That is not the information I'm referring to. I really don't want to have to walk you through what has already been written. Just read it again more carefully. The data point in question is not about the rusk of harm in general (which is the only rusk I've spoken about considering). It about the rusk of consent violation or displeasure over the matter of existence. — Isaac

Whether that information is unknown or unknowable is irrelevant, because the basis (or lack thereof) for our decision remains the same. — Tzeentch

Any type of information that is lacking only affirms the lack of a basis for our decision.

The benefit. Same as any other risk. — Isaac

And what if your judgement on what constitutes benefit may drastically differ from that of the individual one is making decisions for?

As noted, it's like buying a suit with someone else's money, while not having the slightest idea of what type of suit they may like.

Displacement of when decision is made to when person is affected doesn't negate that a decision was made that affects a person. — schopenhauer1

Shifting the problem so we now have a decision that is both made (becasue a person exists, which can only happen as a result of said decision) and not made (because we act as if we can still prevent that person from ever existing, which we can only do before the decision) doesn't help.

The core problem remains that all humans necessarily exist. There are no humans that do not exist, and thus there are no humans who do not have existence (and all it entails) "imposed" on them. This logical necessity cannot be changed by semantic games, displaced decisions etc.

Any type of information that is lacking only affirms the lack of a basis for our decision. — Tzeentch

Then we have no basis on which to make any decisions at all, since all lack millions upon millions of theoretical data points which are impossible to know.

what if your judgement on what constitutes benefit may drastically differ from that of the individual one is making decisions for? — Tzeentch

That doesn't change things. Presuming I cannot possibly access that person's judgement I have nothing else to go on. As I said to khaled, no one has yet offered an argument beyond naive neo-liberalism as to why inaction suddenly trumps action. I don't even see.much if an argument in the case where consent cannot be acquired. I certainly see no coherent argument in the case where consent isn't even logically possible.

it's like buying a suit with someone else's money, while not having the slightest idea of what type of suit they may like. — Tzeentch

No it isn't, because asking that other person whether they'd like a suit is almost always possible and never logically incoherent. Our intuition in it is affected by the context, which is different from deciding whether to have children.

Shifting the problem so we now have a decision that is both made (becasue a person exists, which can only happen as a result of said decision) and not made (because we act as if we can still prevent that person from ever existing, which we can only do before the decision) doesn't help.

The core problem remains that all humans necessarily exist. There are no humans that do not exist, and thus there are no humans who do not have existence (and all it entails) "imposed" on them. This logical necessity cannot be changed by semantic games, displaced decisions etc. — Echarmion

But you are the one making semantic games here. I stated earlier:

If there is a state of affairs that a person is born, there is a person affected by someone else's decision. However, if there is a state of affairs with no person born, then there is a state of affairs where no person was affected by the decision, thus no violation, and no new individual who suffers will take place. All of this is encompassed with colloquial terms like "potential child" etc. — schopenhauer1

I've changed the details here, but I had a client once who could not read books because he'd convinced himself that tiny invisible people were living on its pages and he would harm them by closing the book.

He would say "but how do you know there aren't, why take the risk? It's not worth it". It seems a similar delusion is happening here, imagining the souls of yet-to-be children looking down on the world thinking "please don't put me there, I prefer it here".

"How do you know there aren't, why take the risk? It's not worth it"

If there is a state of affairs that a person is born, there is a person affected by someone else's decision. However, if there is a state of affairs with no person born, then there is a state of affairs where no person was affected by the decision, thus no violation, and no new individual who suffers will take place. All of this is encompassed with colloquial terms like "potential child" etc. — schopenhauer1

Sure, all you'd need to argue now is that being affected by this decision is equivalent to a violation.

if you want to use a term in a particularly unusual manner you'll need to explain it first — Isaac

What on earth kind of heterodox definition of 'conservative' are you using which allows the extinction of the human race to fall under it?
— Isaac

"Does no harm". — khaled

Right. Which is a harm if what I wanted was a suit. — Isaac

Whenever I use harm I mean it in the sense that I strictly made the situation worse. If I do not buy you the suit, I do not harm you. Even though it is not the best possible outcome. Because had I not been around you still wouldn't have your suit.

Now tearing your suit apart, that's a harm. Because had I not been around your suit would have been fine.

And I find this is a much more common use, so I would tell you:

if you want to use a term in a particularly unusual manner you'll need to explain it first — Isaac

If I had access to your credit card for some reason and did NOT buy you a suit, and you happened to want a suit but didn't tell me, I doubt you would say "You harmed me". If you want to use "harm" to mean "Did not bring about the absolute best outcome" then the word could be used for everything ever.

You've still not given anything close to an explanation of why you think non-action has some moral strength over action when faced with uncertainty about outcomes and the impossibility of consent. Either could equally bring about a negative consequence, or lack virtue, or defy a duty... whichever moral framework you subscribe to, inaction does not just magically trump action. — Isaac

There is no such thing as inaction first of all. Any action can be rephrased as an action and vice versa. "Did not save the drowning person" and "let the person drown" for instance (inaction in the first action in the second). It's not about action vs inaction it's about harm, defined as strictly making the situation worse.

The rule is: If I am thinking of doing something that could make the situation worse than if I wasn't even around there at all, don't do that thing. And that is the only rule I propose. Note: I am also part of this calculation of "worse situation".

How can you reasonably expect not to hurt others while driving? — Isaac

By being a good driver. Not being drunk. Etc. There is a difference between "reasonably expect" and "guarantee". I can't do the latter.

It seems a similar delusion is happening here — Isaac

Only because you don't understand the argument. At the very least, that's not what I'm doing, don't know about the others.

Then we have no basis on which to make any decisions at all, since all lack millions upon millions of theoretical data points which are impossible to know. — Isaac

What were you saying earlier about Socratic ideals?

Presuming I cannot possibly access that person's judgement I have nothing else to go on. — Isaac

Then the argument for inaction seems obvious; by your own words you claim to have no idea what you're getting that person into.

No it isn't, because asking that other person whether they'd like a suit is almost always possible and never logically incoherent. — Isaac

You miss the point. Why would one feel entitled to make that decision for someone else in the first place, especially considering the fact that the decision is irreversible and can result in a life-time of misery.

You really think it so strange to choose to err on the side of caution here?

Sure, all you'd need to argue now is that being affected by this decision is equivalent to a violation. — Echarmion

How is it not? A decision was made. This affected the individual being born. The individual being born could not possibly be a part of the decision affecting him/her. Similarly regarding harm..True no one at the time of the decision to procreate was harmed. However in the future, a person will be harmed from that very decision. This could be prevented. At this point I am just re-explaining what I have explained in more precise language using "state's of affairs" so refer back to that if you need to.

Edit: The violation occurs because a decision was made affecting someone else, even if the affect for the person is displaced from the time the decision was made and there was no person there previously. It doesn't matter if the decision and the affect happen at the same time or displaced by several months, the violation took place nonetheless.

You claim that the "chance of bad outcome" needs to be near 100% for having children to start to be considered wrong. — khaled

Yup. That's my personal moral intuition. I've also stated that other people may decide differently. A survival expert could decide to have kids in abject poverty and be able to provide for a stable and happy upbringing. I can't, so I wouldn't in that event and I assume most people in similar societies and positions as mine would as well. So the example serves as something that is probably true for a lot of people.

And you claim at the same time that putting the bar at >0% is wrong. On what basis?

I never said that. I said the question doesn't pertain to reality and as such the question is moot, because we cannot calculate the likelihood of an unhappy life. Even more so because I'm not a utilitarian so I don't even weigh ethical questions on the basis of their consequences.

If I would be a consequentialist I could use a proxy for the Netherlands the happiness figures of the World Happiness Report, which exceed 7.4 out of 10. And our own social and cultural planning bureau researched it and Dutch people on average gave their lives a 7.9 out of 10. 73% of employed people are (very) happy. Among the self-employed this is even higher.

So on average it makes perfect sense to have kids in the Netherlands as it's extremely likely they will be happy.

EDIT: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2018/27/one-in-five-dutch-adults-very-happy

Only 2.6% is unhappy. Those are excellent odds.

Whenever I use harm I mean it in the sense that I strictly made the situation worse...
...And I find this is a much more common use — khaled

Stanford has quite a good article on the philosophical use of 'harm' if you want to read up about it. So what would you call some negative outcome of your failure to act?

But you said earlier that you'd also include failing to meet a responsibility as a harm (or at least equally morally relevant, we can quibble over terms). When pressed you said that some moral intuition guides you as to what these responsibilities are (you're not persuaded simply by its status as law).

So definitions aside, I don't see what difference there is. It might well be your responsibility to ensure I'm suited, in which case, absent of any ability to ask my consent, you would have no less behaved immorally by failing to act as you have by acting.

It all turns on what you consider your moral responsibility to your community, rather than any more fundamental argument about default choices when acting without consent.

By being a good driver. Not being drunk. Etc. — khaled

Is absolutely evidently insufficient. Driving is a risky undertaking. You risk harming others in doing so, that much is unarguable. Again, this seems to alk turn on the figures rather than anything more fundamental. And as @Benkei has pointed out, the odds of causing net harm to a future person are pretty low.

Only because you don't understand the argument. — khaled

Why is it everyone couches disagreement as the other side not 'understanding'? Have you considered the possibility that it's you who don't understand the counter-arguments?

How is it not? A decision was made. This affected the individual being born. The individual being born could not possibly be a part of the decision affecting him/her. — schopenhauer1

That's a description of the various parts of the sentence, it's not an argument. It doesn't tell me what is bad about affecting others if they haven't been part of the decision.

The violation occurs because a decision was made affecting someone else, even if the affect for the person is displaced from the time the decision was made and there was no person there previously. — schopenhauer1

But this again only tells me that affecting others is a violation, not why this is so. It's not obvious why any influence I have on anyone should be considered a violation.

Then the argument for inaction seems obvious; by your own words you claim to have no idea what you're getting that person into. — Tzeentch

That doesn't follow at all. Not having access to their judgement is not the same as having no idea what it might be. We can have a very good idea what it might be, humans are not radically different from one another in fundamental preferences.

Why would one feel entitled to make that decision for someone else in the first place, especially considering the fact that the decision is irreversible and can result in a life-time of misery.

You really think it so strange to choose to err on the side of caution here? — Tzeentch

Yes, absolutely. Making decisions for others (making decisions that will affect future others - I still don't agree with your incoherent wording), is something that humanity has been doing in this context for several million years and overall happiness ratings for the people who have later been affected by these decisions have been consistently quite high. I'd even argue that they were even higher for much of our past. There seems to be a very low chance of resulting in a lifetime of misery. The alternative seems utterly pointless (a world without suffering which no one exists to enjoy).

So yes, it seems utterly stupid to wipe out humanity to avoid a risk which we've been taking by the billions without any noticeable issue.

We can have a very good idea what it might be, humans are not radically different from one another in fundamental preferences. — Isaac

Disagreed.

Making decisions for others (making decisions that will affect future others - I still don't agree with your incoherent wording), is something that humanity has been doing in this context for several million years and overall happiness ratings for the people who have later been affected by these decisions have been consistently quite high. — Isaac

I don't buy this argument. This seems to be based on a severely cherry-picked version of history. There are many things humanity has been doing for much of history, where some have suffered and others and have profited, which we now consider inhuman.

At any rate, regardless of what the ratio might be between happy and unhappy people (it seems silly to reduce one's choice to have children to generalizations and statistics, but this aside), it seems we're arriving at a "ends justify the means" type of situation, where forcing individuals into existence is a "necessary evil" to produce a net-positive outcome. This fails to take into account those individuals who must suffer as a result of it. It is easy for an outsider to say they find the suffering of those individuals an acceptable sacrifice.

So on average it makes perfect sense to have kids in the Netherlands as it's extremely likely they will be happy.

EDIT: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2018/27/one-in-five-dutch-adults-very-happy

Only 2.6% is unhappy. Those are excellent odds. — Benkei

Most of the countries with the highest reports of happiness are wealthy democratic western countries. This wealth is partly or even largely based on exploiting people in poorer and less democratic countries.

I don't think one persons happiness justifies another persons unhappiness or hardship. There are on average 800,000 suicides a year. Billions of people live in poverty.

There are around 140 million orphans in the world.

"According to UNICEF, almost 10,000 children become orphans every day. According to internationally accepted figures, there are at least 140 million orphans in the world. Given the fact that there is so much compelling evidence showing that there are millions of more orphans not included in official statistics, there is no doubt that this number is actually much higher."

https://insamer.com/en/2020-orphan-report_2928.html#:~:text=According%20to%20UNICEF%2C%20almost%2010%2C000,million%20orphans%20in%20the%20world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report


I think happiness is inappropriate given these kind of facts and I don't want to coexist with suffering people or be involved in their exploitation.

We can have a very good idea what it might be, humans are not radically different from one another in fundamental preferences. — Isaac


Disagreed. — Tzeentch

Odd, because when talking about the suffering intrinsic to life you reach for rather a familiar list - disease, work, war, poverty, disability... You never seem to list friends, love, comfort, peace...

This seems to be based on a severely cherry-picked version of history. There are many things humanity has been doing for much of history, where some have suffered and others and have profited, which we now consider inhuman. — Tzeentch

Of course. All of which have been vigorously complained about by the aggrieved parties. Until Benetar almost no one complained about being born and even now it's restricted to whiny teenagers and niche philosophers. So where's the evidence of widespread regret having been caused (in the opinion of those to whom it has supposedly been caused)?

it seems silly to reduce one's choice to have children to generalizations — Tzeentch

Weren't you only recently citing exactly such generalisations in our ability to predict harms?

where forcing individuals into existence is a "necessary evil" — Tzeentch

We've just established the very low rate at which people consider life a necessary evil.

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Thank you for sharing your emotions and opinion about it. I understand the empathy underlying such statements.

I think the conclusion is wrong though. Because other people are unhappy, I should be too, thereby increasing unhappiness? Seems to be the wrong way to go about it. Moreover poverty is in decline across the world and there's plenty we can do (and I think should do) to improve things. You might look into my thread on the "politics of responsibility".

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Why do you think the non-identity problem applies here? That concerns adjusting behaviour to avoid a problem for a future person which adjustment causes that future person being different from the one that caused you to adjust. Here there's a future person and the adjustment would lead to no person but this non person doesn't have an identity by definition.

Seems to be fundamentally different.

yeah you’re right, I got mixed up with other things. Thanks for pointing it out. But my issue here is that you and others are trying to use loopholes around this by saying that there’s no nobody to consent in the first place, so that makes it justifiable. I’m not going to bother providing my view on the matter, but this doesn’t make sense to me.

I've changed the details here, but I had a client once who could not read books because he'd convinced himself that tiny invisible people were living on its pages and he would harm them by closing the book.

He would say "but how do you know there aren't, why take the risk? It's not worth it". It seems a similar delusion is happening here, imagining the souls of yet-to-be children looking down on the world thinking "please don't put me there, I prefer it here". — Isaac

What?

I know from my own experience of human embodiment that there are significant burdens involved. For example, the ever-present need for warmth, protection, safety, water, food, etc - not to mention the near endless list of other needs a human has (eg, social, sexual, entertainment, existential). The majority of our lives are spent striving to meet these needs, which burden us.

It is precisely because there *doesn't* exist the souls of the 'yet-to-be', that one ought not procreate. No child is out there in the aether, crying out for embodiment, being deprived of having a stomach that needs to be fed. People do not pre-exist the harm that comes about from being embodied. So why create another human body with perpetual needs that must endlessly be strove against, and only for this person to die in the end regardless? A pronatalist might perhaps point to the good or joys of eating to justify procreation, for example. But the joys of eating are predicated upon having a stomach - on being a human perpetual caloric/nutritional needs, not to mention the source of this food is rooted in harm (eg, someone must labour to produce the food, bring it to market, in many cases horrific animal harm and cruelty being involved). To justify creating a body with a stomach, by pointing out how good it is to feed it, strikes me as absurd. You created the very deficiency that eating solves, and call that good. Better to just not create the deficiency in the first place, to not create a body with a need for food.

But in my personal experience, when you actually ask those with children why they procreated, the reasons they give tend to relate to their desires in some way or another anyway (eg, "I wanted a family", "babies are cute", "it just happened", "my mother wanted grandchildren", "I thought I'd make a good mother/father", "I wanted someone to take care of me when I'm older", or some some other reason relating to fulfilling social/cultural/religious expectations, etc). It's mindless.

You created the very deficiency that eating solves, and call that good. Better to just not create the deficiency in the first place, to not create a body with a need for food. — Inyenzi

This seems to be an unwarranted value judgement, arbitrarily describing one physical process as a "deficiency". The kind of processes involved predate humans, and would still be around if humans were not.

Without reference to the important part - the mind - the argument can go nowhere.

But this again only tells me that affecting others is a violation, not why this is so. It's not obvious why any influence I have on anyone should be considered a violation. — Echarmion

I should really qualify "affecting" as imposing and causing conditions of harm on another person.

@khaled What do you think of the tiresome and predictable move that the natalists make that parents make decisions on behalf of children all the time, so what makes this different? I can guarantee one of the arguments will move there, so mine as well just discuss that usual perennial one...

This seems to be an unwarranted value judgement, arbitrarily describing one physical process as a "deficiency". The kind of processes involved predate humans, and would still be around if humans were not.

Without reference to the important part - the mind - the argument can go nowhere. — Echarmion

That it predates humanity doesn't counter what @Inyenzi saying. And it is precisely the human mind that often amplifies this type of suffering. We not only lack, but know we lack and can perseverate all the more on it. He brings up the much deeper structural forms of suffering I mentioned towards the beginning. Once born, we are almost always in a state of lack that we are trying to fulfill, and this overcoming of lack is its own form of suffering that is often talked about in Eastern circles, and which philosophers like Schopenhauer have expounded upon in World as Will and Representation and his essays. If you take away any contingent forms of contextual suffering (which is actually common enough to be structural anyways), this form of lack is always there churning away in the psyche, all the more compounded by self-awareness of this very situation that we lack.

I don't think it's a loophole though but a serious logical error to pull in consent in this discussion. It's gaming the issue by demanding that there should be married bachelors and then pointing out there are no married bachelors as a moral reason there shouldn't be any married people.

I do agree with you that it's not the issue necessarily but will point out the problem when it occurs. I also say this earlier :

It's not well-stated at all because consent cannot play a role here because this is once again personifying non-existence as if it has thought processes and a will. And consent isn't even necessarily important for moral questions. Actions can be moral or immoral without another person being involved. Unnecessarily cutting down trees because I like destroying stuff isn't right either. Gluttony isn't right either. Lusting after your girlfriend even when nobody in the world is aware of it, isn't right either.

I should really qualify "affecting" as imposing and causing conditions of harm on another person. — schopenhauer1

Yeah, but then we're right back to square one. Affecting is a very broad term, which is why the claim that creating someone "affects" them is plausible. This is no longer the case when we use more concrete terms like imposing or causing conditions of harm. The whole causation argument has been done to death, as has the imposition one.

If you take away any contingent forms of contextual suffering (which is actually common enough to be structural anyways), this form of lack is always there churning away in the psyche, all the more compounded by self-awareness of this very situation that we lack. — schopenhauer1

As I have alluded to earlier, it seems, for lack of a better word, childish to respond to this by wishing to end self-awareness itself. Not that childish necessarily equals "bad", but the wish to avoid existence rests on magical thinking.

I can understand the apparent paradoxes here. We want to fulfill our desires, but fulfilling them only ever leads to more desire. We want to realize ourselves, but can only do so through others, which requires limiting ourselves.

These are, like all paradoxes, caused by modes of thinking, which can be rejected. But the anti-natalist solution seems to be to instead find the one who is responsible for the paradox, and ask them to fix it. Blaming your parents for something they did not do - indeed cannot do.