immorality and I don't have to accept it.
Last edited by Nill; 04-02-2014 at 05:36 AM..
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