The real taboo question nobody wants to touch isn't abortion or suicide but birth itself, because all the other moral dramas start the moment someone is dragged into existence without consent, into a life that is terminal from day one, structurally hostile, filled with pain, discouragement, and moral compromise, and only made bearable through coping mechanisms, illusions, art, religion, distractions, and self-deception. We pretend life is some intrinsic good, that procreation is generous, that motherhood is sacred, and that suicide is the ultimate sin, but flip the picture upside down and it's obvious that life is a slow deterioration embedded with death, that having kids is a way to dump this burden onto someone else to give meaning to your own anxiety, and that morality itself is sabotaged by scarcity, competition, and decay, forcing everyone to become callous just to survive. If being born is already a harm and a manipulation, then continuing to live at any cost isn't automatically noble, and deciding to leave when dignity, autonomy, or ethical agency collapses is a perfectly intelligible response to a rigged condition, especially since most people only endure life by numbing themselves with habits, neuroses, meds, entertainment, and lies until death does the job for them anyway. The "enigma" isn't suicide but why anyone keeps going under extreme misery, and the answer is usually folly, instinct, fear, or illusion, not reason. Suicide doesn't destroy some sacred order, it's already written into being itself as a constant possibility, and the only sane position isn't demanding everyone die now or forbidding it forever, but refusing procreation, living minimally, resisting harm where possible, and staying willing to die if moral or personal dignity demands it, because there is no unconditional duty to stay alive, only a stubborn cultural panic about admitting that life doesn't love us back, even though we desperately love it and wish it could have lasted forever.
This book was to me as the Upanishads was to Shoppy. Picrel.
>>24970217Fuck me, wrong pic. Still relevant thoughbeit
>morality
>>24970208I dunno. I like draining my balls in random women.
>>24970208CRAWLING IN MY SKIN
>>24970208TRVKE
>>24970208Nobody's consent is violated in the moment of creation. The ethical objection is ineffective.>b-but... it will affect someone down the lineYes, that is how actions in the world work. They don't require consent. You're free to argue that there exists an unethical way to create and I will readily agree with you. But consent has jack shit to do with it.
>>24971219My consent was violated when I was born because nobody asked me if I was okay with being birthed or not.
Being born can't logically be a harm since there is no subject to harm prior to birth. Life can be miserable. But I think the Book of Disquiet said it best when the narrator says pessimists are happier than he is because they fashion the world in their own image and therefore feel at home in it, whereas he cannot in good faith presume life is as unpleasant for everyone as it is for him. Pessimism is a form of reductionism which comforts the pessimist because it reifies their, often warranted, unhappiness into reality itself. Therefore they aren't forced to come to terms that they are more miserable than others, and perhaps doomed to always be so, but are allowed to become resigned to their condition and part and parcel of existence itself. This is a lot easier but not always better, since it frequently reduces their thoughts and feelings to the pedestrian level instead of forcing them to grapple with them daily which can produce great art and endeavors. Especially if someone suffers because their mind or feelings are too elevated to find solace in what others find solace in
>>24971255Your consent faculties didn't exist so your consent by definition couldn't be violated.
>>24971261OP touches on a good point though which is expired in Paradise Lost and Frankenstein, which is the enmity of society or parents (or God) toward their creation. If you despise it, why did you create it? It never asked to be created. Consent is a weak angle but obviously no one entreats for his creation.
>>24971270Despising your creation and your creation's suffering are entirely separate points and I will be glad to discuss those. But as far as consent goes, it is anon-issue as no consent was violated.
>>24971219>>24971260>>24971261Didn't read the book award for both of you. We make choices that account for consent for subjects without being every day. For one massive example, the widespread sentiment that we are obligated to leave the world a better place than we found it for the sake of our next generations. If you hold this view (Which you should even if the next generation won't be directly your offspring) you must concede that you care about the potential living conditions of being(s) without subject. the consent argument is just one more step/leap towards the idea that realistically no matter what you do you can never leave the world to a perfect ideal, which is that your children will not have to suffer at all, or else concede further that you are fine with your children suffering. this is what most people do, subconsciously, and it is further explained (if you actually read the book; its dry but this is the lit board for god's sake) in chapter 3b, WHY SELF-ASSESSMENTS OF ONE’S L I F E ’ S QUA L I T Y A R E U N R E L I A B L E, by the polyanna principle, habituation principle, and the comparison paradox.>Pessimism is a form of reductionism which comforts the pessimist because it reifies their, often warranted, unhappiness into reality itself. Therefore they aren't forced to come to terms that they are more miserable than others, and perhaps doomed to always be so, but are allowed to become resigned to their condition and part and parcel of existence itself. This is a lot easier but not always better, since it frequently reduces their thoughts and feelings to the pedestrian level instead of forcing them to grapple with them daily which can produce great art and endeavors. Especially if someone suffers because their mind or feelings are too elevated to find solace in what others find solace inThis is well written, and completely true. However its instrumental value as an actual argument for creating new people, some of whom are, as you rightly point out, doomed to pessimism, remains to be explained.
>>24971300>we are obligated to leave the world a better place than we found it for the sake of our next generations>you care about potential living conditions of being(s) without subjectYes. No actual consent involved. I would care about the living conditions of a subject that wanted them worse too.
Should I gift this book to myself on this christmas day?
>>24971323Don't play coy; wanting a better world even for those who don't and won't want one is a brave and beautiful sentiment and betrays your deep empathy. If you didn't bury it under layers of conceptions you would see with crystal clarity that consent and happiness are synonyms.
>>24971360I never argued against or hid empathy. I argued against shoving "consent" into issues where it's tangential.
>>24971362Arguing against consent is arguing against empathy; you don't care about the subject's opinion, and they are just an instrument in your wider plan, whether its improving living conditions or raping their holes.
>>24971370>you don't care about the subject's opinionThere is no subject before/during creation. Hence consent plays no role.
>>24971380see your own response here >>24971323>I would care about the living conditions of a subject that wanted them worse too.We already established the premise that a subject without current but with potential being is significant and even that its consent can be violated, and therefore can be simply referred to as a subject. Notice how when faced with an obligate concession that you either actually do care about creating a better world and therefore care about empathy and consent of extant and potential beings, or don't care about consent and therefore don't actually care about creating the best possible world (I know it to be the first one because humans are fundamentally redeemable/good/godly), you get stuck in a recursive loop of faulty logic. This is because reproduction is actually the main goal of life, even superseding survival in the majority of cases. The ultimate conclusion of accepting the premises laid out so clearly in the book (if anyone in this entire thread actually did the bare minimum and at least read his short 11 page 1997 essay that the book is based off of, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20009904) is to accept that the emergence of logic, reason, and empathy endowed to the human race by evolution is, as Zapffe puts it, a maladaptation, akin to a buck who's antlers grow too large for its head to support, because it produces beings with the capacity to willfully make themselves extinct. Therefore instead of remaining ideologically pure and consistent, we simply accept faulty logic, in order to justify our predilections, which largely align with those of evolution itself. To put it another way, one must actually forsake reason to willfully harm or advocate harm, like the aforementioned buck slamming its head into the ground or on a tree or even another buck over and over until its huge antlers break off or it dies of concussion.
>>24971431No, we did not establish that consent of a non-existent subject can be violated. >>24971323 points out precisely that consent of the non-existent is irrelevant.>you either care about consent of potential beings or don't care about consent [fullstop]False dichotomy.Also, I want to make it clear that I'm not writing this in an angry or arrogant tone. I'm being brief because verbosity and free-flowing associations seem to have created this problem to begin with.
>>24971431you make me feel so sorry for that poor buck with the big antlers
>>24971431Buddha at some point realized that forcing yourself to fast is as food-centric as chronic over-eating. You are controlled by food in both cases. Logic, reason and empathy being the crowning jewel of human special-ness and them being a curse we are struggling with are two sides of the same narcissistic coin. You have no idea what "ideologically pure" means because no ideology can prove itself as Godel has mathematically established long ago. You can at most establish that your limited premises warrant a limited conclusion, keeping in mind that you excluded an infinity of relevant premises as well. Antinatalism isn't that deep, brother.
>>24971450If it makes you feel better, the real existence of such a creature is essentially a historical fabrication akin to the deranged conclusions drawn by late 19th century paleontologists>Historically, its extinction has been attributed to the encumbering size of the antlers, a "maladaptation" making fleeing through forests especially difficult for males while being chased by human hunters,[13] or being too taxing nutritionally when the vegetation makeup shifted.[33] In these scenarios, sexual selection by does for stags with large antlers would have contributed to decline.[61] However, antler size decreased through the Late Pleistocene and into the Holocene, and so may not have been the primary cause of extinction.[41] A reduction in forest density in the Late Pleistocene and a lack of sufficient high-quality forage is associated with a decrease in body and antler size.[62] Such resource constriction may have cut female fertility rates in half.[41] Human hunting may have forced Irish elk into suboptimal feeding grounds.[3] Irish elk populations may have been subject to selection pressure such as predation and sexual selection that forced them to maintain a large body size even if a smaller body size may have been more optimal for given environmental conditions.[4]
>>24971461True and good post. Namo Buddhaya.
>>24971444The only point that >>24971323 made is that they would care about (securing good) living conditions even of a subject that wanted them worse. This was in response to the claim that all people agree on the basic premise that we are obligated to leave the world a better place than we found it for the next generations, proving that the experience of a being without subject is a considerable quantity. In context, therefore, their "subject that wanted them worse" can only be a future being, a being without contemporary subject.The problem here is the conflation of consent with goodwill. When you vaccinate a newborn against measles, you do not and cannot ask for their consent, but everyone recognizes this as a necessarily breach of consent, and an act of goodwill. You could easily argue that the consent of the non-existent may be violable in a similar fashion, and in fact that is the implication of >>24971323. But to say their consent is irrelevant, uninvolved, or doesn't actually exist is the logical equivalent to the buck hitting its head on the ground.Actually, the problem is you not reading the fucking book. Picrel.
>>24970208
>>24971261rekt
>>24971300I don't think creating new people has an instrumental argument except in lands where they are still created for their utility (which often leads to female children being discarded). Most people who create children without deeply considering the matter though are not conscientious enough to be accessible to philosophical reasoning. The sort of people who are already tend to think very carefully about children and often postpone it to ensure their children are less likely to have an existence of misery
>>24971255In fairness to your parents, they never knew you'd become such a whiny little prick.Still, cheer up. You can rectify their negligence right now. Drink some bleach.
