Because there is no person to harm, prior to it, like there is in the case of death. — Thorongil

Yet the epicurean position is precisely that death cannot harm the person themselves because a person does not exist after they die. It seems ad hoc to require someone exist before a harm for something to count as a harm but not require that they exist after a harm for something to count as a harm.

Consider again, for a moment, the reason for my emoji. I said that lemons need to exist before making lemonade. You disagreed. But then you contradicted yourself and agreed with me that, to make lemonade, the lemons need to exist "before" doing so (whether by two seconds or a century). — Thorongil

No, I didn't. Read that again.

It doesn't matter if it existed for a century or two seconds before. — darthbarracuda

You're asking how nonexistence can harm them, and I agree that it can't. Death itself harms the person, not the after death state, of which you refer. — Thorongil

So why cannot birth harm a person?

Nothing you've said has caused me to doubt it. — Thorongil

...okay? How is that relevant?

On the other hand, death is clearly different from birth in that an individual does exist prior to its occurrence. In that sense, death cannot but be a harm to that individual, since it results in that individual's bodily extinction, at minimum. — Thorongil

Right but a person doesn't exist after they died so how can it harm them. This whole "argument" is going in circles, punctuated by emoji's and sarcastic poems.

:-} — Thorongil

???

As for the first question, that depends on context. I agree in principle with the death penalty, for example. So I do think people can benefit from the death of an individual convicted of a serious crime, those people being the criminal's potential victims, were he not punished. I also think that some wars can be justified, in which case the people on the just side of the war would benefit from the enemy being killed. As for harm, I think a suicide's death, for example, can harm the friends and loved ones of the person who took his or her life. Fatal accidents can do so as well. — Thorongil

I meant specifically the person dying, not those around them. So you're taking the epicurean stance on this.

And your definition of harm is incoherent for this reason. — Thorongil

Yeah...no.

It feels like you're pulling my leg now. If they exist at the time of making lemonade, then they existed before one made lemonade. — Thorongil

No that's not right. The history of a lemon's existence is irrelevant at the time of lemonade-making. It doesn't matter if it existed for a century or two seconds before. All that matters is that it exists at the moment lemonade-making occurs.

Now that you've have time to think, I'll ask you again: do you think people can be harmed or benefited by dying? Do you think it might help someone to be euthanized if they are suffering terribly? Even if they don't exist after the fact?

I've made it clear that my definition of harm does not require there to be an actual person existing prior to the harm. It requires only a counterfactual hypothetical person, "if there had been".

I agree, it is well-written and very interesting.

Because it's self-evident. You might as well ask why lemons need to exist before making lemonade. — Thorongil

Lemons don't need to exist "before" making lemonade. They just need to exist at the time of making lemonade.

And it seems that you, apparently tendentiously, left off the 'or helped' that should have been included at the end of your sentence. — Janus

It wouldn't be "helped", it would have been "benefited". Helped implies there is something harmful that needs to be removed.

If you meant the latter, then we're not talking about any person that exists, for there can be no person that exists before existing. — Thorongil

I mean, no shit. But why should I believe someone needs to exist before in order to be harmed?

If I snapped my fingers and instantly fully-grown people appeared and were instantaneously tortured, would it be harmful to these people, since they previously did not exist? Would it only be a harm if, say, the came into existence, and then after one second began to be tortured? Why is prior existence so important?

Well, actually you are not necessarily harming a child by not making them wear a seat belt, so I can't see your point with that analogy — Janus

:-| Criminal negligence is a thing.

Be that as it may, existence cannot be seen to be either a harm or a help, per se. Of course, if you don't exist then you cannot be harmed because you cannot be anything. — Janus

This makes it seem like existence does, in fact, help or harm someone by enabling them to be harmed.

There is a being who might be harmed by not wearing a seatbelt. But there is no being who might be harmed by being born. — Thorongil

But there is - the person who is being born. They are being born. Birth is happening - to them. If a person cannot be harmed by being born because they don't exist prior, can a person even be born at all, since they don't exist prior to being born?

Existence per se does not harm anyone; it merely provides the conditions, so to speak, for help or harm along with anything else to be. — Janus

That's like saying you aren't harming a child by not making them wear a seatbelt, you're just providing the conditions that enable the child to be harmed. If a person's existence requires them to be harmed, then their existence is harmful to them. This should not be difficult to understand.

And, for some people, existence is equivalent to suffering, which is seen as harmful. There is no difference.

I don't know what to say. One sentence says you can't be harmed before existing and the other says you can. — Thorongil

???

You can't be harmed if you do not exist.

Coming into existence implies you now exist. If this existence harms you, then you have been harmed by coming into existence.

A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism by Lee Braver.

No. What was it? — Thorongil

That coming into existence can be harmful.

Again, incoherence. These two statements are flatly contradictory of each other. — Thorongil

You're going to need to explain why.

Your position is utterly incoherent. — Thorongil

:-}

No, this doesn't follow at all. If you don't need to exist in order to be harmed, then what is being harmed? — Thorongil

No, obviously you need to exist to be harmed. You just don't need to exist before the harm occurs in order to be harmed. There's nothing incoherent here.

I took "birth" to refer to "coming into existence," not "exiting a mother's birth canal." — Thorongil

Right, I think you get what I meant though.

The fact is that birth harms no one. To say that it does requires that people exist before they are born, which is to say that people can exist before they exist, an absurdity. There's no getting around this. — Thorongil

Hardly, for we don't need someone to exist before they're born to be harmed. If something is bad to experience, then it is harmful for a person to experience it, even if they don't exist before. Especially if we define harm in the way I did in the first premise: something counts as a harm to a person if this person, if they were rational and well-informed, would prefer not to experience it.

Unless you honestly, truly believe it is not a harm to a baby to be tortured as soon as they're expelled from the womb. It's not a persuasive line of reasoning. If, for some crazy reason, people actually did exist in some pre-natal otherworld before they were born, would that suddenly make coming into biological existence a harm?

(I'm sure you'll agree that at least some people are better off dead, even if this means they don't exist to recognize that they're better off.)

As a side note, I am using deontology in a broader sense than Kant's ethics. Common sense ethics is often deontological.

I'll take a swing at it, although my take is more ethical. Here's the argument I give in the book I'm writing:

"
Premise 1: If a person has an experience that a rational and well-informed person would prefer not to experience, then this person has been harmed (definition of harm).

Premise 2: But life as an experience is not something a rational and well-informed person would prefer (the negative perspective).

Conclusion 1: Therefore, life is harmful to a person.

Premise 3: But the life of a person depends on them having been born (self-evident truism).

Conclusion 2: Therefore, the birth of a person is harmful to this person.

Premise 4: But it is wrong to hurt other people (the fundamental ethical articulation).

Conclusion 3: Therefore, it is wrong to give birth to a person.
"

This is what I call the fundamental argument for antinatalism.

And while I agree with you that there is a fundamental "uncalmness" to phenomenal existence, I'm specifically focused on the anxiety produced by our inherent moral disqualification. We have to make do with the "lesser of all evils", go for the "greatest good", oftentimes solve difficult problems by appealing to the majority, and inevitably hurt or manipulate other people simply because we feel the need to live, progress, survive. We feel forced into political discourse, dirtying our hands and getting pissed off. We have to make exceptions to the fundamental ethical articulation, we can't get bogged down and worry about the "little things" we do that hurt other people. They are expendable and forgettable, apparently.

I happen to have consequentialist leanings but only because I believe the world we live in is incapable of sustaining a more natural, primordial deontological ethic. Deontology is often criticized for not addressing the problems with agent-relative reasons (refusing to hurt one person to prevent five more from equal treatment - it has an air of irrationality to it) - but that's not really the fault of deontology per se as much as it is the fault of those who decide it's okay to sustain a world in which we have to substitute this ethic for another one. In my view, the existence of substantial moral disagreement is a very troubling thing.

Therefore I believe that life is structurally negative and is morally disqualifying. We will never have a satisfactory ethic that affirms life, and this produces an anxiety in us. There's no such thing as "the good life", and everyone is guilty of doing something wrong. Most of the time it's not even our fault.

So, how do we know what X level of evil is? How does the person proposing the Problem of Evil as an argument against God know we have reached X level of evil without arbitrarily deciding it to be so? In other words, how does the atheist know that the X level of evil is reached and actually exists? How would we identify the X level of evil and differentiate it from levels of evil below X? How much evil is too much and how do we know that it is too much? Is a single death justifiable? How about five? Ten? Thousands? What is the support for this conclusion? Anyway we support our conclusion appears arbitrary. Thus, the Problem of Evil is not a charge against the existence of God. — Chany

I think this is probably what van Inwagen was arguing for. The idea, I think, is that if God had prevented Evil Happening x from happening, then people would be asking why God didn't prevent Evil Happening y from happening...and so on and so forth.

I'm not sure about this argument, it rubs me the wrong way, but maybe that's just because I'm not comfortable with the idea of a God actually existing. However I think a bigger problems looms that van Inwagen failed to adequately address, which is that of God's ability to prevent suffering from the start by altering our choices.

Early on he talks about one of the common atheist arguments in regards to compatibilist free will - that God had the power to "force our hand" to do good by making us in such-and-such way and the environment in such-and-such way. van Inwagen uses Orwell's 1984 (a horribly over-used example IMHO) to show that forcing people to do good is not really "free will".

But I think this fails because it's obvious that we don't have the ability to do things much worse. We don't have the ability to snap our fingers and fire nukes from our eyeballs. We can't fly and spy on people from above. We can't read each others' minds. So we have limitations already, but van Inwagen still wants to believe we are free. Now, God would seem to have had an arbitrary line to draw here as well - or did he? I think it's reasonable to believe that God could have made things a little better than they are right now without impinging on our free will in any noticeable way. The fact that we are so tempted to do bad things and have the ability to do so many terrible actions means that, even though we may have "free will", we have the odds stacked against us in doing good actions. I find it hard to accept that free will is intrinsically good if it is made in such a way that it leads to disproportionately large amounts of evil.

I wasn't particularly focused on your brand of antinatalism, but I will say I disagree with it. It's not just aesthetic, it's a definite ethical problem.

I think that could be generalized and applied to basically any marginal ethical/political point of view, regardless of its validity. Radicals like to pride themselves as being the few noble individuals who fight for justice for the forgotten. And fuck everyone else.

Anti-natalists take great pride in the fact that hardly anyone seems to problematize procreation like they do. Anti-natalism's obscurity is therefore perhaps its greatest strength. — Thorongil

Yo I'm gonna steal this (Y) 8-)

I'll give credit, of course.

As you say, Inwagen put those outside the bounds of his argument. So I'm not sure why you want to change the goal-posts. — apokrisis

No, he puts animal suffering outside, not natural disasters and freak accidents.

It is planned and deliberate, not a reaction.

How would a determinist explain such a decision to deliberately jump in the air? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

What caused you to plan and deliberate to jump in the air?

But Ingwagen is already accepting that God wants there to be freewill at that point. That must be some ultimate good. And so the price you pay for that is having humans making bad or mad choices. — apokrisis

Right, that's what I thought he meant, as I said in the beginning. That human free will is good, and God's reconciliation plan requires that this free will be maintained.

But you should have also read the part about horrors not caused by humans. Natural disasters, freak accidents, and finally animal suffering (which he accepts as outside the bounds of the argument).

An unexpected first reply. But I don't understand how it's relevant. The question is: if God could have prevented a terrible horror from occurring, why did he not? van Inwagen's answer, I think, is that God already prevents a whole lot more terrible horrors from occurring but has to decide on an arbitrary line on how much horror exists, because (I think??) horror is somehow necessary for God's plan to work. I don't see why you needed to include Guassian statistical errors or powerlaw distribution or whatever, especially since if we're theists all of these things exist because God created the world. In fact I'm not entirely sure what the point was that you were trying to convey.

The fact that many of the things we find to be of good character or virtue in a person are that which help meliorate against the many things we find to be bad in people makes me think misanthropy is not entirely wrong. A courageous person may go fight in a war - a war created by humans. A compassionate person may go becomes a medical aid in a poverty-stricken country - a country created this way by corrupt and selfish humans. Humans create disasters that have to be fixed by other humans.

But I think we have the capability to acting otherwise and having good intentions. A lot of misanthropic beliefs stem from conceptions of humans as being selfish and egoistic, always out for themselves and ready to stomp all over everyone else if it comes to it. That is empirically false and ethically repugnant and the fact that we recognize it as ethically repugnant means we aren't secretly egoistic turds.

Conquest of Abundance by Paul Feyerabend.

When you focus right down to it, every single behaviour and action from eating to love and even death can be sourced right down to a mechanism just to sustain the continuation of life. — ThinkingMatt

Is this post simply a mechanism meant to sustain the continuation of life?

What about actions that are clearly detrimental to the continuation of life, like suicide?

Anything that isn't us specifically focused on surviving is killing time. Life can be brutal but it can also be easy-going, to the point where you have vast stretches of time in between procreative acts in which you simply..."persist". All civilization seems to be the management of everything that happens in between sex acts and sleep. It is how we stay alive long enough to make babies. From a purely evolutionary perspective it doesn't seem like there would be any real difference between living in civilization or living in cryo-stasis, so long as you procreate in between sessions. Whatever passes on your genes is "successful".

Bucking the system may not be evolutionary successful but it's hella satisfying. I guess that goes to show that what is satisfying may not be the "best" for the survival of the species. But it also is extremely absurd to look at all the complexity in life and realize the only reason it's here is because it helps people persist for long stretches of time in between sex.

Our common notion of causality requires the passage of time. What does it mean for something to "begin" to exist, or "have a cause" outside of time?

Some people do not see the vanity in it. The ironic thing is that the more reflection we have on it, the more it becomes in vain, the more repetitive and unnecessary it seems. Why do people need to go through it in the first place is a bit different than, we are already here an we get pleasure out of things. — schopenhauer1

I think there's also an element of disbelief accompanying all this. Like it's actually hard to believe, not because it's far-fetched but simply because how underwhelming and unsatisfactory it is. It's not until the end of our lives that we really get it, after we've gone through life and seen it all happen.

So to summarize, there is the "goal-seeking" primary need for need, which we do not need to self-reflect on, and then there is a more abstract philosophical problem of why more "to do" in the first place. — schopenhauer1

So we have the goal-seeking need for need, as in, we need more needs because needs entail goals and goals are good, and we have the "philosophical" problem of why we need to have goals to begin with?

I think the only time "why" comes into the picture is when the attainment of a goal fails to compensate for the striving towards it. Otherwise the "why" would easily be answered by: because it feels good, it gives me pleasure, I enjoy doing it, etc. Why do we keep making philosophical posts on this forum? It's pretty repetitive, cyclic, and not much seems to get done - but presumably we find some degree of satisfaction that compensates. It's worth it.

Only when a job becomes annoying and difficult do people start to wonder if they should quit. But maybe they keep going because there's another reason to keep the job, to provide for the family, pay the bills, etc.

But if life takes more than it gives (which is what I see to be the umph behind instrumentality), then what reason is there to keep living, and make more people who will live?

So I think the part where I might be disagreeing with you is that I find enjoyment to be positively good and a justifying reason for doing (some) things. All things considered, if something brings me pleasure then I have a good reason to do it and keep doing it, even if it's repetitive. Maybe if I see how repetitive it is and wonder if there's anything "more" to life will I cease to find pleasure in what I am doing - but that's the problem, really, I cease to find pleasure in it.

Your vision of no struggle would be something I would not even recognize as it would not be life as we know it. The struggle of being faced with "to do" or more accurately "to deal" with life, is structural. — schopenhauer1

Right, precisely.

I suppose what I was trying to get at is that, even if we recognize the repetitiveness of existence (existence being not simply that which exists right now but that which exists in the past and the future as well), how it's a cycle of birth, decay, death...why should this necessarily be a bad thing? I agree that it is problematic but I don't think it's problematic in itself.

Why do these needs need to be brought forth to a new generation, ad infinitum, until species or universal death is the question more or less. — schopenhauer1

Say nobody suffered. Say we all loved life, and death was not feared but calmly accepted without any sadness. What would be wrong with instrumentality?

Your focus on needs makes me believe that it's the struggle that is problematic. If everything was easy-peasy lemon-squeezy there'd be nothing wrong with an absurd life.

So I think the problem of instrumentality is that there is no end to the "but why?" questions - how could there be?

Why do I exist? Because my parents had sex. But why did they have sex? Because they wanted to. But why did they want to? Because they're human beings. But why do human beings exist? Because they're part of the evolutionary chain of life. But why does life exist? Because the Earth had the right conditions for it to exist. But why does the Earth exist? Because the solar system exists. But why does the solar system...the galaxy...the galactic cluster...the universe exist? Because...because...because...full stop. Somewhere along the line something exists simply because it exists.

So any sort of reason, purpose, teleology exists within a system that already exists. But this base system cannot have a purpose itself, because purpose implies that something needs to get done, but self-evidently if there is only one being in existence, nothing needs to get done. It's also the case that something cannot come into being on its own accord, unless it already exists. So it seems that anything that comes into being can have a purpose but that which has no beginning cannot. But it cannot be that a being that comes into being has a purpose for itself, for it did not create itself. So the purpose is imposed on it from something else. Which eventually leads us back to the timeless substance with no purpose in its existence. So ultimately there is no fundamental purpose for anything. The universe cannot have a purpose for its being unless we postulate the existence of another world, which merely kicks the can down the road.

So perhaps instrumentality is a meaningless issue, although I suspect it isn't. If nothing can ultimately have any purpose at all, then what does it mean for us to wonder why things exist? If it's impossible for something to have ultimate purpose, then can it really be bad that it has no ultimate purpose? What would need to be the case in order to satisfy the problem of instrumentality?

Probably the answer is that we humans need reasons for things and the absence of any is discouraging. Just as we need justice even if there isn't any. Or beauty when there isn't any. etc

From Will To Power:

"At the same time I grasped that my instinct went into the opposite direction from Schopenhauer's: toward a justification of life, even at its most terrible, ambiguous, and mendacious; for this I had the formula Dionysian. Against the theory that an "in-itself of things" must necessarily be good, blessed, true, and one, Schopenhauer's interpretation of the "in-itself" as will was an essential step; but he did not understand how to deify this will: he remained entangled in the moral-Christian ideal. Schopenhauer was still so much subject to the dominion of Christian values that, as soon as the thing-in-itself was no longer "God" for him, he had to see it as bad, stupid, and absolutely reprehensible. He failed to grasp that there can be an infinite variety of ways of being different, even of being god."

I'm not well-versed in Nietzsche, but one thing I've retained from my reading of him is that Nietzsche thought the "ascetic" pessimism of Schopenhauer and his acolytes was detrimental to the flourishing of "great" people. Nietzsche did not reject pessimism but he tried to find a different way of approaching it in a way that ultimately affirmed life, because there are things in life that are beautiful, sublime, etc. At the core of his thought seems to be this notion of "health" - that no matter the circumstances the "healthy" person is able to flourish, and that the ascetics were really simply sick and diseased.

So Nietzsche was concerned that the influence of Schopenhauer's pessimism on the continent was negatively impacting the lives of people who would otherwise go on and do great things. This of course includes the production of music which Nietzsche criticized (like Wagner et al). It seems as though Nietzsche thought reading Schopenhauer dissolved potential in people. Nietzsche seemed to have wanted to instill a new sense of purpose and meaning in people so this wouldn't keep happening.

Nietzsche's philosophy was a product of the current cultural shift happening in the continent at the time. He's important, sure, but he is studied too much and given too much credit for ideas that weren't even his per se. It wasn't just Schopenhauer ---> Nietzsche, it was Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Frauenstadt, Duhring, von Hartmann, Mainlander, Bahnsen, etc etc.

It might be the case that Nietzsche is so wildly popular simply because ascetic pessimism is not altogether that satisfactory. Sooner or later people get bored and want more and it's refreshing to hear someone speak about active power and drama and achievement and heroism and all that.

What about Euthyphro, do the gods love what is just because it is just or is it just because the gods love it?

If morality derived its legitimacy from authority, then there would be no reason to be moral if there was no authority to enforce morality. But that's wrong. Morality tells us to act in a certain way even if there's nobody there to make sure we do.

For certainly if morality required authority to be legitimate, then it really doesn't exist. It's just authority, or rather, sheer power.

I would have thought authority would have derived its legitimacy from morality, not vice versa.