1- I’ll be 24 this month. I’ve been an Antinatalist for 2 or 3 years.
2- I’m not sterilized. The idea of having small surgery down there is not a very pleasant one.
3- Yes. Both his books are tremendous.
4- Not really. Certain features of reality are depressing. Not antinatalism in itself.
5- No, I have not. Interesting to hear his voice for the first time.
I don’t see what the big deal is about someone thinking it’s best not to have kids. Makes a lot of sense, actually - for a variety of reasons. Hopefully we’re not talking about involuntary sterilization or anything.
I don’t know about the suffering versus pleasure equation. Something about such a quantification and comparison strikes me as misunderstanding something about the nature of either. I don’t know…
In B not everything else is the same. In B, there is absence of pain and absence of pleasure. In A, there’s presence of pain and presence of pleasure.
Antinatalism doesn’t say that you shouldn’t want to live. If you want to live, that’s great. The question of whether or not life is worth living is a facetious one because in reality that question is mixing two very different questions into a single one:
1 -Is life worth starting ?
2- Is life worth continuing ?
What Antinatalism says is that life is never worth starting. But it leaves the question of whether life is worth continuing up to each person to decide. it doesn’t command suicide in any way. David Benatar does explain why self assessments of one’s life’s quality are unreliable ( and so did Schopenhauer by the way) but he doesn’t tell anyone that they should kill themselves and neither does Antinatalism.
Having said that, and please don’t be offended by this but, your statement “'I prefer to live rather than not to live, that really is the end of the story”, is not really philosophy is it ? It’s a refusal to reason and an enunciation of an emotional disposition. I’m not saying you shouldn’t or can’t have emotional dispositions but if you don’t allow yourself to at least question that, then you’re refusing to engage in honest, rational discussion. That statement is not that different from " I prefer to believe in god than to be an atheist, so I’m going to continue to be a theist". Fine, you’re perfectly entitled to your feelings but they do not dictate reality.
As a side note, I know that you’re father and none of this is to be constituted as a personal attack. You know I love ya 
Also, in Benatar’s own words: “Nevertheless, the view that coming into existence is always a harm does not imply that death is better than continuing to exist, and a fortiori that suicide is (always) desirable. Life may be sufficiently bad that it is better not to come into existence, but not so bad that it is better to cease existing.” *
And: “In asking whether a life is worth starting we should not have to consider whether it would not be worth continuing. Nor should we have to appeal to the preferences of already existing people about their own lives to make judgments about future lives.” **
* P. 212, Better Never To Have Been: The Harm Of Coming Into Existence, David Benatar
** P. 28, Better Never To Have Been, The Harm Of Coming Into Existence, David Benatar
The difference between deciding not to have kids and antinatalism is this:
I doubt that is the reason that most people would give for not having kids.
Well someone might think that - that life is never worth starting. I don’t think that’s a scary thing in itself.
I guess some people think that using others, in any way, is very bad and shouldn’t happen. But people have kids in order to have help on the farm. They have kids because they think it will bring them joy. They have kids because they think they will be good parents and their children will help to improve the world, which probably isn’t going away anytime soon. There’s all kinds of reasons, probably none of them “pure”, and I think that’s ok. So I have no problem at all with people wanting kids. I just don’t see what’s wrong with Volchok’s alternative view.
See, I think the whole “consent” thing is overblown. So I don’t go along with this logic. But I can understand it.
Obviously some people think that way. No, it’s not scary in itself. Seems very flawed logic.
I think it’s no more or less logical than anything that someone values. The reason why having kids is a good thing is no more or less logical.
It’s not a question of having kids. It’s a question of rejecting sentient life because suffering is a part of sentient life.
That is of course, a very common argument, but it’s also one of the worse arguments against antinatalism that I know of. What you’re saying is absolutely true. An athlete who feels elated that he just won a gold medal would not feel half of what he’s feeling had he not suffered tremendously to get there. All those hours of training, the constant diet, the constant worry and so forth. Getting extremely rich after being extremely poor feels much better than becoming extremely rich after being mid-class. A glass of water after days without having any will be the best glass of water you will ever taste in your life. There’s no question about that.
We also know that wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition *, be it making love to your partner for the first time or finally eating that delicious meal that you’ve been dreaming about for years. That’s the wonders of psychological habituation.
But using this considerations to justify the existence of suffering or to attribute some merit to it or even to suggest that suffering is not that bad after all, seems like a huge distortion and quite a sick thought to be honest. The fact that one can’t have pleasure without pain, speaks volumes about the nature of reality. And while it is true that it’s very hard to imagine a world where this isn’t true (we would have to imagine a world where we had different physiological and psychological features), that is a failure of imagination on our part and nothing more. It does not follow that the world we live in is the best of all possible worlds or even a good world.
Non-existent beings don’t miss out on appreciating beauty or love. They don’t exist, after all.
Us, living beings would obviously accept to suffer for a second if we were promised a lifetime of pleasure after that second. Everyone who is neurologically intact would accept that deal. Why ? Because we know very well that even the best lives contain more than one second of suffering. Even the most cheery optimist would agree with me on that one. The question is, you can only care about a lifetime of pleasure if you are missing out on it. Non-existent beings don’t miss out on anything, therefor bringing a person to life, knowing that that person will experience suffering, regardless of how little, cannot be justified.
This is nonsense humean. As mentioned before: In asking whether a life is worth starting we should not have to consider whether it would not be worth continuing. Nor should we have to appeal to the preferences of already existing people about their own lives to make judgments about future lives.
*Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling On Happiness, P. 130
I thought I was the one defining what A and B are in my own post…
No, it’s not like that at all. It’s a preference. Not a preference in a belief. Not a preference in a statement of truth, as opposed to some other statement of truth. It’s a preference in and of itself. It’s like someone saying ‘I like vanilla ice cream’, and you thinking you can argue them out of it. Liking vanilla or chocolate, preferring a flavor of ice cream, is not at all like saying ‘I prefer to believe something despite a lack of evidence.’
In fact, quite the contrary: I can actually provide evidence that I like chocolate or vanilla. And I can provide evidence that I prefer to live rather than not to live.
So your analogy is…pretty much…completely off. How is saying ‘You can’t argue me out of preferring Vanilla.’ similar to saying ‘You can’t argue me out of believing in God?’ Notice the underlined words there - that should give you a pretty big hint about why they’re dissimilar.
It would have been an accurate analogy if I said ‘You can’t argue me out of believing I prefer vanilla.’ But I didn’t say that.
So, I prefer cookies and cream, and I prefer to live rather than to die, and as I said before, both of those preferences are able to change (because they’re probably not bedrock preferences, which aren’t able to change [barring actual brain meddling]), but not by abstract arguments that don’t make reference to my preferences. And the abstract argument ‘A lack of pleasure isn’t bad’ doesn’t make reference to my preferences, so it can’t change them.
I fail to see how that is relevant in any way.
Oh sorry, I thought you were referring to the image I posted.
So you’re saying that in A, there is pleasure and in B, there is no pleasure and that you would consider B, a bad scenario.
Well, the fundamental problem is that B can’t possibly be a bad scenario since there is no one to miss out on the pleasure that doesn’t occur.
So, what you’re essentially saying is that you like being alive enough that you want to go on living, correct ?
That’s fine. That’s not at odds with Antinatalism in anyway:
[b]
Antinatalism doesn’t say that you shouldn’t want to live. If you want to live, that’s great. The question of whether or not life is worth living is a facetious one because in reality that question is mixing two very different questions into a single one:
1 -Is life worth starting ?
2- Is life worth continuing ?
What Antinatalism says is that life is never worth starting. But it leaves the question of whether life is worth continuing up to each person to decide. it doesn’t command suicide in any way. David Benatar does explain why self assessments of one’s life’s quality are unreliable ( and so did Schopenhauer by the way) but he doesn’t tell anyone that they should kill themselves and neither does Antinatalism.
“Nevertheless, the view that coming into existence is always a harm does not imply that death is better than continuing to exist, and a fortiori that suicide is (always) desirable. Life may be sufficiently bad that it is better not to come into existence, but not so bad that it is better to cease existing.” *
And: “In asking whether a life is worth starting we should not have to consider whether it would not be worth continuing. Nor should we have to appeal to the preferences of already existing people about their own lives to make judgments about future lives.” **
- P. 212, Better Never To Have Been: The Harm Of Coming Into Existence, David Benatar
** P. 28, Better Never To Have Been, The Harm Of Coming Into Existence, David Benatar[/b]
It sounds like the antinatalist is another enemy to all people, including themselves.
It sounds like you haven’t read a single word in this thread. 
You’re distorting my point. Part of the OP is “no pain is good”. I disagree with that, and that’s not the same as “there’s nothing at all wrong with world’s suffering”. I’d disagree with the cooking premise that “no salt is good” without having to deny that a lot of people have too much of it in their diets.
It speaks volumes about the nature of pain and pleasure, and the appropriateness of a philosophy that holds that all pain is bad and should be stamped out, even if that means removing all sentience from the world.
They haven’t been spared any pain either, as they don’t exist to have been spared.
How can I permit you to continue living, knowing you’ll suffer, however little? Suffering is not always all that bad. Some is, and that should be stamped out where possible, especially the needless sort. But I’d find it hard to not justify bringing a person to life who’ll have a full and happy life, and who will help others to live better lives, on the basis that as a baby they will have teething pains and they’ll have to put up with chickenpox. Assuming we could know very much at all about the content of the future life, which we really can’t.
Given that the potential person would be existent, it seems like an excellent place to start.
Why is a “little suffering” good then ? If it’s because it allows the highs in life to be higher, I’ve already responded to that. That argument fails completely. The fact that the existence of pain enhances future pleasure, or allows you to learn and grow is a negative feature of life, not a positive one. Clearly it would be better, if the word “better” has any meaning, to be able to grow and learn and experience pleasure without having to experience pain. The fact that we can’t imagine such a world doesn’t make your argument valid nor does it suggest that a little suffering can be good or that existence is overall pleasurable.
Antinatalism doesn’t suggest that we should “remove” sentience from the world. It suggests that we shouldn’t create any more. It may seem like I’m being pedantic here but I’m sure that a some point, someone here will accuse me of inciting mass murder so I might a well make this distinction now. You make it sound like “removing all sentience from the world”, which is to say, not having kids, is bad. I fail to see how that may be so. I’m sure some people want kids so much that they would suffer if they didn’t pop them out but you can’t alleviate that suffering without creating much, much more. So, unless you have a very good and rational reason as to why mankind must continue to procreate, it seems to me that you don’t actually have an argument against antinatalism.
Indeed but antinatalism doesn’t claim that the never-existent literally are better off.But instead that coming into existence is always bad for those who come into existence. In other words, we can’t say of the never-existing that never existing is good for them, but we can say of the existent that existence is bad for them. There is no absurdity here.
You’re once again missing the point. I already explained twice, that antinatalism claims that coming into existence is always bad but does not claim that all lives are so bad they aren’t worth continuing so, why are you making that snide remark ? Also, you do not know if a person will have a full and happy life but even if it were true, that person would not miss out on it had she not been born. I have yet to see you provide a reason or a motive that justifies procreating.
No, it wouldn’t be an excellent place to start because as I have mentioned before, there are two separate questions that we need to answer. One is " Is life worth starting" ? And the other one is " Is life worth continuing" ? As Benatar said, life can be sufficiently bad that it is never worth starting but not so bad that it is not worth continuing. You cannot claim that life is worth starting simply because some lives are worth continuing. And that is what you and fj have been trying to do this entire time.
Because conscious life’s a good thing, full of experience, and a little suffering is part of what it is to be human. Being human’s great; you have abstract thought, emotional relationships, numinous experiences of awe and wonder. Compared to that, a little suffering is peanuts; it’s the price of admission. You hold that it’s a price that’s never worth paying, and that’s your right, but I’m inclined to disagree because it means accepting that my only moral duty, which is to say the way in which one defines oneself to be living a good life, is to minimise suffering wherever one may find it.
Only if you have a morbid obsession with suffering over all other forms of experience, to be fair. You could as easily turn the argument about face and say that the fact that suffering allows greater pleasure is a positive feature of suffering.
My existence is overall pleasurable, as is that of most of the people I know. Isn’t yours?
I’m well aware of that. I’ve already said a couple of times: sentience - the ability to experience pain and pleasure, and to theorise about it, and to discuss it, is inherently considered a good. It’s not good to needlessly extinguish it, as you rightly say. Whether it’s good to increase it depends on the overall effect of the increase - overpopulation could be a concern, for example. And a practical decision not to have children is perfectly defensible on such contextual grounds - bringing a child into a war-torn, famine-stricken danger zone is different to bringing one into a stable, peaceful, affluent society, clearly. But before claiming it to be a universal rational imperative, you need to state your premises.
Existence is not bad for me. This is pure linguistic muddle, a category error: if there were no me, nothing would be good for me. It’s the condition of existence that makes “good for me” and “bad for me” possible. So no, we can’t say of either group that non/existence is good or bad for them, because things that are good or bad for people are subsets of existence.
Existence is one of those tricky words that gets used in bad arguments, like Anselm’s ontological argument. Now I come to think of it, you could feed “existence is bad for things” into the ontological argument as a way to prove that God doesn’t exist 
That could be philosophy of the “so bad it’s good” school. But I digress 
Youv’e stated all lives are more bad than good. I don’t believe that, and you haven’t given any reasons yet for me to do so.
I wasn’t talking about continuing life, I was saying that I would guess most people who have existed feel life was on balance worth it. Let’s take this as a premise.
Any person I create is therefore pretty likely to be glad to have been created.
Therefore, I’m doing them a favour by having created them.
But since you raise it, it’s clearly something you want to address: If life is always more bad than good, and always will be, then any utilitarian calculus will require you to get out ASAP. You have an easy route to non-existence, it requires work to remain existant. Rather than tell me what Benatar said, tell me how your mathematics works. That will be the clearest way to differentiate yourself from the advocates of mass murder: what is the value of continuing life, if it’s always going to be more bad than good? Buddhists believe life is suffering, and believe in reincarnation, which keeps them from suicide while they seek their snuffing-out, nirvana. What’s stopping you?
(Please don’t take my questions as encouragement - I’m asking from the point of view of someone who thinks life is inherently worth experiencing)
Only_Humean,
Your arguments about suicide aren’t relevant to anti-natalism. The whole purpose of anti-natalism is to prevent suffering of OTHER people, namely future generations. Suicide causes suffering to the person that commits it, plus their family and friends, etc. Not creating new life does not harm the non-existent being because they do not exist, therefore, they can’t be harmed.
You are free to view YOUR life as relatively free of suffering, but that doesn’t make it moral for you to create another being, without its consent, that may suffer a tremendous deal throughout it’s lifetime. Also, you tend to minimize the amount of suffering in the world. Most humans are under the delusion of optimism, namely pollyannaism, which causes them to overestimate the quality of their lives. Think about the thousands of people in the Philippines dying this very minute from the hurricane and imagine telling them their sufferings are just the “price of admission” into our brutal universe.
Humean,with all due respect, you can’t say that conscious life is a good thing and leave it there. That’s a bare assertion.
Oh, it’s a good thing because of abstract thought, emotional relationships and numinous experiences ? What about fear, anxiety, poverty, hunger, disease, pain, old age and so on and so forth ?
Anyway, I never said that life had a little bit of suffering. I think it has an unspeakable amount of suffering. The “one second of suffering followed by a lifetime of pleasure” was just an hypothetical scenario to make a point. Having said that, from an antinatalist perspective, it does not matter if there’s more suffering or more pleasure in life. There is some suffering and that is enough and you simply cannot justify putting a conscious being trough that suffering by saying he will also enjoy many great things , because if that being hadn’t been born, he or she, would have not missed out on those great things. You’re not doing anyone a favor. Allowing someone who is already alive to experience great things and who otherwise woudn’t, now that would be a favor.
Humean, this is a very simple point. It would be better if we could experience a high degree of pleasure without having to experience pain as opposed to having to experience pain to be able experience a high degree of pleasure. It’s as simple as that. I’m sure that if you stop with your absurd rationalizations, you’ll find that you agree with this. If you don’t agree with such a simple premise, words such as “good” and “bad” have no meaning to you, and there’s no point continuing this conversation. Do you honestly disagree with this?
That’s great but it’s also completely irrelevant. I understand that you enjoy your life. So what ? I never said you shouldn’t. That has no bearing on this discussion.
Why ? Another bare assertion ?
And here we go again. Humean, how much or how little you enjoy your life is completely irrelevant to this discussion. You keep repeating and repeating and repeating it and at this point I’m wondering if I should bake you a cake or something. I get it, you claim to be happy. So what ? There is nothing about you being supposedly happy that negates antinatalism and I have explained why several times. You’re either skipping entire sections of text, or you are consciously refusing to reason. Furthermore, there is no linguistic muddle there but if you prefer a different formulation of the same statement: Only living beings can suffer and all of them do, regardless of how much suffering or how little there actually is. Existence is bad for those who exist in the sense that every single person that exists suffer, even if it’s only for a second.
I do believe that but antinatalism doesn’t require you to believe that. That’s why I keep saying that determining exactly how much suffering or how much pleasure there is in life is irrelevant. And for now, I’m not going to give you reasons to believe that statement because I don’t need you to believe that statement in order to accept antinatalism. That statement is my own personal opinion and not something an antinatalist has to believe.
That’s a bastardization of logic if I ever saw one. Whether they feel glad or not that they have been created is absolutely irrelevant. If they hadn’t been born you would not find them in some sort of limbo state wishing to be born. To say " I am glad that I am alive" is a violation of logic even if people don’t realize it while saying it. What people really mean to say when they say that, is that their lives are sufficiently pleasant for them to not consider themselves unhappy or to wish to commit suicide. In some cases their lives might even be pure bliss. To say " I am glad to be alive" is to imply that there is something that it is like to be dead, which is nonsense, of course.
The old “Why don’t you kill yourself?”
There are many reasons as to why an antinatalist might not want to kill him or herself. The most obvious one being that their lives may not be so bad that they are not worth continuing. You would understand this reason if you stopped assuming that Antinatalism is equivalent to thinking that all lives are more bad than good. Other reasons: an irrational fear of death, wanting to care for others, not wanting to cause pain to family and friends and so forth.
The view that coming into existence is always a harm does not imply that death is better than continuing to exist or that suicide is (always) desirable.