David Benatar VS Jordan Peterson

I think Benatar destroyed him. Anyone else have any thoughts?
iono.fm/e/516604

Other urls found in this thread:

reddit.com/r/antinatalism/comments/7p73c0/jordan_b_peterson_vs_david_benatar_up_now/
youtube.com/watch?v=vsyZcKUP_-k
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

i ain't clicking that shit nigga

It's safe. I'm listening to it now.

Here's the link from reddit then
reddit.com/r/antinatalism/comments/7p73c0/jordan_b_peterson_vs_david_benatar_up_now/

Not a fan of Peterson but so far I'm finding his arguments much more compelling. A Nietzschean vs. a Schopenhauerian. I take the Nietzschean.

I couldn't imagine a more autistic argument if I tried.

The thing about the Nietzschean is that he has no arguments by design, it's just an aesthetic bias towards the status quo.
>we can show specifically what makes sentient life such a shitshow and pose the question whether continuing it is worth it
>MUH ERADICATION OF BEING AND CRYPTOTHEOLOGY

>destroyed harris
>obliterated peterson

jesus christ i thought benatar wasn't a pro-mortist

Isn't the aesthetic bias more compelling anyway? >muh dialectics.
Who cares

all antinatalist arguments rest on ulilitarian ethics which makes it wrong by default.

What's your beef with utilitarianism?

thanks for the heads up opi

all non-religious ethics rest on nothing desu, they're equally nonsensical

bye bye god is nihil reich

its focus on happiness is baseless.

Nope, you can argue it from a deontological perspective as well.
puu dot sh slash yXUdH/ce34367d31.pdf

But what does have a base?

>muh principles
>muh consent
philosophy was a mistake

you can't just drop a 10 page article and call it a day. summarize the argument or point me to to the relevant section of the article.
why are you asking me?

BEING

Even religious ethics are baseless. Just because a very powerful being says "x is right and y is wrong" doesn't make it true.

Read the abstract, retard.

He only tells his position in the abstract now how he got to that position. I'm reading through the article now and it appears that he's resting what he says on his own intuitions about happiness and suffering, which isn't making a strong impression on me.

What philosopher are you echoing?

why do people make fun of nihilism but take antinatalism seriously
why not just kill yourself if you think your life is 99% suffering

Yeah all he's saying in the article is that its plausible there are "prima facie duties" that give reason to be an antinatalist. He doesn't explain why he considers them plausible or why anyone else should consider them plausible.

>antinatalism developing and flourishing among White South Africans, who are collectively shamed for colonialism and racism.
Coincidence? I think not.

These are just projections of their anxiety.

>Some fag trying to justify himself never getting laid with ridiculous arguments about life being like a bad show at a movie theater and some fag trying to justify his 6 billion monthly patreon income with vague talk about chaos and cleaning up your room

I think the winner is everyone who chose not to participate.

God I can't stand this "humanity was a mistake" nonsense.
If life is not worthwhile because there's suffering then do us a favor and kill yourself so we don't have to listen to your dismal drivel anymore Bena-faggot

CRAWLING IN MY SKIN

>death cult figurine visible

Gee, who would have guessed.

baka senpai can you really say people shouldn't take antinatalism seriously when you clearly haven't yourself?

I don't know user, I was personally wondering why people like you post this same retarded "argument" every time this topic comes up.
Maybe if you take two seconds to get even the shallowest exposure to Benatar's position you would realize he makes a point of differentiating between not bringing new lives into being vs. terminating already existing lives.
And also maybe people in general don't actually "decide" to continue living or not in any sort of rational or conscious way. I'm pretty sure most people who do commit suicide aren't all like:
>Hmm, looks like I can safely conclude life is not worth living based on this impersonal logical argument written down here. I'll just position my shotgun like so and *BLAM*
You don't have the benefit of clearheaded rationality when it comes to tampering with deep-seated pre-rational survival instinct. That'd be like expecting because someone is a surgeon that they could calmly cut open their own torso and remove a tumor based on their rational knowledge that they'd be better off without it. You theoretically could cut yourself open like that, but you probably wouldn't, primarily because your instincts would keep you from even beginning to try.
People who do kill themselves are usually going to be severely fucked up mentally and emotionally to be able to override basic survival impulses like that.
Props to Slobodan Praljak desu because he offed himself while staying cold as ice, but again, he's the exception, not the rule. Same with that monk who set himself on fire and just calmly sat down to let himself get burned to death. How many people do you think could pull that off?

Most people “destroy” Peterson. The guy is a fucking moron

Correct.

Are you actually retarded enough to think that's Benatar?

David never explained how he gets from there being more suffering than pleasure in a typical life to the position that you shouldn't bring in another life.

The conclusion should be pretty obvious if you're not a stone-cold asshole.

I guess you can't explain it either. Seems like this whole antinatalist thing rest on just having the same intuitions you have without trying to justify those intuitions.

It requires you to accept that life is only worthwhile if it contains more positive than negative, which it gives to justification for

based Anekantavad

Edit: which it gives NO justification for

The thing about justification is that it always stops at unjustified basic beliefs or goes forever in a regress. Regress is problematic for obvious reasons and "You shouldn't cause unjustified suffering" (unjustified in the sense that humanity has no quest or purpose and all other things being equal there ought to be either nothing at all or more happiness than suffering, which isn't the case in the majority of lives) is such a canditate for ethical bedrock that I would have to think you're mentally handicapped if you deny it. What are you really after, a mathematical proof from axioms that are located in your ass?

Philosophers aren't afraid of death nor life.

found the britbong who is stuck in 1850 and who prays to numbers and money.

Nah, it's not just about bad > good.
Do you feel bad about all the potential children you *haven't* had in the past decade? Have you deprived "them" of anything by not bring "them" into existence?
Not creating life is *not bad*. That's a key part of his argument. You can't feel bad without the prerequisite of existing.
You can on the other hand relieve suffering in a way that's good through euthanasia even though the person or animal you do this for will no longer exist after. We recognize this in the common practice of putting to sleep pets with cancer. The dog you put to sleep doesn't need to continue being alive for the end of his suffering to be a good thing. So the asymmetry extends beyond just weighting the bad as greater than the good and into the stance that there isn't anything harmful to a potential life when it comes to refraining from creating it and there is something good about eliminating harm even when the subject of that harm doesn't exist. Fundamentally, the harm and the good of these situations are not actually mirror image balancing forces like people imagine them because you need to exist in order to even have the capacity for feeling deprived of a good thing.

From "You shouldn't cause unjustified suffering" it seems like you're making the mother responsible for all pleasure/pain in the babies life. How is the mother the cause of all that?

Also, why do you think that "causing" that suffering is only justified if the happiness in the life of the baby outweighs the good?

Wow Peterson is actually extremely annoying in this thing. Why does he try to debate philosophy, he's fucking terrible. He keeps moving the goal posts, jumping to conclusions, misrepresenting the opponents arguments, misunderstanding, using rhetoric and even playing to his emotions. This is just terrible

your euthanasia example as a way to justify the asymmetry is silly. in that example the suffering already exists and putting an end to that suffering is what people feel good about. in the case of not bringing into existence another life there is no suffering that you are putting an end to so they aren't the same sort of thing. I don't feel good or bad about not bringing into existence another life for that reason.

HAHAHAHAHA

This guy should really fucking stick to archtype analysis of works of fiction: he's actually good at that.

the internet has made it possible for people to be heard who shouldn't be heard beyond the confines of their small little worlds. it really needs a more tiered hierarchy.

youtube link

youtube.com/watch?v=vsyZcKUP_-k

If net benefit for humanity justifies action, then all of this board should kill themselves, myself included

You could make a much more compelling case for eugenics than for that anti-natalist crap.

>there is no suffering that you are putting an end to
You're preventing suffering.
By your argument here vaccines aren't a good thing because they prevent instead of treating an already present disease.

Just listening to it, 25 minutes it and I think Jordan is winning this.

> Jordan: "Why is ignorance bad?"
> David: "Well, uh, because knowledge is something that's valuable. It's the flip side of it."

I don't know how David become a professor with this kind of logic.

>You're preventing suffering.
Obviously. That was my point. That is different than putting an end to it.
>By your argument here vaccines aren't a good thing because they prevent instead of treating an already present disease.
No. This is another silly example because being born could lead to pleasure and pain whereas getting a disease is only bad.

when making a decision, having more information is better than having less information because your scope of choices is larger, and so is your personal freedom. knowledge can permit greater freedom, since it lifts the restraints of ignorance.

i do not see how knowledge is the "flip side" of ignorance, just like "heat" isn't the flip side cold. cold is simply the absence of heat.

I agree with you. I just thought that even just defining something by it's opposite is somewhat evasive and isn't truly answering the question. It just leads to the question: "then why is knowledge good?" It was a somewhat sophistic move on David's part.

Why is freedom good?

It could be argued that ignorant folks live a much better life than those who are not. If you are an ignorant individual, you can find happiness in everything, be it popular music, shit movies, tv shows, ridiculous hobbies and you have much more companionship as you are more likely to enounter someone with these crap tastes.

>That is different than putting an end to it.
Different in that they're two distinct concepts sure. Different in that one counts as good and the other doesn't though I don't see as a reasonable stance.
>being born could lead to pleasure and pain whereas getting a disease is only bad.
That's not actually relevant to the analogy's point which was just to show why it isn't reasonable to claim prevention somehow doesn't count just because it's "different" from elimination. More specifically both the prevention and the elimination in that analogy involve disease, so you can't claim that makes the prevention scenario seem unfairly good since it's an apples to apples comparison with an elimination scenario that also involves disease.
Also not putting a dog to sleep could "lead to pleasure and pain," dogs with cancer can still have moments of enjoyment in spite of their condition. So again you have an apples to apples situation with the original prevention scenario vs. elimination scenario.

empirical evidence seems to suggest that complex organisms dislike confinement. humans also seem to give off the impression that they do not enjoy slavery. it would seem that freedom is something that humans enjoy. there is no inherent reason or argument as to why its good or bad.

in that vein, being dead is also something the majority of animals and humans do not prefer, since is minimises freedom. apparently, life likes to have choices, and it uses those choices to propagate and adapt.

As an antinatalist I have to say it dismays me that the chief exponent and most eminent figure in antinatalism couldn't argue his way out of a paper sack.

ignorant folk do well until they are faced with hardship or a complicated situation. they will then depend on external help to manage the situation. like if your car breaks down in the desert. you're fucked if you can't repair it. as long as it doesn't break down, sure, ignorance can be bliss. or least not a burden.

It's just a stuffed tiger bro.

Did you read the book? Obviously not every point can be developed with their due care in an hour especially when a crypto-theologian brainlet is shouting on top of you.

Yeah, that was another flaw in his argument too.

> Suffering is bad, pleasure is good
> Ignorance is bad, knowledge is good
> Being ignorant can be more pleasurable than being being knowledgeable

This to me says that ignorance can be good and knowledge can be bad.I feel like he really needs to define "good" and "bad" but 40 minutes in, he hasn't. Peterson is kind of making him look stupid, while not really even makes great points. David just seems like a miserable dude who doesn't like his life so doesn't think other people should have kids. lol

>Different in that one counts as good and the other doesn't though I don't see as a reasonable stance.
I wasn't making that case. I was just saying that I feel good about one and don't feel good about the other. I'm not making the claim that you're making which is that we can jump from these intuitions we have to the claim that its actually good to those things. I was just saying I don't share your intuitions.
> the analogy's point which was just to show why it isn't reasonable to claim prevention somehow doesn't count just because it's "different" from elimination
That wasn't the claim I was making. See above.
>More specifically both the prevention and the elimination in that analogy involve disease, so you can't claim that makes the prevention scenario seem unfairly good since it's an apples to apples comparison with an elimination scenario that also involves disease.
I don't understand what you're saying here.
>Also not putting a dog to sleep could "lead to pleasure and pain," dogs with cancer can still have moments of enjoyment in spite of their condition. So again you have an apples to apples situation with the original prevention scenario vs. elimination scenario.
Don't understand this either.

>good to those things
good to do those things*

he shouldn't have went down the "good or bad" route. or better and worse. they both wouldn't even be arguing if either one thought ignorance was a good thing. peterson is using time constraint and complexity to bore down on his opponent, who is struggling to sift through the semantic trickery thrown at him.

It's almost as though antinatalism is inherently ridiculous to the point of philosophical and imaginative stultification; but then what do I know? I'm one of those "pro-sentience" types.

>ignorant folk do well until they are faced with hardship or a complicated situation.
It depends on how you define ignorant. A man can have a stable profession, raise kid well and be an igmorant of his condition as a man. I believe you can find examples of this everywhere.

they will then depend on external help to manage the situation. like if your car breaks down in the desert. you're fucked if you can't repair it.
Very few are capable of surviving under such an extreme condition. This is a bad example.

If Peterson is a Nietzschean I'm fucking Rasputin reborn. Namedropping Nietzsche while completely ignoring a lot of his main points is not being a nietzschean at all.

>David just seems like a miserable dude who doesn't like his life so doesn't think other people should have kids. lol
Exactly how I feel about all this "movement", even discussing it probably lowers one's IQ.

the problem is Julio Cabrera an antinatalist already BTFO this argument and basically everyone else does who says "bad for whom"? There is a fundamental and intractable double-standard built into the asymmetry argument and even now Benetar seems to recognize this, he's reverted to bolstering it with an appeal to emotion. There is a simple fix as far as I can tell and that is looking at good and bad in relation to the presence of needs, wants and impulses. Since a need or want is a condition which is yet to be fulfilled we can categorize all the good things as the mere amelioration of a perpetual series of wants, needs and impulses. Why bring someone into existence so they can pretty much fight to satisfy the conditions that were already satisfied by their nonexistence?

Antifrustrationism is just the asymmetry in a different set of clothes, the basic sentiment is the same.

The whole argument is based on existence being worse than non-existence. He needs to explain why he thinks that, which leads to a discussion of good and bad. One could refute him there even though I find it to be the less interesting aspect of the argument. However, since they did go down that route for awhile we saw that David's own sense of good and bad is contradictory, so it makes me wonder why he is claiming existence is so bad, if bad is such a fuzzy thing to him. Nonetheless, I understand your point. In my opinion, both of these guys are highly sophistic and none really has a clear argument. They're asserting preferences ultimately.

> David: "Non-existence is preferable to existence, and here are some shaky reasons why *insert some shaky empirical data*. "
> Peterson: "Existence can be justifiable though, and here are some shaky reasons why *insert some shit about archetypes*."

I still haven't heard a very serious argument out of either of them, but I think Jordan is right to call David out on his definitions of good/bad and how one measures that without bias.

>Why bring someone into existence so they can pretty much fight to satisfy the conditions that were already satisfied by their nonexistence?
How can you satisfy something by not existing?

It's (vacuously) true that the non-existent have no unsatisfied preferences, ie. all their preferences are satisfied.

>I feel good about one and don't feel good about the other
You haven't made an argument for why prevention should be considered less good than elimination.
>That wasn't the claim I was making.
That's exactly the claim you were making. You objected to prevention as somehow not the same as elimination. I provided an argument why there isn't a meaningful difference between the two as far as this topic goes. Saying you describe this alleged difference in terms of "you feel good" / "you don't feel good" doesn't change that.
>I don't understand what you're saying here.
You claimed the vaccine (prevention) vs. treatment (elimination) analogy was "silly" because disease is only bad while life can be both bad and good. I explained why that's irrelevant because the vaccine analogy was only an analogy for showing why it's not reasonable to treat prevention as different from elimination. That disease is only bad doesn't matter at all for that analogy and that can be seen by the fact both the prevention and the elimination in that example are about disease. It's a wash. Any added badness to the prevention example because it's about disease is equally added as badness to the elimination example because it's also about disease. There is no reason to object to this analogy for that specific reason.
>Don't understand this either.
You brought up how prevention of suffering by not creating new life would involve preventing both good and bad things. I pointed out that doesn't matter because euthanasia in fact would involve eliminating both good and bad things. It's similar to the last point. You're making objections to alleged differences between prevention and elimination which just aren't there.

His concepts of good/bad are probably some subjective bullshit like a bad life is that which enables suffering, bad person is someone who inflicts suffering unto others. Completely ridiculous, in saner times, would be ridiculed in a comic play by Aristophanes and sent to a house for mad people.

I agree 100%. I think even getting to the point where one is even considering anti-natalism as a viable position just shows lack of courage in a man. He should probably kill himself, he has nothing to offer the world except to bitch and tell everyone "hey, I'm pathetic and life sucks so either don't fuck, wear condoms/take birth control, and get abortions because I hate myself and hate you too."

Last point I'll make, anti-natalism seems based in the idea that existence couldn't be improved to a point where it's better than worse for most people. I would contend and say theoretically life could be such that it would be better than worse, given the right conditions. But even then, would life be worth living without those aspects which we consider bad? Is pleasure island what David wants? Does he wish he was wealthier, taller, handsomer, etc. and everything was easy?

I don't know the answers. But I think the premise is wrong, and that even is life was good and always good it might be kind of boring.

Suffering is what makes a man. A man is what I'd like to be.

I'm 44 minutes into this thing and I'm quite bored with it now. Going to just close the tab.

>I think even getting to the point where one is even considering anti-natalism as a viable position just shows lack of courage in a man.
But it equally shows a lack of ear for the spiritual world. Most men have natural tendencies toward one or the other; the rarest both. Antinatalism marks a massive failing on both fronts. A man both exoterically and esoterically waylaid by total haplessness.

I just feel bad for these guys, and I'm not exactly acing life right now either. But this is giving up on another level. Where's the fight in them?

>You haven't made an argument for why prevention should be considered less good than elimination.
And I wasn't trying to nor do I need to. I wasn't saying that one of those things is actually good and not the other. I was just saying what my intuitions are about those two examples and explained an obvious difference between them. Pointing out the difference wasn't meant to support any claim that those things are actually good or bad, they were just meant to explain why I feel different about one and not the other. If I euthanasized my dog that was suffering I would feel good about him not suffering any more. I do not feel good about not having given birth to another person.
>Saying you describe this alleged difference in terms of "you feel good" / "you don't feel good" doesn't change that.
You have it wrong again. I wasn't trying to describe the difference between the two examples with those terms. I just just saying how I feel about those two different examples.
>the vaccine analogy was only an analogy for showing why it's not reasonable to treat prevention as different from elimination. That disease is only bad doesn't matter at all for that analogy and that can be seen by the fact both the prevention and the elimination in that example are about disease. It's a wash. Any added badness to the prevention example because it's about disease is equally added as badness to the elimination example because it's also about disease
Again you seem to be thinking that I pointed out the differences in order to justify that how I feel about certain behaviors makes those things actually good. I wasn't. In the case of vaccines I would feel good about getting one/giving one and I would feel good about treating a disease. Me saying that doesn't support what you're saying because I'm just saying how I feel about those things. You're trying to say that because I feel good about both of those things that there is no difference between prevention and elimination. I disagree because a difference existing between those things is not dependent on how I feel about them. Me feeling good about a case of prevention and a case of elimination does not mean that all cases of those two things would be good.

same way you can satisfy a mathematical equation. Words mean different things in different contexts, who knew.

Anti natalism boils down to wanting a species to go extinct. It's not actually a philosophical position or anything. Just a desire to rid earth of humans because that is the effect of it. Now we can argue about the possible merits of that on a more sane and clear basis. I'll do that: it's meaningless. There is nothing special it unique about humans that warrants their destruction. The universe at large seems to do just fine with us.

He has been doing this since the very beginning, what's happening here is that you now disagree with him. You should suspect any academic that breaks down in tears in the middle of a lecture, he's either a con man or not stable enough to deliver classes. And I'm saying this as someone who had a teacher start tearing up while reading a passage of a text who constantly makes me do the same.

antinatalists were always the boring guys at the party who watched the funny guys and secretly hated them for it

this is a fact

Yeah you are. I think antinatalism is one of the easiest things to argue. Both Benetar and Peterson are just bad rhetoricians.

Don't leave us hanging then. Make the strongest case you can for it if its so easy.

What do you think he means there?

I agree entirely.
Yeah, it seems like he's asserting an aesthetic preference, which I don't mind but it's just the preference of a pussified, low-test man. My aesthetic opinion is that the world would be better without people like him.

Obviously because not having freedom is bad.

>People like being free to do things, so people should be free to do the things they like.
This is begging the question.

I like being free to murder and rape, so I should be free to do so. Now back off you fucking nazi.

>all antinatalist arguments rest on the only logically rigorous school of ethics

I sure hope so.

...

do your best shot at making a case of it because no one else itt has even tried to do the impossible.