And if you asked the vast majority of living people if they'd rather have never been born, what do you think they'd say? If they said "no", are they wrong, or just confused? If the vast majority of people would say "no" (which I'm fairly confident they would), why would you expect a different answer from the unborn? If they're just wrong, and confused about wanting to be alive, again, why is it different? — Wosret

You are confusing a life worth continuing with a life worth starting, and clumping them together as a life worth living. It doesn't matter if the majority think they are glad they are born. Furthermore, there are good reasons to think that people's appropriation of their lives are flawed and stem from optimism biases.

Antinatalism is not an unreasonable view because it doesn't tell people to radically change their lifestyles. It advocates a single change in action that people can live without.

Special pleading. Why does unsolicited mercy killings not violate liberty and consent of potential people? Why can't you kill actually people based on the assumption that there is a chance that they would rather be dead than alive? — Wosret

Because what if they actually don't want to die? Then you'd be harming them. It's none of mine nor your business to be involved in the continuation or lack thereof of someone else's life.

So now you are the cause of their suffering? I thought you were just telling TGW about how that's straining the definition of "cause"? It must be only cool when you do it. — Wosret

You are correct, my mistake.

Anyway, if you throw a glass beer bottle out the window without concern about its trajectory, we would see this as neglect and immoral because you might kill someone. But expel a baby out of the womb of a woman without knowing the various trajectories in life the baby will have, and in fact knowing the ultimate final trajectory (death), for some reason this is supposed to be acceptable.

Unsolicited mercy killings are not preferable because it is violation of liberty and consent. One does not have to assume that potential people would rather be dead than alive, it is enough to assume that there is a chance that they will not want to be alive.

In the case of unsolicited mercy killings, you are enabling suffering that is ultimately in the realm of another person. In the case of potential people, you are causing suffering if you have a child.

Intentions are indeed important, but one also has to take into account ignorant neglect.

But how do we make moral judgement without considering the consequences?

I'm aware of those arguments, but I find that they all collapse into and have as their root some form of consequentialism. I only want to say for the moment that, on my moral presuppositions, which are not consequentialist, my position on birth follows. — Thorongil

I am of the opinion that non-consequentialist normative positions, like deontology or virtue ethics, are quasi-consequentialist in nature. Furthermore, it is a psychological fact that the world and its contents we perceive can be split into three categories of useful, dangerous, or neutral regardless of the intrinsic nature or lack thereof.

And even if you take a non-consequentialist position, such as deontology, you can still have an antinatalistic deontological theory based upon a normative rule that one shall not harm another without their consent, which is an intuitive and simple law. Or you can say that one must not take risks associated with an agent without the agent's consent. The non-identity problem does not make potential agents not morally important, either.

The root word "natal" refers to birth. When the prefix "anti" is applied to it and used as a noun, it can only mean "opposition to birth." I'm not opposed to birth, so I'm not an anti-natalist. But not being opposed to birth is not to be in favor of it. That would be a non-sequitur. The natalist has all his work still ahead of him to convince me of any positive reason for why birth is necessary or good. — Thorongil

If something is not good, it is either morally neutral or morally bad. If you are to take the position that birth is morally neutral, then this means that birth is entirely unnecessary but is not at all morally problematic.

Since you said that you are not opposed to birth, it is assumed that you mean that birth is of neutral moral value.

If this is the case, then I think you have a large project ahead of you to prove this claim, as there is significant and difficult arguments that attempt to show that birth is actually of negative moral value.

So now it is you that seems to be re-defining terms. You can't have it both ways.

Of course the hurricane is too. — The Great Whatever

It's stupid because you enabled the hurricane to wreak havoc on the house.

According to your logic, parents must be murderers because they condemn their children to death since every life form dies. It's a nifty, catchy, angsty little aphorism that you might see in the works of Cioran or Ligotti and co., but outside of that it's really just desperate special pleading.

One suffers just by virtue of being alive; there is no way to be alive without suffering or being threatened with suffering by that very fact. You would have to change very basic material circumstances, like ending the notion of hunger, to change this. — The Great Whatever

Bleh, you're equating pain to suffering. A little bit of hunger, a little bit of discomfort, can be seen as a notification. Extreme hunger is suffering. It's a matter of degree and also of kind; if pain becomes too great that meaning or purpose cannot be derived from it, it becomes suffering.

It looks to me like you're the one playing word games -- your post all but admits that birth causes suffering and then special pleads to say it doesn't (i.e. the one who introduces a seeming non-distinction between 'causing' and 'enabling' is playing the word games). It's not relevant to the point, and drawing a terminological distinction, even if you could justify it (which I don't think you have) won't help. — The Great Whatever

You failed to consider my overall point, though. To say that birth causes suffering is misleading; it's catchy and easy to say that it does, but in fact it does not unless you are willing to equivocate and use the word "cause" outside of its usual definition.

Like I said, building a house in Florida does not cause the destruction of the house. The hurricane causes it. Can it be a bad idea to build a house in Florida right in the middle of a hurricane red zone? Yes. But that does not cause the destruction of the house, it only enables it.

Enabling can be just as bad, but it would be misleading to say that birth causes suffering because it conjures ideas that as soon as someone flies out of the womb, they begin suffering when it's nothing like that. External happenings cause someone to feel suffering, which is ultimately enabled by birth.

Forced chemical happiness, bliss as the response to every foreseeable circumstance isn't hollow, and somehow promotes personal growth and deep insight? — Wosret

The feeling of hollowness is also grounded in a chemical process in your brain. Presumably, all negative feelings could be banished, and the value arithmetic would be radically changed so that conflict is not required for meaning. It seems to me that technology like this is the only way to transcend the barbarism of daily life.

The cause of all these is birth. — The Great Whatever

Birth does not cause suffering, it enables suffering. Building a house in Florida does not cause the house to be destroyed, the hurricane is what causes the destruction of the house.

To be sure, suffering would not exist without birth. But it would be equivocation to say that birth causes suffering when in fact it does not. These kinds of semantic word play arguments are meant to act like a "gotcha!" poke instead of actually proving anything.

You should read this.

Wosret seems to be arguing the route that Nietzsche did regarding Schopenhauer; that the latter was much too decadent and became weak and posh, thus culminating in his gloomy appropriation of the world.

To a point, pain is necessary for life to have meaning, at least life in its current form. Perhaps theoretically we could change the chemical makeup of the human brain so that no pain is necessary for meaning. Perhaps in the theoretical future, the ancestors of our generations will view any kind of discomfort as pathological. But the point is that it's not a cosmic fundamental law that meaning requires pain/conflict, just that its a current fact based on our biological makeup.

The trouble here is that you can't seem to have meaning (or, as I like to see it, a heroic narrative), without there being risk as well as pain. There is pain, but there is also suffering. Suffering creates the risk. And so it seems like a Catch-22 in which, if we were to eliminate suffering but not pain, then there would be no risk, and therefore there would be no hero; for what would there be to overcome/triumph?

If life is set out in front of us with no risk, then there is no meaning because there is no conflict, there is no motivation. But if one should fail in their endeavors, and therefore suffer, suddenly meaning really doesn't have any part of the equation. Meaning goes out the window as soon as someone begins to profusely suffer. Existence, instead of being a heroic game, becomes a thing to endure and wish was better.

And this, in my opinion, is precisely why birth can be seen as a tragic event. The future is unknown, and therefore optimistic foreshadowing is useless and may lead to considerable harm.

Agreed.

Calk it up to personal thresholds, I guess. — Wosret

That, or just luck.

A lot of pain is not preferable to boredom, I would assume.

If you have to actually temper your hopes and expectations for something less than adequate, it makes this whole thing seem quite pathetic.

It can be difficult to lower one's expectations to the point where they aren't expectations at all and still be pleased by a result. I agree the being prepared for disappointment will make the disappointment less annoying, but it does not give someone pleasure or satisfaction. I just gives them a feeling of disillusionment.

And making something interesting does not take away the pain of some situations.

To a point, living on the edge is fun. Being an Absurd (wo)man can be exciting and rebellious.

But sooner or later, and often more than expected, you get knocked down and disappointed, if not seriously hurt. It takes all the fun out of the game.

Although I agree that in some cases the first world natives are too posh and delicate, it would seem that drama and pain, particularly drama, makes life worth living so long as you are not participating in the drama or misery.

We love and are entertained by music, television shows/movies, video games, literature, and even advertisements/propaganda that deifies the hero. We love conflict and drama, so long as we are not actually participating in it. We love watching war movies, but actually being in the scenario of the war movie would suck major. Some of us enjoy playing video games that worship the hero and paint violence, conflict, misery, and drama in an interesting light; it basically acts as a distraction to keep us from twiddling our thumbs out of boredom. But throw any one of us in such a scenario, and I can guarantee that only the psychopaths are the ones that will not want to immediately leave.

Basically, we require a heroic narrative, a story of success, triumph, and glory to continue to live.

I've been thinking about this whole antinatalism thing recently.

First, I don't know if it is really necessary to be actively opposed to birth (or, really, any position for that matter), unless of course one has the passion and dedication to do so.

Second, as I've argued elsewhere, there is no need to be a moral vigilante regarding birth because we live in a society that values liberty, and thus we must understand that there are limits in what a person can do. Furthermore, it is entirely unclear that, with most philosophical positions, that this debate is over.

However, I don't think that that's sufficient grounds for making it "alright". Bad is bad, and not alright, whether temporary and reversible or otherwise. — Sapientia

Agreed. I am not arguing that the majority's belief is the morality, rather, that the majority's belief allows permanent action based upon these beliefs. My argument is only concerned with executing the consequences of your moral view.

It's justified if there's good enough reason to act, and good enough reason doesn't require the consent of the majority. The consent is subsequent to there being just cause. And the majority are far from infallible and can also be wrong, so this mob rule could hinder or prevent justice. — Sapientia

It's a good enough reason to act so long as you happen to agree with the moral vigilante. A terrorist acting upon her moral vigilantism would probably not be seen as having a good enough reason to do so in our eyes, despite her passionate conviction that she does.

The Golden Rule may be well-used in some, if not most, scenarios, especially in a post-hoc manner.

But what about more extreme situations, such as vigilantism regarding the re-distribution of wealth? Suppose a radical communist has, in her heart, the belief that inequality of wealth is blatantly immoral, despite her living in a capitalistic society. Every day she sees disgusting inequality, immorality to be sure. She sees society as an immoral cesspool that requires her immediate intervention. She therefore goes on a spree of armed burglaries into the homes of the very wealthy, Wall Street, and conspires with underground mafia leaders to bring down the corporations of CEOs. She hacks into the databases of the Swiss banks and steals all of the digitized money stored within. She assassinates leaders of the capitalistic regimes, all because they are oppressing the proletariat. She does all of this our of her own compassion towards the common, working man.

Or perhaps there is an efilist, who believes that it is not only her obligation but her right to destroy the world and end the suffering of the countless suffering animals that exist on planet Earth. She dreams of the day that she can press the red button and instantaneously end all life...for the good of all life! Yes, she is doing is not because she hates life, but because she hates the suffering that life inevitably brings about! She genuinely believes that abstaining from pressing a button is to be immoral, to not follow the Golden Rule.

Or maybe there is a xenophobic Luddite, who believes that human expansion into the cosmos is the wrong thing to do, and that we will inevitably screw up other civilizations by colonizing their worlds. She follows the Golden Rule when she plants explosives on the rockets aimed at Mars. In her thought process, she thinks that if she was a Martian, she wouldn't want people intruding into her life, and so therefore she think it is perfectly acceptable behavior to violently stop this incursion.

What I am suggesting is that without the consent of the majority, there is no justification for participating in irreversible moral vigilantism, for you may be wrong in your appropriation of your ethical intuitions. Perhaps it is even the case that there is no justification for participating in irreversible moral vigilantism if this in any way, shape, or form harms another individual without their consent.

I don't think Bernie thought that he would get this far. As far as he is concerned, I think his ultimate goal has already been met: change. Hillary had to change the way she presented herself. Whether or not Bernie becomes president (which is near to none), he's already left a legacy that will last longer than a four year term in office

I'm not sure I agree with what you said. Taking morality into one's hands, being a moral vigilante, is sometimes seen as reprehensible behavior. A far-right wingnut blowing up an abortion clinic is seen by everyone else as immoral terrorism, and yet to them, it is being a moral vigilante.

I think that being a moral vigilante should be considered to be alright so long as your actions do not leave any permanent, irreversible outcomes. Like Bertrand Russell said, never die over something you believe in, because you might be wrong. Blowing up an abortion clinic is taking things too far, because it is clearly irreversible. Assassinating Hitler might be seen by some to be a good thing, but to some strict Kantians or Buddhists, murder is wrong no matter what. So the line between acceptable vigilantism and unacceptable terrorism is that the former can be reversed, usually without much difficulty, while the latter is the product of a god-head who thinks they can know what is best for everyone else.

Morals can change if the meme is spread thoroughly enough. Slavery used to be seen as morally neutral, now it is seen as immoral through the demonstrations of millions.

The egalitarian answer would appear to be a containment of everyone at the same level, so that everyone has roughly equal power over everyone else. There could be minor power differences, but there must always be the possibility of upward mobility. — Pneumenon

I agree. The liberty of every individual must be equal (excluding those who are deemed an unacceptable risk to the liberty of others).

It's a pretty good crowd for a Saturday
And the manager gives me a smile
cause he knows that its me they've been comin' to see
To forget about life for a while
And the piano, it sounds like a carnival
And the microphone smells like a beer
And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
And say, man, what are you doin' here?

That doesn't follow. — The Great Whatever

You see instead of just asserting that it doesn't follow, it would be kind of nice if you took the time to explain why it doesn't follow. Otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time.

Yes you do, hold your breath for three minutes. — The Great Whatever

Why would I want to? I fail to understand what you are getting at here.

It doesn't matter whether my thoughts are determined or not to whether they're true. — The Great Whatever

But "truth" in this case is in accordance to whether or not we are coerced into anything. If you are a hard determinist, then you cannot be coerced! You are pre-determined to do and be subject to whatever you happen to be. To be able to be coerced is to have some sort of (free) will. The phenomenal aspect of having the impression of having control over your actions (a will) leads to compatibilism (soft determinism). A frustrated will is coercion. So you are essentially holding hard determinism to be true while simultaneously holding that for some reason our wills/desires are important because they are frustrated. It's absurd to ignore the phenomenal impression of having a will, and so hard determinism as far as I can tell is untenable.

But this thread wasn't supposed to be over hard determinism but rather its soft cousin, compatibilism, in which case the (illusion) of having a will is important, primarily due to the ethical considerations regarding a frustrated or externally-suppressed will.

I would say that for the sake of charity and to further the discussion without devolving into hair-splitting definitional semantics, I will grant that our bodily processes can be interpreted as being "coercive", or at least "forceful". However, I want to make a distinction between active "coercion" and passive "coercion". An active coercive act is immediately identifiable as frustrating someone's freedom. An example of this is blackmailing someone by threat of abuse or death. A passive coercive act is one that could be interpreted as being coercive but is not explicitly obvious. An example of this is your own body apparently "blackmailing" you into breathing by a threat of pain and death. The difference between the two has to do with whether or not the individual gives a shit about what is happening to them. Would I care about being blackmailed by another person? Yes. Do I care about that fact that I have to breathe to continue to live? Not really.

So I think that perhaps it's not necessarily a difference in kind but a difference in degree. The problem I see with your view in that you are equivocating one with the other. I follow the laws of the road when I drive not because I'm being coerced by the government but because I genuinely understand that to be safe requires me to follow these rules. I would not follow the laws of Nazi Germany, as those would be often oppressive and explicitly coercive. In each case you could use the world "coerced" to describe the situation, but it sounds more like an equivocation gone too far than a legitimate description.

This goes back to one of my original posts, which said that your positions stems from your (overly) pessimistic view on human life. Actually considering breathing as a coercive mechanism is not at all in line with what most people on Earth would consider it to be. It's a necessary act, often subconscious, that we must do to survive, but most people on Earth would say that they would rather continue to live. It's only when you bring into the picture the idea that we ought to die that the mechanism of breathing becomes coercive. If you don't bring this into the picture, then the "coercive" mechanism of breathing (the pain and threat of death), no longer are seen as coercive but rather as an alarm mechanism to alert the person that, hey, they should probably start breathing again if they want to continue to live. It may not be the most gentle mechanism but I'm sure many people appreciate the warning calls when they come.

I would say I'm a 'hard indeterminist' overall, but acknowledge (a) that certain local configurations for all intents and purposes can be modeled as hard deterministic, and (b) there may exist a certain kind of narrow freedom that arises in exceptional cases, but I'm not so confident on this point. — The Great Whatever

Some philosophers/cognitive scientists think that our higher-level cognitive processes allow our will to not initiate actions but rather suppress actions by formulating internal, private truth conditions. A devotee to Dennett would say that Popperian and Gregorian minds are capable of this internal formulation.

Decriminalize and then tax most drugs — Thorongil

By "most", what are you thinking here? Just the drugs that don't do too much harm? How are your views on guns (ban private ownership) compatible with your views on drugs (some violent acts have indeed been caused by drugs, alcohol, and the like). It seems as though if you are going to allow drugs then you have to allow guns as well. Both are supererogatory parts of life (well, actually some people depend on guns to survive).

Also, I don't think breathing is a good example because most of the time it is subconscious and only becomes a controllable function of the body if you focus on it.

Also, I would like to point out that if you reject compatibilism in favor of hard determinism, and then complain that there is no free will and that everything is coerced, then you have to admit that your own thoughts of being coerced were in fact just determined. There is no coercion at all in hard determinism, there is just the natural flow of causality.

Basically, what this means is that you are clinging to an idea of an entirely free will in a universe that is devoid of it, and then wonder why it seems like you are being coerced. It's because it's not compatible with the way things are. It's as if you are not willing to let go of the experience of having control and then wonder why it seems like everything is out to get you.

I hesitate to endorse your idea that humans are like puppets that are thrown around the place by external forces outside of their control (even if control is phenomenal and illusory - which is still a contentious topic but I'd be willing to say that classical libertarian free will is not true).

I think ultimately a human being desires to continue to live (on top of other desires). So suicide is not a choice in the way I would choose an ice cream flavor. It's a way of escaping/solving something. It's not that life is inherently bad that warrants suicide, but that the current conditions are unbearable to experience anymore. And so someone is torn between their desire to live and their desire to escape their pain (psychache).

But a person who commits suicide is not coerced. They are torn between two options and decide to go with one of them. The pain of leaving the other option is what gives a person their psychache. But it is not as if the experience of pain is actually forcing us to commit suicide in the same way a person who pushes you off a cliff would be forcing you to die.

Perhaps you could argue that desires are themselves a type of "coercing" because they are so strong. The Buddha recognized this and advocated ceasing desires and living in a stable state of equilibrium so we don't feel this intense need for something. But again, many people, including myself (and presumably you as well) have certain desires that fall outside of this. I desire to write this response. I feel good by writing this response. So it's not coercing if I enjoy it and feel as though I am doing it by my own "free will" (a la compatibilism).

Someone killing themselves by their own judgement is not an example of coercion. An outside agent forcing the person to kill themselves on threat of torture is coercion.

A coercion requires the victim to not want to do something as well as preventing them from fulfilling their own personal desires. Take your example of breathing. This is not coercion. I don't mind breathing. I'm certainly under a kind of pressure to continue to breathe, but I don't mind it. It's a function of the body, a body that I identify with. Like I said above, humans have a desire to continue to live. Breathing is a necessary requirement for us to live.

I get your idea though that it seems like we are slaves to the whims of our bodily needs. But if you also look at yourself, that is, your psyche, you will realize that you have needs as well, needs that you personally identify with. One of these needs would be, to me, to be in equanimity with your environment, which includes your own bodily functions.

So in order to argue that we are coerced into breathing, you have to argue that we actually do mind breathing (it's a pain in the ass perhaps), and that we don't want to live a life that requires us to breathe. Sure, as both of us have contended, you are coerced into a life of breathing. But ultimately it is still your choice whether or not you desire to continue to live a life that includes breathing. For many of us, it would seem that breathing does not matter at all because it does not impede on our desire to continue to live (in fact it allows us to live).

The rest is about how people instill incentives against suicide. That doesn't mean suicide can't be possible or viable -- I've assumed it is this whole time because people, after all, do it (but then often in great pain or duress because of the mechanisms that act against them). — The Great Whatever

Dude, I have literally been saying this for the past couple of pages. The only reason I said it is because I thought you held the position that suicide was not viable (that we are "coerced"/"forced" to continue to live even if we do not want to).

Okay, there is such an incentive. If you don't do it, you literally die painfully. What more incentive do you want? — The Great Whatever

I'm interpreting this as meaning suicide is indeed not a viable choice.

It obviously doesn't, since I've explicitly included suicide among those possible actions. — The Great Whatever

From page 4.

There actually are coercive mechanisms keeping people alive to suffer once they are born, such as survival instincts, the general pain attending dying, guilt, shame and illegality of suicide (including censure from family members, government, and religion, sometimes threats of burning in hell for eternity), and so on.

You are simply wrong in your description; people go apeshit at the idea of suicide, and there are systematic and painfu pressures in place to keep the coercive institution going once in place. — The Great Whatever

From page 5.

Finally, even if suicide were completely free, birth would still be coercive, because one cannot consent to it. The fact that it might be possible to undo does not make it any less forced (and much of the pain endured happens before it is possible to kill oneself). — The Great Whatever

From page 5.

You responded by saying that suicide is not a viable option, which contradicts what you just said in your last response.

Then why were arguing previously that suicide is not a viable option (because of instincts, pain, relationships, etc)?

and all 'decisions' made while alive are within the context of that coercive establishment. — The Great Whatever

Pretty sure that means that society/instincts are keeping us from killing ourselves (the "coercive establishment").

Regardless of how you interpret your own OP, this is how it came across and furthermore, you have responded to me defending the position that we cannot commit suicide because of this coercive establishment.

Your OP is specifically about not only birth but also being seemingly coerced into a continued life.