Give me a good argument against antinatalism

Start by giving a good argument for antinatalism.

inb4 >muh benatar assymetry

It's not even logically coherent.

>muh genes
>muh I don't wanna die alone :'(
>muh humanity will extinct
>muh life is all smiles and flowers
>muh you're just a mentally ill edgelord

>See this
>Type shit in Google for curiosity's sake
>Forced to debate another antinatalist

>He claims I'm a Christian Presuppositionalist
>Doesn't debate my points
>Blocks me
>Mfw I'm actually Agnostic

This is why I stalk the halls of the post-natal care unit with a croquet mallet.

I'm the hero the city needs right now, but not the one it deserves.

>Dude you're just going through a hard time. Trust me, I know, I'm a 30 year old redditor with several thousand in comment karma, a girlfriend that I have sex with on a weekly basis and a seemingly impossible overbalance of estrogen. Just smonk some weed and quit being an edgy 16 year old virgin lmoa.

please try to give a decent argument for your position

>tl/dr
it's 14 verses

are all antinatalists this dumb? there must be some good argument for it, no?
it's not "I don't want to have kids," it's "people should not have kids"; please give us some reasons to believe this

Give me a good argument FOR it first.

>I have no gf, therefore life is suffering, therefore other people should stop reproducing.

Just testing to see how spoilers work.

Not an argument.

It is extremely improbable that anyone will go through life from start to finish without experiencing physical or mental pain to some extent. Pain outweighs pleasure, and it's better to feel nothing than to suffer.
You can't really deprive "the gift of life" from the unborn, because they don't even exist to have things prevented from them. On the contrary, if you do give them life you give them consciousness in a world where they are exposed to innumerable ways of suffering.
Since existence has such a gigantic weight on the person being born, and it is inherently impossible for the parent to ask for permission prior to his birth, I think it is clearly better not to bring him to life at all.
Also, the parents are incapable of even guaranteeing the relative welfare and security of their offspring, no matter if they live in an African hellhole or if they're first worlders, becauee most things are totally out of their control.

I do understand people's will for family and taking care of others, so why not adopt one of the many unfortunate children who are already here?

Suffering? Whatever. Such is life.

>pain
>pleasure

lot of spooks in this thread.

*human population grew by 3 billion in last 40 years*

*half the wildlife population of the world was killed off in the last 40 years*

hey im a suburban dipshit who produces nothing of value except a mountain of plastic trash! meet my kids braydon, jaydon, aidon, braxton and jaxton! you are so selfish for not wanting a home full of little angels like these!

>a species achieves hegemony over its environment
>it begins shaping its environment to fit its purposes
>assigning some sort of moral value to this behavior

It's unæsthetic.

>It is extremely improbable that anyone will go through life from start to finish without experiencing physical or mental pain to some extent. Pain outweighs pleasure, and it's better to feel nothing than to suffer.

Man, for a so-called nihilist, you sure do seem to think a lot of things are meaningful to the people experiencing them.

>Le lack of inherent value meme
>Forgetting there is also no inherent value in suffering

You tell me why I should care about your pessimism. What if I like the idea of countless humans constantly living and dying just to feed worms?

This, the real problem is antinats aren't edgy enough.

Choosing voluntary oblivion because you can't handle life is probably the least æsthetic.

I've always wondered what a good argument against antinatalists might be. I'm antinatalist in spirit because I like to think I'm a pragmatist but I'm going to have children regardless.

I'll take a probably bad crack at it:

Isn't one of the main arguments against pronatalists that their actions will invariably cause suffering in some form? Yet doesn't this ignore all the joy in life, too? Especially for those who're privileged enough to be born into Western nations

There's also the whole thing about the individual who chooses not to have children becoming an arbiter of who does and doesn't get to experience consciousness.

He who experiences consciousness is privileged insofar as an amalgam of reactions happening by virtue of the constituents of matter coming together in precise ways is axiomatically miraculous especially in juxtaposition with the infinite timeline of the universe. The individuals that get to experience this phenomenon, for better or worse, are part of an ephemeral miracle if you accept that the climate and timelessness of the universe is true.

But before you give me a "technically in a universe of infinite time and infinite proportion an infinite number of organisms get to experience consciousness at the level we do".

To which I posit no, there are different kinds of infinity. It's the difference between an infinite paradigm set in a confine, e.g. 1, 2, 3 -- the paradigm being only positive integers ad infinitum -- and an unconfined infinite paradigm, e.g. all integers ad infinitum. The universe of course is the controlled infinite, with the paradigm being the laws of nature.

I guess my argument is one from awe, but I could be pontificating and full of shit here.

It doesn't help anyone at all.

only good argument i can think of is that there is a chance it could produce someone awesome like me

>Pain outweighs pleasure, and it's better to feel nothing than to suffer.

this is a minority opinion; I wouldn't have a child if I didn't think that he or she would later, on balance, be glad to have been born

>the parents are incapable of even guaranteeing the relative welfare and security of their offspring

no guarantee of welfare is required -- one only has to hit the goalpost you set out: one has to have reason to believe his or her child will be glad to have been born.

since the vast majority of people, almost regardless of their circumstances, have a stance that opposes yours, I have reason to believe that any child I have will too, and so the argument you've given only works to show that giving birth to antinatalists is wrong, which, based on the contents of this thread, seemed true already

Morality is comprised almost entirely of moral culture, morality doesn't make any sense apart from culture. Both natalism and anti-natalism try to refer to individual lives in the abstract, and to derive from them some inherent value, but individual lives derive value from their cultural contexts because morality is cultural.

Both are profound misunderstandings

you don't say "comprised of"

also, you're wrong and your conclusion doesn't follow from your premises

that morality is culturally grounded wouldn't entail that morality can't deal with moral choices in the abstract

if this is all that grounds morality, "x is wrong" is just a statement like "x is wrong relative to the morality of my culture," which is totally evaluable and coherent -- culture supplies a circumstance of evaluation, so the story goes, which can then be used to make ethical judgements that transcend that circumstance; it's in these putatively universal rules that cultures put forth that morality exists

>you don't say "comprised of"
y

consequentialism is not an argument

its a joke

"comprises" already means "is composed of"; 'Toronto comprises twelve large neighborhoods and a public park.'

There is no inherent subjective value in inherent objective value, you spooked twat.

>you don't say "comprised of"

Yes I do

>that morality is culturally grounded wouldn't entail that morality can't deal with moral choices in the abstract

It wouldn't mean that all moral abstractions are useless, but it would mean that when the individual becomes an abstraction which doesn't exist in any particular context, there can be no way to determine what is right or wrong - because what is right or wrong is a fact of context.

>if this is all that grounds morality, "x is wrong" is just a statement like "x is wrong relative to the morality of my culture," which is totally evaluable and coherent

I don't suggest this. "x is wrong" in a particular moral culture is not equivalent to "x is wrong relative to the morality of my culture", unless the moral culture in question recognises other valuations in being moral cultures as similarly legitimate. Most moral cultures do not recognise other moral cultures, in being moral cultures, as similarly legitimate, so the problem ever develops.

>it's in these putatively universal rules that cultures put forth that morality exists

But few moral cultures, other than those which have developed in academia, actually claim universality. For the most part, they make little reference to that which is outside their immediate world. So how do you conclude that these moral rules are 'universal'?

Your notion of morality is so divorced from systems of value as they actually exist in the real world that it explains nothing other than the writing of academics.

what is he trying to say? It hardly sounds like a resounding endorsement of life to me.

t. edgy Stirner babby

>if the junkies like the heroin that must mean its good for them

pfffft

everything you've said in both posts is sloppy and poorly thought out, you aren't minding the distinction between context of moral judgement and context of event that is to be morally judged; that judgement is relative to a context is perfectly compatible with the fact that, relative to a given context of judgement, a context-sensitive or -insensitive universal judgement of events can be made

there are two arguments to be made here: antinatalists are wrong because morality is objective and context-sensitive, and so any moral dictum that ignores context will be wrong-- this is good, Bernard Williams-ish

antinatalists are wrong because morality is culturally determined -- this is bad and a non-sequitur; antinatalists could well be culture-relatively right

universal moral dictums like "giving birth is wrong" are not just of academic interest; this is what moral codes are made out of. part of being moral is being able to say, for instance, "rape is wrong"; and this sort of categoricity is essential to moral codes like the ten commandments and the law; God can't say "morality is so context-sensitive that no rules would be of any use" -- this is good, because he needn't.

He never said he was a nihilist. That's just another baseless aspersion cast against its proponents like sour-grapes (Aesop was a retard). Antinatalists are probably the least philosophically nihilistic group within the secular domain.

>wah be more edgy so I can discredit you

this isn't a good analogy; the question isn't whether someone wants to die, it's whether someone thinks, on balance, it's good to have been born

are you trying to argue that, independently of what anyone thinks or values, pain always outweighs pleasure?

how could you even think this was the sort of thing that could be grounded in something other than how people feel or what they value?

So you imagine we live in an anthropocentric universe? You believe that the conditions for human survival and prosperity are more readily available than conditions inimical to those things? The amount of "pleasure" is inconsiderable given the legion hazards which are not working against human preoccupations but only remain coldly indifferent. Everything we do as a species is predicated on the idea of insulating ourselves from the idea of a world that isn't made explicitly for us.

for something to be considered "pleasure" it must at minimum be conducive to human vitality. almost 100% of the universe is not conducive to human vitality. If I offered to teleport you to a random position in the universe you would insist that this not happen because you understand you need a very specific set of conditions just to continue existing. Disutility is everything that falls outside of that narrow umbra and therefore disutility comprises a vast majority of everything.

the universe is neither cold nor warm to us; we assign value to things and, for most of us, it's enough

what are we lacking that the addition of could solve the supposed problem you're appealing to?

would a coddling god make life worth living? I suspect that if it isn't now, it wouldn't be with amenities thrown in

thankfully, we don't live in the whole universe; when we go about trying to answer the question "is life more pleasure or pain?" we look at life -- we don't look at the sun and say "well that's very hot and very big, and since it must be painful to be there, and since the earth is so much smaller, I guess life must be mostly pain"

If this is how we appraise life, life gets worse as the universe expands, no? How could you think like this?

That I can't summer on Alpha Centauri is a bummer, but it doesn't make me wish I was never born. The Mediterranean is just fine.

But by the same token you cannot limit the sampling size to be convenient to your conclusions. You cannot say: "here in my sensory deprivation chamber I am fully relaxed and therefore things on the whole are fully relaxing". I am saying that yes, there is this blue ball that (just barely) allows us to exist and continue to thwart its legion hazards with new technologies. But in a much greater sense we have everything working against us. We can subvert the mechanism of one natural occurence or another to favor our ends but we can never make the mistake of thinking that these natural phenomena are here to better serve our purpose; its untennable. Also just consider the fugacity of your own life, you don't even register on the temporal record. So there is a clear blithe audacity to human existence, particularly when its taken at face value. If one was to do a genuine valoration of the parameters of existence then there would be nothing ignoble about giving up the fight, whether it be through suicide or the voluntary extinction of the whole species. It would just be a matter of coming to terms with the inevitably insurmountable inconveniences of an entropic universe.

>the universe is neither cold nor warm to us

What are you, some kind of retard?

>I suspect

nobody cares what you suspect

>We can subvert the mechanism of one natural occurence or another to favor our ends but we can never make the mistake of thinking that these natural phenomena are here to better serve our purpose; its untennable.

Teleology is human-relative. there is no non-intensional, out-there purpose that anything has -- accordingly, the universe is "inherently" neither for nor against us; it's up to us to assign meaning, value, and function to it -- it doesn't come prepackaged. And this is fine!

>Also just consider the fugacity of your own life, you don't even register on the temporal record.
Oh yeah, so life would be more worthwhile if the time were shorter?

You're trying to get at feelings everyone feels sometimes, but none of the facts you've given lead most people to the conclusion that life isn't on the whole worth living
>the universe is big and largely inhospitable and we are small
>time is big and we are small
this is fine! none of this would lead someone who isn't already disposed to think that life isn't worth living to think that life isn't worth living

Its not fine if your argument is that you can reasonably ascertain that the quality of life for your offspring (or you for that matter) will be equitable.

No, not anthropocentric. I said that the genesis and onset of the universe is intrinsically paradigmatic, i.e. the laws of nature are the paradigm in which the universe exists infinitely. Then I supposed that the implications of this meant that consciousness, by virtue of the necessary conditions for it, down to the most infinitesimal prerequisites and luck, is miraculous and anomalous.

This isn't anthropocentric but merely observational and wholly detached from any sort of theocratic purview.

AntiNatalism is a personal choice that fails when applied to the collective.
You cannot convince someone who likes sex and wants children not to have children. The reason people have children is to leave their legacy and genes through them. Thus, they selfishly doom a person to a lifetime of suffering because they want their will to live on past death.

Therefore, the only way for people to become antinatalist is for them to be completely selfish but not to the point where they don't care of the suffering of their offsprings.

1) Benatar's assymetry doesn't work because it's dishonest and make a priori assumptions about the Universe that are never demonstrated or proven.

2) The logical conclusion of antinatalism, its end goal, is actually the complete opposite of what it wishes to do if you accept of all of its tenets. I'd say that makes the position dodgy at best and quite simply untrue at worst.

3) The consent argument makes no sense within the framework of antinatalism. Why does it matter if people have no consent whether they are born or not if they do not get to experience the displeasure of not giving their consent until they are born?

4) How can you claim to be able to speak for the suffering of others?

Go home David. If non-extant pleasure is neutral, then not-extant pain is as well. You aren't good if you don't inflict pain, you're neutral. Or do you consider yourself a saint for not punching everyone you meet?

when you give birth to a child, it doesn't pop into some random place in spacetime

that space is big and time is big has nothing to do with the quality or perceived quality of my hypothetical child's life

all of your arguments have been dismissed summarily by everyone who has replied to you, and you've continued by expressing your feelings and values rather than attempting to appeal to the values of your interlocutors;

surprise, surprise, "my diary desu: philosophy edition" doesn't work very well -- if it didn't work for Camus, why would you expect it to work for you?

We fear death (nothingness) because life is good, and we don't want to lose it.

There is no point in arguing with antinatalists because if they, from their life experiences, have come to the conclusion that life is not worth continuing they should most certainly be left at that conclusion so they will not reproduce. The last thing we need is another generation of wet blanket crybabies.

The only danger is that they spread their degenerate ideas to otherwise healthy minds. The appropriate response to antinatalists, most of whom in this day and age will skip 'suffering' or whatever and go straight to muh environment and muh resources, is to tell them to kill themselves because that's the logical conclusion of antinatalism.

I mean once you've hit the conclusion that life sucks and you don't want to bring a kid into the world, why do you decide to keep yourself in this supposedly terrible world? Are you just a fucking set piece waiting for someone to wheel you off the stage or are you a man? Killing yourself is incredibly easy and if existence is really so terrible you'd have done it already.

If it's so good to not have been born just take the shortcut back to nonexistence and end yourself. Schopenhauer's arguments against suicide were patently bullshit and even he must have known it, he probably put them in there as disclaimers.

I made two posts retard. There are more antinatalists on Veeky Forums than you woul like to admit. Also you're a retard

no, not the fact that its big but the fact that whats contained within that bigness is thoroughly perilous. The point is that you have no appreciation for any of this. If you did then you could admit, at least there is no selfless aspect to bearing a child because it involves committing that sentience (and sapience) to a confusing, capricious and perilous reality.

Why I don't kill myself? Well, as an already living being I fear non-existence, and I will take my life only when I feel it too unbearable, or in the case of a war endangering me, economical collapse or something like this. I think there are a lot of things to enjoy in this world, but the bad outweighs the good and I'm not glad to have been born and I think it was better not to have been at all, and I'm not going to impregnate someone so she can shit a baby to experience all this.

There also more anti antinatalists than you'd like to admit.

Nobody claims there's no risk involved in having a child. But thinking that accepting all the tenets of AN somehow logically links to the extinction of mankind shows ANs are not able to understand their own arguments.

Why do you fear non-existence if the bad outweighs the good?

inb4 muh instinct

Are you really so weak you can't overcome that? It's incredibly easy to kill yourself if you think about it.

please just try to read the post you're responding to again

"you don't get that the universe is capricious" doesn't work; you have to give us reasons to think that the porential lives of our potential children are fraught, or that the likelihood of their being so fraught that they aren't worth having is high enough that taking the risk is unethical

you need to stop, this is an embarrassing thread, you've said the same three or four things in every post, given in support for a tendentious universal dictum facts about the universe that would only lead someone to endorse the dictum who was already believed the point you're trying to prove

you're begging, and begging, and begging the question, and everyone who has responded to you has said "no, no thank you"

*potential
*who already believed

>implying there are suburbanites having kids in the year of our lord two thousand ten and six
Your post would be better if the kids were named Jose Ahmed and Tyrone

I consider 99% of humanity anti-antinatalists bud

wrong

HAHAHA

Like I can consider 99% of humanity are Dodger fans

Yuck, go back to your homeboard already. Also read this.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

this user wasn't using a rhetorical technique or a logical fallacy, he was just calling you out for being a hypocrite

calling "tu quoque" here is like a redditor yelling "AD HOMINEM" in response to someone calling them dumb -- it's not a logical fallacy, it's just an insult

I'll agree that I am an absolute moron for not killing myself, sure. If I was intelligent then I would kill myself. There's no "smart but lazy"

You are not necessarily stupid for not killing yourself. I also consider being a passive antinatalist acceptable.

My question is why would an antinatalist, someone who understands life as inherently painful, futile, fleeting and on the whole undesirable give enough of a fuck to even bother arguing with other people over whether it's better to reproduce or not. Do you really think you're making a difference, much less a positive one by convincing people who want to do something to not want to do it? Who are you making a difference for? You have no children and want no children. You have no vested interest in making even a pointless and futile attempt at influencing the future through argumentation.

In fact if you were really deep into the minimization of suffering thing you'd go into full Malthus mode and will famine and plague upon the human race because if capitalism manages to destroy industrial civilization, after the initial dieoff period far further humans would be subjected to the indignity of life. That's maybe the best use of an active antinatalist's life, start worshiping Land's machine death cult.

>implying I have to do or must refrain from doing anything

Tu Quoque wikipedia article would like to have a word with you

Meanwhile if I convince even just one person to not reproduce then I've nullified a whole dynasty of suffering. And why would I will famine and plague when sterility would do?

If there's no one to be conscious of big bad consciousness then there'd be no one to stop big bad consciousness from arising in other species.

wrong, it is precisely nihilistic in the positive sense of the word. rather than arguing that everything in like is meaningless, which would be the negative, destructive sense of nihilism, antinatalists argue that there is nothing in life that is more meaningful than pain, and hence that the meaning of life is to destroy it. this is the positive sense of nihilism in that it is an affirmation that life is worthless compared to the pain experienced with in it: even a single instance of pain is intolerable for them, and so the absolute value of pain is always approaching infinity as the instances get smaller and smaller. as the absolute value ascribed to pain approaches infinity, so too does the absolute value of life become infinitesimal until it is finally reduced to nothing and the argument to destroy it seems sound.

I say absolute value because pain is a "negative" value, something to be avoided—what counts is the magnitude. the magnitude is taken here for life, too, because were the situation reversed, and pain was the value approaching zero, there would correspond an infinite increase in the positive value of unpainful life—this is the meaning of nietzsche's aphorism of the eternal return, where for one moment you would celebrate the demon and declare him a god and that you had never heard anything more divine: the infinite worth of that single instance makes all the other instances of pain and suffering meaningless. of course, in antinatalism, it is precisely the reverse: they mistakenly ascribe pain a negative value, an infinitely negative value, then take its absolute magnitude and use this to justify a reduction in the meaning of life. on the contrary we must take the infinite value of the single moment of bliss as our justification for a "nihilism of pain," of reducing the value we allow to pain, the power it has over us, to nothing at all.

so "not-life"= nothing? Only postmodern subjectivists are truly nihilistic.

Because life is amazing and raising a child you created and watching him succeed is the most fulfilling thing you can do?

The idea of eternal return (while a bit pants-on-head) just makes me want to live on the briefest and simplest terms possible desu.

nope

what if he fails instead, like I did?

>assumptions aka axioms
>proven
Wow we have a literal retard here.

Antinatalism is a Jewish trick to destroy the white race.

This alone is reason to breed.

Ok loser
By not failing

Most people are doing fine in life. Antinatalists don't understand the subjectivity of the human experience and think their pain is everyone's.

There is pain in the average normie life too but it's outweighed by the good.

The antinatalists in this thread are a good reminder of the fact that most of Veeky Forums is really bad at philosophy, and that you don't get good by osmosis alone.

The reasoning is that you are gambling with your children's life.

get out of here with your satanic trips

>The reasoning is that you are gambling with your children's life.
So?

Last intelligent comment itt

What if your sweet little boy will get gang-raped one day and beheaded with an axe?
Life is amazing everyone should enjoy it :^)

Right now it's mostly instinctive dread of unconsciousness. I know it's easy and when the relative convenience of my current life will be over I'll just buy a helium container and make an exit bag.

>non-extant pain
But the person created is conscious and feels pain, he doesn't remain unborn in non-existence, so he's pain isn't neutral.

his*

What if he wins the lottery and bangs bitches every day instead.

Axioms are meant to be self evidence beyond all doubt. Like existence existing. All live existing to suffer is not an axiom.

I want children to carry on my legacy and venerate me as their God-emperor. Since these children don't exist yet, they don't have any preferences to counteract my own. My preferences win.