The meaning commonly referred to in our language as "happy," seems to be Eaudaimonia — Dranu

Incorrect because if it did mean that the world would be much better than it is and it isn't. You do the math...

but there is a clear reduction in happiness inherent in any morality — Coben

Reduction but not elimination, to a non-zero value. Exactly what I meant.

You're basically just baking in an ex falso quodlibet into the premise. — Pfhorrest

Where is the contradiction?

If you think everyone is a hedonist, then the answer is no, there is no difference between being good or happy. The person being good is just doing what makes them happy. Which means they are just selfish with their needs. Someone who gets called bad just enjoys other things. Just a bunch of selfish people with different genes. The term good has no meaning. It just means enjoying what other people think you should enjoy because that 'what' makes them happy. There are no morals in there anywhere. — Coben

I disagree with your claim that if hedonism is true, morality is meaningless.

Let's begin with religions; humanity's earliest experiment with morality. Invariably all religions are hedonistic systems promising happiness and threatening suffering depending on the moral choices we make. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the concepts of heaven and hell that is, to my knowledge, ubiquitous in religion. Somewhere in our collective history we realized that happiness by itself is incomplete or even dangerous to social existence; we can't have people doing everything that makes them happy, right?

Along came morality a set of rules, dos and don'ts, that would temper the happiness-seeking nature that is inherent in every person. Morality doesn't contradict happiness directly for it would be immediately opposed by our nature which is primarily motivated by happiness. Ergo, morality does what it must: it imposes an hierarchy on happiness which very roughly can be spoken of in terms of higher and lower forms of happiness; the higher forms of happiness being those that contribute to harmonious coexistence among peoples while the lower forms of happiness being those which if unchecked would tear society apart. This stratification of happiness into higher and lower forms achieves, or is at least aimed at achieving, peaceful coexistence without going against our natural instincts.

Therefore, while it may be true that morality forces us to examine the nature of happiness more closely it can't outright reject happiness; what it does instead is akin to what a chemist does with mixtures: separating happiness into higher, more valuable forms and lower, less valuable forms and lays down rules that channel the populace away from the latter and towards the former. Morality is hedonism refined.

You are assuming happiness qualifies/designates/characterizes feelings only. If this is so, what distinguishes it from feelings in general (in a way that does not mean "good"?). — Dranu

It seems the good you're concerned about doesn't have anything to do with morality. You describe the good as a fulfillment. Nevertheless, the moral good is the highest fulfillment one can imagine, right? There can't be anything better than being morally good.

However that's only half the story. Humans are also uniquely rational and so to be it is also the highest fulfillment one can imagine (for a human).

I think the Greeks called this eaudaimonia or flourishing: a state of being a virtuous, rational being. Thus the good you're interested is about eaudaimonia, the scope of which may be expanded to include everything from pens to gods.

You seem to think, erroneously???, that happiness isn't an emotion. Read below:

Happiness in its broad sense is the label for a family of pleasant emotional states, such as joy, amusement, satisfaction, gratification, euphoria, and triumph. — Wikipedia

Happiness is an emotion; there's no denying that. If you don't accept what seems to be a basic fact concerning humans then you'll need to produce an argument for it.

That happiness is good in the sense that it's part of the highest fulfillment for mankind is an open question. Epicureans and Utilitarians have made this claim but some philosophers have disagreed. If you ask me, then my reply is simple: there are more ways of being happy than there are ways of achieving eudaimonia (virtuous rational person) and so, inevitably, there are many occasions where happiness and euadaimonia conflict. For instance our happiness may lie in making love to someone else's wife but eudaimonia, a state of virtuous wisdom, would oppose the fulfillment of that desire. It's this frequent incompatibility between happiness and goodness that is the cause of many of our problems.

The two videos I posted quite vividly demonstrate the difficulty we face. We have agent Smith, a person who is morally corrupt and thus diametrically opposite to moral goodness which we've seen is an essential component of fulfillment and yet he's ecstatic. Then there's Jesus, morally good and thus an instance of fulfillment of one arm of eudaimonia and yet he suffers.

If you have trouble answering this do you see my dilemma? A side note to you: don't hear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying feeling good or feeling happy (the same thing, no?) is the same as being good or being happy. — Dranu

I hear you loud and clear.

entity — Monist

A variable that stands for what is being considered.

Is there a logical difference between being happy and being good? — Dranu

Well, the videos I posted suggests that happiness and goodness aren't the same thing. This, in my humble opinion, is what's been, is and will be humanity's greatest bane. Sometimes or maybe most of the time, depending on how cynical you are, we derive joy from the suffering of others; sadism is real isn't it?

There were philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Epicurus who thought of pleasure as the highest good. The philosopher's quest for euadaimonia too can be safely construed as happiness driven. Yet, it didn't take long for these very same people to realize that happiness to be good requires some modification; morality in whatever shape and form is humanity's all out effort to bring happiness and goodness into alignment. The past and the present state of affairs indicate that this process of bringing these two important aspects of living, happiness and goodness, into harmony is no easy task.

Is there a logical difference between being happy and being good? — Dranu

Only subscribers can upload images here; others have to host them elsewhere and then link them from here. — Pfhorrest

:up: :ok:

Why can't I post images?

In my humble opinion near-perfect simulation is already a reality.

Cortical Homunculus





The image above is called the cortical homonculus and shows how the sensori-motor system of our body maps onto the brain. The image clearly shows that our head and hands take up a major portion of cerebral real estate.

Video games are at the forefront of simulated realities and notice they, for all purposes, engage the head and the hand. There's a display & sound to experience the simulation and a hand-held controller to navigate the environment.

All in all, if the cortical homunculus is an accurate representation of our bodies AND with video games built as they are, simulated realities are already being experienced by our brains. All we need to do now, to complete the process, is to work our way through the rest of the brain's sensori-motor cortex.

Great advice! I hope somebody with 6 degrees of separation from the members on this forum is a bigwig politician, oil tycoon or car manufacturer.

:up: :ok:

Good point. I'll point that out if I talk to him again — khaled

:up: :smile: Don't believe me.

That applies for all n belonging to the natural numbers. But the proof is about what happens at the point of actual infinity, which is not a natural number. The proof is all about showing that actual infinity is impossible. — Devans99

What about space? Is space finite? What is there outside of space? Nothing/something. The former is space and the latter requires space.

Fair enough. I don't feel the use of "present-at-hand" makes much sense in this context, but I get your meaning. — Xtrix

Give me an example where it does make sense.

But all balls numbered less than ∞ have been removed from the bag at the end of actually infinite steps. So there are zero balls in the bag.

Mathematical induction leads to 9n balls in the bag at each finite step (where n belongs to the natural numbers). You can't use mathematical induction for the infinite part of this problem as it applies for all n belonging to the natural numbers only and ∞ is not a natural number. — Devans99

Just check the math. In the 1st step the 1st ball is removed but there are more than 1 ball. In the 2nd step the 2nd ball is removed but there are more than 2 balls. Ergo at the nth step then nth ball is removed but there are more than n balls.

So we have an infinite bag and we add ten balls and remove one. We repeat that an actually infinite number of time. At each finite step, there are 9n balls in the bag. At actual infinity, there are zero balls in the bag. Reductio ad absurdum, actual infinity is impossible. — Devans99

step 1, 9 balls numbered 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
step 2, 18 balls numbered 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
step n, 9n balls numbered n+1, n+2, n+3,...10n

The bag isn't empty because at the nth step even if the nth ball is removed, the balls numbered n+1, n+2,...10n are still in the bag.

I’m not talking about grammar or world languages. I’m talking ontology. It’s discouraging that this has to be explained, repeatedly, in a philosophy forum. — Xtrix

Linguistic turn? Perhaps I misunderstood. Sorry.

In my view it would mean that we’re not engaged with the world in a particular way (in this case, as “abstract thinking”). Heidegger would say something similar, only as a “present-at-hand” mode of being.

Once you’re in this mode, then a subject contemplating objects as a fundamental distinction can commence. But this is a “privative” mode- what human beings do for the most part does not involve subjects and objects at all. — Xtrix

Well reminds me of driving. When traffic is flowing smoothly we're completely unconscious of the act - the car and the driver are one. The instant something unexpected happens the driver becomes aware of driving the car. Carrying this to its logical conclusion, taking into account your other thread on the problems the world is facing, it seems that the scientific bent of the human mind, albeit only expressed in a minority but widely claimed by all, which is the quintessence of the subject-object distinction, is actually an indication that the world has broken and is now present-at-hand. It makes sense since morality, something that has been on our minds for over 2000 years, is about oughts, as if to say the world is busted and needs repair.

Did you notice what is common to all the "problems" you listed? HUMANS!!!

:up: Enjoy life. Thanks

Each banana has a different spatial position I agree, but the two sequences, ignoring their space time position are identical (same mass, same number of bananas, all bananas in one-to-one correspondence). The definition of a sequence (similar to a set) does not include their relative spacial positions - so the two sequences of bananas remain identical whilst they are changed. Which is a contradiction. Hence actual infinity cannot exist. — Devans99

You can't ignore their space-time positions because it's critical to your argument. Why are there infinite bananas? Because they occupy different spaces? If they occupy the same space there would be only one banana.

We add 1 banana to the sequence (=it should change quantitatively and qualitatively).
But is does not change quantitatively(∞+1=∞) or qualitatively(still identical rows of identical bananas). — Devans99

It does change. The problem is in your definition of identicalness.

1. Logical identicalness. I'll use examples to make it clear.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is identical to Lewis Carroll. There's only ONE object but with different names. Carl Lutwidge Dodgson and Lewis Carroll can occupy the same space at the same time. There's absolutely no difference between them.

2. Xerox identicalness. Identical twins or two instances of the same car model. Identical twins or two instances of a car model cannot occupy the same space at the same time. There's a difference there.

Your bananas are not type 1 identical because then there would be only ONE banana. Ergo, your bananas are type 2 identical but then there's a difference between each instance of such identicalness by virtue of their inability to occupy the same space at the same time. It's this difference that produces the change in your two sets.

From the OP. That's what I've been saying all along. — khaled

Merriam-Webster definitions follow:

Action: doing something
Inaction: failure to do something (that should've been done)

Your OP depends on the above difference but your last post sweeps it aside.

Anyway, the difference between the two is immaterial since not having children, call it action or inaction, to be immoral requires knowledge of the future as in you would have to to know your child will be some kind of a superhero to the world and that's impossible. So, whether you want to label it action or inaction, it makes little difference to the fact of the matter which is that not having children is a lesser evil than having children and that's working within the boundaries of comparable suffering you set out in your OP.

This isn't something difficult to grasp. Imagine person Z wants to have a child and there's a chance that the child will cure cancer but it is certain, as your argument depends on it, that the child will both suffer and cause suffering to others. There are now 4 possibilities:

1. Z has the child and the child cures cancer.

2. Z has the child and the child doesn't cure cancer

3. Z doesn't have the child but the child could've cured cancer

4. Z doesn't have the child and the child couldn't have cured cancer

Note: All 4 possibilities involve suffering both for the child and others

When is Z responsible for causing suffering by not having a cancer-curing child? Only option 3, right? However, we can't blame him for an act that is not intentional, right? Yet to have the intention of causing suffering by not letting a cancer-curing child be born requires, as of necessity, that Z know, beforehand, that his child would cure cancer and that is impossible.

So, since Z knows having children involves suffering but he's unsure if his child will cure cancer he would be guilty of intentionally causing harm by having his child but is completely innocent of any suffering in the wake of him not having a cancer-curing child.

Did you just completely ignore my point? What is an "action" and what is an "inaction" depend on each other. So if I define "abstaining" (not having children) as the "action" then having children is an inaction. — khaled

:lol: Then you would be equivocating. Look at the OP and then compare it to what you just said.

People want to create and achieve, for example. — Coben

am just saying that you seem to be a hedonist, and you assume hedonism is everywhere — Coben

We're not all hedonists or the term would have no meaning. — Coben

All the above, infact anything humans do, are in fact wants/desires or what proceeds from them, which points to a crucial aspect of life but I'll get to that later.

Being alive naturally comes with having wants and the satisfaction of these becomes the primary objective of living. What is the nature of these wants? Mainly that they are a source of satisfaction and happiness. Now some have said that there's a difference between satisfaction and happiness and if there is we must, perforce, agree that hedonism isn't universal as you've been saying here; after all people make a goal of satisfaction too.

However, I'm going out on a limb here, if biology is correct there is no biochemical difference between satisfactionand the feeling of joy - the same chemicals, presumably dopamine, is released in both events. Ergo, if there's anything to say of satisfaction then it's that it's a milder version of happiness - not distinct enough to warrant a separate existence.

Separately, in a non-reductive sense, satisfaction is a state of mind engendered when a person's investments matched her returns; there is no net positive/happiness in a hedonistic calculus and the person is simply contented that his input perfectly matches his output. However, realize that even viewed this way, satisafction was a state where happiness matched the suffering; we couldn't, actually it is impossible in my opinion, remove all considerations of happiness from the calculation. Ergo, hedonism is universal in scope.

I'd like to take you back to wants at this point; desire is universal. There seems to be very clear connection between antinatalism and buddhism in that both propose a cessation of birth - the former in a very matter-of-fact way and the latter as some grand state of being - as a solution. Buddhism has as central tenets that 1. desire is the cause of suffering and 2. to sto suffering we must stop desiring. Surely a philosophy with such a claim should find a way to cease all desire and yet this isn't the case for we must want nirvana to achieve it. Wanting/desiring is inescapable - even Buddhism couldn't do it for to stop desire to end suffering is itself a desire. Ergo, desire is universal. Given that is so and taking into account that desire, the fulfillment of which causes happiness or satisfaction and the lack of fulfillment of which results in suffering, it becomes impossible to deny that hedonism is universal. Hedonism is indeed universal.

puritanical perfectionism — Coben

I think hedonism is quite the opposite. It cuts through all the highfalutin stuff and gets down to the basics. Everyone wants happiness - the king the beggar and everyone in between are hedonists. Ergo, hedonism is a more truthful philosophy than anything that denies it. It follows that any corollary of hedonism, antintalism being one, shares this quality of being truthful to the facts as they stand.

That's how precious life is to me. It's despite all the pain precious to me. — Coben

It's great that you value your life. I value your contribution in this discussion.


The difference between action and inaction is critical to your argument because having children is an action and not having children is an inaction.

I used the legal analogy to provide you insight on where our moral intuitions stand on the issue of action vs inaction. Clearly, the legal system, by extension our moral compass, sees the two as different and last I read on the topic, intention is a deciding factor. What's the relationship, if any, between intention and action/inaction? One performs an action with intention right? Of course an inaction could be intentional. In both cases we see that the person, accused of harm via action/inaction must know the consequences of either his action or his inaction. In other words he must be aware of the chain of causation beginning with his action or inaction.

Now consider the having/not having of children in re the argument from comparable suffering. We agree that having children invariably leads to suffering. Ergo, the action of having children is obviously bad because all would-be parents are fully aware of the consequences (here suffering) of being born and having children is an intentional action. So, we have here, in the act of having children, an intention to harm.

What of the inaction of not having children? When does it equal, as a moral transgression, to having children as described above? Well, only when a would-be parent is aware that his child will benefit humanity e.g. the child could discover a cure for cancer. This is impossible isn't it? So, the inaction of not having children can never, unless the parent is clairvoyant, be an intent to do harm; after all to have such an intent one must know beforehand that the child will cure cancer, or stop a war, etc.

The argument in the OP is that you can add/remove identical items to an infinite sequence and the sequence remains identical/unchanged (both qualitatively and quantitatively). This results in the contradiction 'when it is changed, it is not changed', which is what I intended - assumption of the existence of actual infinity leads to a contradiction. — Devans99

So add/remove is the change. How? In what way have you changed the infinite set from which something has been removed and the infinite set to which something has been added? You deny that the change is qualitative since you claim you're using identical bananas. You deny that it is a quantitative change since infinity + 1 = infinity and infinity/2 = infinity. So, it must be that nothing has changed and that precludes any claim that the sets have changed in any way.

Is change that is neither qualitative nor quantitative possible?

Also I have an issue of identicalness of the bananas. How does this identicalness weigh in on the issue? Since you've listed your sets as {b, b, b,...} it implies that there's a difference between any two b's; after all if they were logically identical in that all b's refer to one and only one object then you wouldn't or rather couldn't list them separately as {b, b, b,...}; set theory doesn't allow repetitions of elements. Since the difference between b's isn't quantitative because b corresponds to the number 1 it follows that the b's differ qualitatively and that points to a qualitative change when you manipulate the two sets as you do.

My argument uses sequences of identical bananas, so that the 'quantity' and 'quality' of bananas both are constant whilst bananas are added and removed from the sequences - resulting in absurdity. — Devans99

Well then you're contradicting yourself. Things can change either qualitatively or quantitatively and you say neither has occurred. Then in what way have the sets changed; after all your claim is that when it is changed, it is not changed.

I doubt that very much. This conception is so prevalent in the west we take it as part of human nature, but there's no reason to assume it's universal. — Xtrix

I'm no Wittgenstein but check out language as Andrew M suggested. All languages I know of have a subject-verb-object structure and maybe, just maybe, if there are languages that lack it we may gain some insight into the issue herein discussed.

What would it mean to say that there's no subject-object distinction? Surely we're sufficiently removed in time and space from the moon landing in 1969 to validate it as an object and us as subjects. To say otherwise is, in my opinion, to claim that there's a causal connection between any and all would be subjects and would be objects rendering the subject-object distinction moot.

Premise 1 is: It is wrong to have or not have children.
Premise 2 is: We have not commited a moral blunder. — khaled

These two are inconsistent. If it is wrong to have or not have children then we have already committed a moral error if either option obtains and premise 2 (we have not committed a moral blunder) has to be false.

Premise 2: We have not committed a moral blunder suggests a third viable alternative to both having and not having children and that's impossible. According to you, having children is immoral AND not having children is immoral. If you think in terms of not having committed an immoral act then you'll need to put a third option on the table. What is it? Bear in mind having children or not having children is a tautology and to negate that, as you must, would entail a contradiction.

I feel your argument is basically a dilemma that invalidates the antinatalist argument from suffering. The claim for them is rather straightforward: if we have children then we cause suffering and so we must not have children if you want to alleviate/eliminate suffering. Your argument demonstrates that even not having children can produce the same amount of suffering. So, not having children doesn't solve the problem.

Let's go to your beautiful example of the two rooms A and B, each with 200 people and you have a choice to either press the button or not but the consequences are same; 200 people die. As you can see the only difference that there is the pressing or not pressing of the button and so the solution to the dilemma must lie therein. Arguably, having children corresponds to pressing the button and not having children to not pressing the button. Ultimately, it boils down to the moral nature of action vs inaction. This aspect of the problem completely slipped my mind and as it turns out is the cornerstone of the issue.

To be frank there is a working principle in the legal systems of the world in re action vs inaction. To take an extreme example, the action of plowing a 747 into a building is murder and the inaction of a plane safety technician who fails to perform his duty and leading to a crash is considered manslaughter; though both murder and manslaughter lead to deaths they aren't equivalent in the eyes of the law. Manslaughter is a lesser crime than murder. Doesn't this indicate that one is held wholly responsible for one's actions but not so for one's inactions? The answer is "yes" and ergo, even if having children or not are both morally bad, the former is worse than the latter based on the preceding distinction between action and inaction.


There also seems to be an additional problem with your argument from comparable suffering which is related to the moral distinction between action and inaction. We already agree that having children leads to suffering. This information is in no way special; everyone knows this for a fact.

However, for the person who refuses to have children to be morally culpable things are a bit complicated for s/he must know that his child will benefit humanity in a big way; after all it is only this way that his inaction/not having children will be bad.Such a person must have foreknowledge of the future and that we know is impossible.

Therefore, since for inaction to be equally culpable as action the requirement is to be some kind of seer which is impossible, inaction is less of a moral transgression than action. Your premise that both having children or not having children produces comparable suffering while true, the person who doesn't have children commits a smaller moral transgression than one who has children.

Or that there are other values to take into account beyond the value of never putting someone else in a situation where they may suffer. Or by arguing that there are no objective morals. — Coben

One does not have to evaluate life or this issue in terms of plus minus emotions. Life can have value beyond happiness. In a sense this is kind of assuming an emotional hedonism is the correct way to evaluate life — Coben

I'm interested to know what can be more valuable than acquiring happiness and avoiding suffering. Bear in mind that however you answer that question you will have to provide a viable alternative to hedonism and as we all know this is impossible for hedonism subsumes everything; by that I mean value for humans is based off of whether there's pleasure or pain involved. The more pleasurable a thing is, the greater its value and the more painful a thing is, the lower its value. Think of anything humans value, either positively or negatively, and invariably these are hedonistic evaluations.

There is a sense in which what you say appears to make sense: sometimes we either forgo happiness or endure suffering. However, this paradoxical state is easily explicable with the presence of greater pleasure to be achieved or greater [isuffering[/i] to be avoided. It's as if pleasure and pain are goods to be traded with using some kind of a felicific calculus.

1) I do think some people should not have children 2) I don't really believe in objective morals. I like life, including sentient life. I hope it continues. That is one of my strong values. I see nothing in the antinatalist manifesto that makes we want to stop valuing life, including life that can suffer, and rooting for it to continue. I don't really need to even think of the phrase 'morally neutral'. — Coben

I suspect that you're not the only one who makes statements like "I like life, including sentient life"; this is a widely expressed sentiment and thus gains a level of legitimacy that antinatalism, to be a sound philosophy, must deal with. Why do so many people like life? Either life is likable or we have a biased sample on our hands. Which do you think is probable? That there is a philosophy that discourages birth suggests that all is not well in this world. You know, no smoke without fire. What weighs in on this is the undeniable fact that if one is suffering there really is no way we could say, "I like life". It would be the mother of all lies.

We could dig a little deeper though and come to the realization, if it is one, that when one is not in a position to say, I like life", as when one is suffering, it doesn't mean one dislikes life: after all we all, more or less, share the sentiment that life is likable. The bottomline is that if there's anything we loathe it's suffering. Similarly, we don't like life per se but the opportunity that it provides to be happy.

Somewhere, sometime, for some of us, suffering exceeds, either in intensity or duration or both, the limits of our endurance and suffering becomes life itself. The clear line between life and suffering vanishes and the two become one. At this point, when life = suffering, having children, if they share the same fate, becomes a criminal offence committed against unconsenting innocent beings.

I disagree. Certainly some natalists must think that a junkie deciding not to have children is doing a good thing. I am not my whole species. So, right off I deny the universalism. I can also judge the antinatalist project as holding values I disagree with. I think it would be aweful if their values spread to the degree that all sentient life stopped procreating. And the technology to do this without creating suffering could certainly arise, even for animals. I think that's horrible. That's one of my values. I don't think it's an objective one. It's mine. Of course I don't want people to suffer or children to suffer. I share that value to a degree. but I do not think that value should have veto power over all other values. It is extremely puritan. I think there is a hatred of life in it, since it's hope is that all fauna no longer exists. I honestly think that is sick. Not morally sick, but anti-life. — Coben

I think it depends, in individual cases — Coben

Like I said, life is an opportunity to be happy even if that maybe a journey few will ever complete. Some are both fortunate and wise to achieve happiness; I salute them and envy their luck and wisdom. However most of us are neither blessed by fate nor wise enough to achieve this state and so it behooves us, at least as a gesture of sympathy, to grant them a negative outlook on life.

The idea is to avoid a moral blunder i.e. we must not do bad things. Agreed?

The premise you start from is this:
1. If either (you should have children or you should not have children), then you commit a moral blunder
2. We must not commit a moral blunder
Ergo
3. It's not the case that (either you should have children or you should not have children)
(Either you should have children or you should not have children) is a tautology (p v ~p)

Statement 3 negates (either you should have children or you should not have children) and negating a tautology we get a contradiction viz. (you should have children AND you should not have children.)

Ergo, one of our premises is false. It can't be 2 because we agree we mustn't commit a moral blunder. The premise we assumed viz 1, the foundation of the argument from comparable suffering is off in some way.

Let's consider a purely logical scenario with the exact form and we can see the error in the logic

1. (p v ~p) > q.....assume for reductio ad absurdum
2. ~q
3. ~(p v ~p).......1, 2 MT
4. ~p & ~~p.......3 DeM
5. ~p & p.........4 DN
6. ~[(p v ~p) > q].....1 to 5 reductio ad absurdum

Well, I'm still a bit unconvinced about the matter. The argument from comparable suffering as presented by you makes, what I think is, a very subtle distinction: that between you should have children and you may have children. The conclusion of your argument is the latter and not the former.

There's an assumption that instead of two choices, you should/should not have children, there are three:

1. Should have children
2. Should not have children
3. May have children

3 is what you infer with the argument from comparable suffering.

Notice that choice 3 essentially negates both choices 1 and 2 and declares that both options are available but what is of concern to the antinatalist is that it rejects his/her stance that we should not have children.

Your argument gives a degree of freedom, that we may have children, that the antinatalist wants to deny us. Before we even begin to think of how antinatalists would counter this argument we have to consider whether option 3 makes sense or not. What does it mean to say that we may have children? Since all of this is contextualized morally, your argument amounts to the claim that having children or not having children are both morally bad. Is this situation possible? Can I use two premises that contradict each other and arrive at the same conclusion?

C = we should have children
~C = we should not have children
B = we have to do something that is morally bad

1. (C v ~C) > B assume for reductio ad absurdum
2. ~B........we don't want to do something bad
3. ~(C v ~C).....1, 2 MT
4. ~C & ~~C....3 DeM
5.~C & C.......contradiction
6. ~[(C v ~C) > B]....1 to 5 reductio ad absurdum
There seems to be an underlying contradiction in the argument from comparable suffering

When it is changed, it is not changed — Devans99

Reminds me of Hilbert's Hotel. It helps to make a distinction here - that between quantitative and qualitative change.

Since your argument is just a reworked Hilbert's Hotel Paradox I'll go with the Hotel analogy.

Imagine a hotel with infinite rooms and with an infinite number of guests a1, a2, a3,... Now imagine a new guest b1 who wants to stay in that hotel. The manager simply moves a1 to a2, a2 to a3, aN to aN+1,... and b1 gets a1's room. Notice that though the quantity, infinity is still infinity, hasn't changed, the quality has: b1 is the new guest.


Similarly for an infinite number of new guests c1, c2, c3,..., we do the following:a1 moves to a2, a2 moves to a4, a3 moves to a6, aN moves to a2N,...which frees up the odd numbered rooms for the infinite guests c1, c2, c3,... As you'll notice though there's no change quantitatively there is a qualitative change, the guests c1, c2, c3,...are new.


Since infinity is an exclusively quantitative concept, it fails to register qualitative changes but that doesn't mean no change has occurred.

To illustrate take 3 people, Tom, Dick and Harry. Now imagine Tom gets replace by Jane. We still have 3 people viz. Jane, Dick and Harry. There's no change in quantity but there's a qualitative difference viz. Jane is now in place of Tom.

That makes it rather uninteresting though doesn't it. How about: If you push the button your child will save 4 people. That's more like the situation he had in mind — khaled

To be frank I like the argument from comparable suffering as you phrased it. We can reel in some positive/good effects of having children to bolster the original argument but I think that would be reverting to saying suffering is in equilibrium with happiness, a bridge that seems to have already been crossed if you argue from comparable suffering.

Just to inform you there's another thread on antinatalism and Kant that's also active. From a Kantian perspective there is nothing immoral about having children; in fact not to have children can't be a categorical imperative because it can't be universalized without the extinction of humanity and that seems somehow not what Kant would've wanted. Morality is about how to live and to suggest that that involves extinction of life is like saying the solution of a puzzle is to destroy all traces of the puzzle having ever existed in the first place.

To return to our discussion, I think a similar analogy - that of a puzzle needing solving - applies to antinatalism which is implicitly a consequentialist stance. As for the comparable suffering whether you have/don't have children view I think it only demonstrates that both options lead to undesirable consequences and not that one is preferable over the other. So we need some means other than the consideration of suffering to decide which choice to make; this is exactly what you've proposed by saying, quote, "your child will save 4 people". However, this additional premise contradicts the initial assumption - comparable suffering which presumably concedes the irrelevancy of happiness of any form.

I'm wondering how many people in this forum still see the world in this way or something similar to it. It seems to be the philosophical basis for modern science, at least since Descartes. — Xtrix

Although it may not be a conscious decision, all thought and action implicity assumes the subject-object distinction. I, the subject, think of and do to objects. I think the subject-object paradigm has proven its worth in the vast amount of accumulated knowledge we have in our libraries.

If at all there is something off about it then it must mean that the subject isn't sufficiently detachable from the object in terms which we can roughly speak of as causality. I maybe wrong about this but I believe quantum physics has phenomena that blurs the line between subject and object e.g. the double slit experiment with electrons where the act of observing by a subject changes the outcome of the experiment, the object. However, the question remains whether findings at a quantum level can be extrapolated to the world of humans - mind and body.

Also I recall that some very clever person, whose good name I forgot, once suggested that the universe is trying to understand itself which I assume is via evolving conscious thinking lifeforms like humans and, hopefully, other intelligent life elsewhere; lifeforms capable of actively investigating and discovering the inner workings of the universe. In such terms the universe is both subject and object.

Thematically, self-reflection, when the subject makes an object of itself, has its origins in philosophy. Socrates, the father of western philosophy, famously claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. I'm sure eastern philosophy too has a similar tradition.

Presumably, philosophy, understanding the self, not only just an individual but humanity as a whole, was the first step in the journey of the universe in understanding itself.

ARe their no evil moral principles? Hitler could be seen as following moral principals. I am sure he thought so — Coben

Isn't that like asking "are there no bad good people?

A contradiction in terms.


As for Hitler, he can be "explained" not by a moral philosophy but a morally deficient ideology - racial supremacism. Even then he was "good" to the Aryans.

All I'm saying is: If you cause comparable suffering whether or not you have children then there is nothing stopping you from having them. Does that make sense? — khaled

Notice that one who argues like this is already on the backfoot; to argue thus is, after all, to concede that happiness is irrelevant and that the morality of having/not having children is based solely on the suffering that it'll cause.

Suppose for the moment that such a position as you're taking is the correct one: since there's no difference in the amount of suffering whether we have/don't have children, there's no real reason to not have children. If so then let's extend the same logic to other comparable situations. Imagine a room where there are 20 people and an evil scientist shows you a button labeled "fuck & reproduce" and says, "Whether or not you press that button, ALL the people in the room will be killed. However, if you do press the button, one additional person, your child, will be forced into the room and made to kill all 20 people. After that your child too will be killed." Would you press that button? It's not the case that the suffering is comparable.

As far as wikipedia, the main opposition to anti-natalism is not natalism, but the idea that there is nothing per se wrong about having children — Coben

@khaled

Since the antinatalist is making a moral argument the world divides into what is good and what is bad. The basic assertion of the antinatalist is that it's bad to bring children into this world with conditions as they are. If this is accepted then we're morally obligated to not have children.

To deny antinatalism would require the demonstration that either having children is good or that it's morally neutral. That having children is morally neutral is not true, after all, as per the antinatalist, suffering is inevitable, and, according to natalism the inevitable suffering is adequately compensated with the counterweight of happiness; either way both antinatalism and natalism are claiming that having children has a moral dimension. So, it's false that having children is morally neutral. This then implies that natalism is a claim that having children is morally good and that means we're obligated to do what is good; we must have children according to the natalists.

There is no wiggle room to say, quote, "there is nothing per se wrong about having children" which to make sense would require having children to be morally neutral and that it is not.

Within a moral context you either should or should not have children. Natalism is the former and antinatalism is the latter.

Either all the above or it's true that life has an equal amount of suffering and happiness which then would allow us to say, quote, "there is nothing per se wrong about having children". After all the experience of life would be a perfect balance between tears and laughter. However, precisely because of this view that life, on the whole, maybe a neutral experience the question of consent enters the scene. For an experience that guarantees certain fun or pain we usually don't think of asking for consent; we assume, and rightly so, that a person will either enjoy or not enjoy it. However for an experience that provides no such guarantees it's mandatory to seek consent. So, since consent is not sought and is not given in having children, it is immoral. It simply is impossible to say, quote, "there is nothing per se wrong about having children"

This

I think that is as fanatical a position as some of the worst extremes of radical abrahamism. They are will to take, it seems to me, an unbelievable risk that their values are not as perfectly correct as they think. The unbelievable part of the risk comes in given what they are rooting for and striving for. It's hubris and perfectionism. Only this value and nothing else. — Coben

If there's anything wrong with antinatalism then it's that it throws the baby out with the bathwater. After all, they wouldn't have a case IF suffering could be eliminated and this is, in my opinion, a primary objective for humanity as evidenced by how we measure our progress - high life expectancy, low childhood mortality, less poverty, low disease rates, etc. In this respect the future looks bright for our progeny and antinatalism looks destined to become outdated in about a 100 years or so.

Sexual preference, no matter strength, no make babby, no exclude babby. Sometimes babby come from gay man or woman and partner because like partner and want child. Sometimes drama. Sometimes artificial insemination. Sometimes woman have child for close gay friend. Sometimes person gay for loooong time and fuck other sex for loooong time until reaches personal epiphany, or until moves away from restrictive social context.

This has been your yearly dose of sex ed. — fdrake

:rofl: :up: