I have difficulty with it for a few reasons. One, it’s not analogous. Two, creating a child is in no way similar to assembling a gun. Three, creating life is the opposite of taking a life. — NOS4A2
But as for your argument, I do agree that if and when those parts come together a person will be affected. At that point we are able to apply ethics and morals to them. — NOS4A2
So is society itself a sort of ideology — schopenhauer1
Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the “barbarians” who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples. (from the publisher's summary)
haven't actually read the book, the principle was summarized for me. Against The Grain, by James C. Scott posits that 10 or 12 thousand years ago sedentary agriculture was not an attractive option for successful hunter/gatherers. Rather, hunter/gatherers were coaxed, seduced, or coerced into agriculture by proto-state actors who wanted to harness the energy of people--their capacity to work and to reproduce--for purposes of accumulating power. — Bitter Crank
Agriculture wasn't the beginning of society, of course. The hunter-gatherers were/are as much society as the Upper East Siders of Manhattan. But the kind of society which came to dominate much of the world was settled, urban-rural, agriculture-based states. — Bitter Crank
So if we know the outcome of the gun getting put together, and we know the outcome of the parts of the person coming together, you should understand why you can talk about preventing people from being born.
Perhaps what I don’t understand is the language being used. I cannot see how deciding not to have children is to prevent them from being born, just like I cannot see how deciding not to assemble a gun is preventing yourself from committing murder. — NOS4A2
A person who decides not to have children is not performing an action called “preventing”, and he certainly isn’t performing such an action on any objects called “people”. He is not stopping people from being born as if he was standing in their way or performing abortions. He isn’t preventing their suffering as if feeding them or mending their wounds. The action called “preventing” is performed, and the objects called “people” exist, only in his imagination. — NOS4A2
Just like it is impossible to obtain consent from a potential human, it is also impossible to perform any other act towards him and for the same reasons—no such being exists. For this reason it is impossible to act morally towards beings that do not nor will never exist. Instead the antinatalist is imagining beings, imagining their suffering, and directing his moral faculties and moral behavior inwards, ultimately towards himself. So I have trouble seeing the argument as anything more than a sort of affectation. — NOS4A2
To be fair to you, you are far more well-read on the arguments than I and you’ve probably heard this all before, but I think the absence of any beings is a problem for many moral arguments for antinatalism. The antinatalist should limit the moral case to protecting the environment or to affecting beings that already exist. — NOS4A2
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