Sentient life, yes. All life? Not interesting of a question imo. Most life has no experience, so the question doesn’t really arise about should or shouldn’t for me.
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This would support the idea of not having children, though. YOu should not have the control as to whether or not another sentient, intelligent being comes into existence.
I happen to also take this stance, but this reply is just to point out that the concept above leads to the fairly clear conclusion that one cannot then foist life onto one (awkward, as there is “no one” until the life obtains, but there we go).
Because of the first quote from yourself 
Ah, nice to see this good old topic come back. It’s fun.
The way I see it, those who think life is such a crap storm have an easy way out. But that’s rarely taken. And that’s well I suppose.
But then life cannot be that bad. Or you can try to delude others. Antinatalists don’t like to talk about it, but there’s a surprising correlation between depression and people who hold such views. But apparently that’s not an argument because psychology.
In my opinion, some lives are tragedies. But certainly not all.
Yes, everything suffers at some point or another. But is that not counterbalanced for many with joy and love and other emotions that don’t fall under suffering? If life is so full of suffering, why do the majority of people choose to keep living?
Not a chance, what would give me the right to decide for everyone?
No, because I want to live. I have suffered before, I will likely suffer again and yes, I still want to be here. I’d be interested in living multiple lifetimes if the option were given to me.
Reproducing is what life does, I see no crime in that even for a species that has intelligence to weigh the option of whether they should or not.
Besides, the risk of cruelty doesn’t extinguish the risk of missing out on joy. Would we also not then be guilty if we denied a life that might have had the potential for joy?
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This is a fundamentally wrong take on antinatalism: I do not know any antinatalist (of which I am one) would does not think that once you’re alive, you have good reason to remain alive**. Antinatalism is about not having children. If critics could perhaps restrain themselves to the claims antinatalism actually makes, that would probably make hte discussions a bit more lively and less contentious.
** the coolest part about that is that it supports the idea of not having children(if you’re taking this seriously, anyhow - if not, all good - it wont lol): If, as you posit, for some, life is that bad, why take the risk that you’ll have a child who feels that way, and still wants to stay alive? Seems pretty shitty to me (that’s not meant to be an argument, I’m just illustrating the confusion that tends to come about).
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I had in mind schopenhauer1, dunno if he’s around. He did think being alive is worse than being dead. Many. Many times.
On not having children, that’s easy. There’s dozens of reasons not to have them, good and bad arguments.
But the argument being that brining a life into pain is a fundamentally different reading than most people have about life.
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No
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No
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Depends on the situation. For example, if I had a bad hereditary disease, or was ostracized, persecuted, or too poor to support a family, or lived in a war zone etc. To postpone or decisevily stop reproducing is a sound response to bad situations one can’t change and must endure.
In better situations, if couples want to reproduce, then antinatalism is foolish. When the probability for success is reasonable, then it would be foolish to avoid trying because of a possibility of failure.
Also nihilism is foolish (i.e. finding it meaningful contradicts it).
We might wipe ourselves out, and you can smile in your last moments of awareness. But if we don’t destroy ourselves, we might find a way to end suffering. No hunger, no disease, no way to act against anyone else, no nothing negative. Then we will have billions of years of a gigantic population, spread across the universe, not suffering.
Would it be fair to deny those gazillion people the right to a happy life for the sake of today’s population?
We need to solve these problems, not end life.
Life is a miracle. (Figuratively speaking, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t mean God.) Our awareness and understanding are extraordinary, literally and figuratively. For all we know, were the only planet in an unfathomably, unimaginably huge universe where a part of the universe is capable of understanding the rest. Ending it would be unconscionable.
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i wont answer all questions since idk if im right or wrong,But the last question you composed is actually great
since we dont know what our child or kid would look like or what would be his life like we dont have any right to bring him in and let him suffer unless we cant fully make sure hes doing good (which we cant obv). Yeah but different people different thoughts, depends how people see.
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I’m not sure whether you’ve maybe missed some words here?
On my assumption, yeah it’s clearly not the common view. But this is partially because people tend not to think morally. They think emotionally, and post-hoc moralize.
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True. That surely happens very frequently.
And some people are also born depressed - ranging from mild to severe depression.
Not if you understand nihilism to be the view that life has no inherent meaning or purpose. The existence of an overarching purpose and meaning may be opposed to, or at least devalue, all other meanings and purposes. I believe that is what Nietzsche referred to in saying that monotheistic religion is nihilistic.
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Sure, but to find nihilism meaningful implies that there is something meaningful in life, and thus refutes the view that life has no meaning.
- I personally wouldn’t.
- I personally wouldn’t.
- Guilty as charged.
Your arguments aren’t without logic and you aren’t even making half the arguments you could be making.
I do have one question though. If I had a switch that could end all the suffering in the universe why should I switching the suffering off?
I don’t mean why should in terms of my personal subjective preference, or in terms of your personal subjective preference, or in terms of the collective subjective preference of everyone in the world.
I mean, what objective reason that doesn’t depend on personal subjective preference is there that means I should flick that switch and turning a universe worth of suffering off?
My question isn’t rhetorical. I am genuinely interested in your answer.
I like your post btw Thea.
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This is slightly misleading. Natural selection does not operate at the individual level, but at the species level.
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Why would nature and physics have any kind of opinion that it is a blessing or a tragedy? Life just is.
We could argue that life is a further state of matter in physics. Molecules forming into a further behavior that weren’t present in matter before.
In that case, there’s a logic to how life forms. An evolution of matter, just as it went from plasma to atoms, to molecules etc.
Why fight that natural order of things? And why view the formation of consciousness and self-awareness as also different from this development of nature?
To self-annihilate is to essentially work against that natural progression. To work against the form of “will” of nature that evolves along this path under the right conditions.
And I think it is a failure of consciousness that drives this, from the chemical imbalance in a broken mind leading to a weak rationale based on an inability to see things in a larger perspective than the depression of the self.
This anti-natalist perspective rarely extends into objective truth or concept, it mostly is an attempt at making a depressed mind justify its own position to annihilate everything because they want to annihilate themselves and it easily spreads to others who want to justify the same for themselves.
This nihilistic position also demands proof that the universe without life has some higher purpose than a universe with life. A point that’s pretty hard to argue for from any perspective other than the one angry because they think life has been unfair to them.
The blame for suffering is not existence itself, it’s the system and actual perpetrators of that suffering.
Blaming existence itself is a form of expression of the inability, or laziness, to actually deconstruct where the suffering actually comes from and propose a strategy for happiness.
- No
- No
- Is that a question or a statement?
I’m unsure we could even know this, if it were true. I don’t think we know much at all about depression such as to be able to come to this kind of conclusion.
One thing relevant to this thread, which I’d just mentioned in another thread, is that suffering is necessary for life. Those who fail to feel pain (yes, congenital insensitivity to pain is a real thing) do not learn to protect themselves, and inevitably end up doing something or another that results in an early death. So pain serves a purpose in motivating people to protect their bodies from damage. Likewise, feeling cold motivates people to avoid hypothermia, and feeling hot motivates people to avoid heatstroke. And so on.
Consequently, I have to assert that suffering in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It is only suffering that does not serve some useful purpose that is bad.
I agree with this, but there is some semantic stuff to sort out: Again, I agree.. you can think of the athlete who suffers constantly.
I think the issue is that many people define suffering as that pain which is undesirable (bit of an oxymoron, but if you see “desirable” as akin to the athlete’s situation, it kind of works). So the a-symmetry argument doesn’t work for those people - the concept of suffering is a universal bad which we must accept.
I see “suffering” as multi-faceted and it is the undesirable kind, which seems much, much more prevalent in life to me, which supports the a-symmetry argument.
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Your semantic distinction of desirable and undesirable suffering was really cool and well-put in the form of the example with the athlete’s pain, so thanks for sharing it!
It helps answer critiques that question the assumption of inherent undesirability of suffering or pain. This can potentially be applied to the stoic’s or the Buddhist’s arguments.
And I also agree with you that suffering of the undesirable kind seems to be much more prevalent in society.