Blake has this absolutely right.
The OP may be inclined to respond that even in the case of accidents, one can be held financially responsible. But of course that’s true of childbirth too; we do hold parents financially responsible for the decision to bring a child into the world.
We just don’t hold them responsible for the unforeseeable, any more than we do anyone else.
But one can not be held responsible for accidents when due care is taken. Even though everyone knows that there is a chance that a child might run in front of any car, no matter how careful the driver, a driver is never held responsible for injuring a child that runs in front of her car.
Even when the injuries are are a lifetime of excruciating pain sup[/sup], the driver isn’t held responsible. That’s because they are not the result of the driver’s actions.
I predict a short stay for our new friend. I smell ban-hammer. I wonder which mod will wield it.
And if no one reproduces for fear that their children might feel pain, the last geezers around will inevitably feel a great deal of pain as they suffer the effects of old age with no one to take care of them. So the result of everyone following his advice is immoral - and more so than if people ignore his advice.
Well, this is a perfect example of where the word “sophomoric” comes from.
Ah, yes, the old “there’s no such thing as probability – all outcomes are equally likely” argument. (Hint: They’re not. People being stuck in a box and electrically tortured for a lifetime (or tossed into a shark tank that’s somehow below a chute) has a probability of basically zero.)
But why stop with your parents? Folks are more likely than not to have kids, which means for most of us, having kids is eventually subjecting perhaps millions of people to the die roll that is life. Most folks consider that a good thing, overpopulation issues aside. But keep having enough generations, and eventually you’re going to hit that one-in-a-million with the horrible life. Does that mean you shouldn’t have had any of them? Feel free to say yes, but realize that most folks won’t agree with you.
Your parents must be very proud of the way you turned out. I bet they spend lots of time bragging about you to all the friends and relatives.
Or on the other hand . . .
“Man hands on misery to man;
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.”
What Blake’s posted says a lot about how I think about this, but the I think the core of your problem in this discussion is right in the sentence I quote above. There is no way to look at these “things” objectively. They are value judgements. What I feel is missing in Blake’s statements and questions, even though he might agree with me, is that they to are value judgements. The “rights” mentioned are products of our choices as a society, and with different fundamental principles (to the degree society abides by any common principles) we’d have different rights.
You may feel your view on pain and suffering and choice is an objective judgement, but it’s not, and if you still want to elevate it to a fundamental principle then, as Blake has explained, you’re throwing society, government and law on the bonfire as well.
And that answers your altered questions as well:
With the principles we have we do have the right to risk other peoples happiness and comfort for our own benefit and people who assume we don’t are societal dead ends, so their view only lives on as a parasitic and self-defeating philosophy in a functioning and thriving society.
Sometimes you get to a post on these message boards that just makes life worth living and brightens not only your whole day and week, but possibly month and year.
This is seriously one of the best posts I’ve ever seen. Did you come up with this?
I think I’m starting to hate your parents a little too.
Because that’s what reading the rest of your post feels like?
I think you need to lighten the fuck up.
I haven’t read the whole thread, but here’s my take: The OP, and several other posters, are laboring under the presumption that “pain” and “pleasure” (or “happiness” and “sadness,” etc.) are separable quantities. In my experience (clarified by thinkers like Marcel Proust and Gautama Buddha), they are not. All these attempts at cost-benefit equations are just so much barking up the wrong tree. It’s not just that you can’t have pleasure without paying for it with some pain. It’s that they are ONE THING. I’m not trying to be cosmic or deep here…this is very much a real-world fact (for me, anyway). The scale of observation doesn’t really matter, either, although the oneness is more readily apparent for big, complex “things” like “being a parent for fifty years.”
I just realized that my take doesn’t entirely resolve lankyBlonde’s dilemma, though. She would still have to take the step of accepting that this ONENESS of pain and pleasure can only be avoided by avoiding life itself. So, I guess I’m sort of validating her conclusion after all: if you can’t handle this truth, you do have no choice but to to get out of the game.
But, as Blake and others have pointed out, you’re making an arbitrary distinction when you define “get out of the game” as “avoid providing 50% of the the genes to a new human being.” The reality is, you are “in the game” every moment of every day, child or no child. So, best to just kill yourself, then, if you can’t handle the oneness of pleasure and pain. (Disclaimer: I’m not actually advising suicide…just emphasizing the unavoidableness of this oneness.)
Last thing: If you, lankyBlonde, are really feeling bad about this fact – perhaps clinically depressed – then I recommend you find ways to not only accept the oneness of pleasure and pain, but to CELEBRATE it. Start by refraining from using the phrase “avoid pain.” Next time you have a headache, say, don’t reach for a Tylenol. Practice intensely observing the sensation if the headache…describe its shape, size, color. (This was some pain management technique my father tried to teach me when I was ten years old – he died before telling me where he’d learned it or read about it. Maybe Werner Erhard? I think I’ll do a bit of google research right now…)
LankyBlonde,
I think you ask a fascinating question and there are things we can debate about it. The question is an odd one that doesn’t get asked often, but it’s out there.
Opting out of having children is also a choice with consequences that might not be neutral. Most of us are glad we got the opportunity to have a life, and choosing not to have children makes “no life” nearly a certainty for one or more hypothetical future humans. There isn’t any ideal choice open.
So we make a judgement based on the advantages and disadvantages of different outcomes (if we consider the question at all, which of course many of us don’t, at least not explicitly). The suffering disadvantage weighs very big in your descriptions, and you aren’t really talking much about joy and contentment and satisfaction, mostly about pleasure, in your upside description. I don’t know why, and wonder what that says about your own life experiences. FWIW when I think about the advantages and disadvantages I see life as an opportunity that can typically be opted out of (being locked in the room with your antagonist is really pretty rare), and note that few people opt out, and many reflect on how glad they are to be alive. In my life experiences there has certainly been a great deal of pain but also a great deal of joy, and I feel the precious thrill of joy more often than the pain these days. So, my reaction to your overall question is that it is valid, but my reaction to your description is that your weighting of pain is much too strong relative to your weighting of the positive things that make people glad they bore their pain.
I think the “get over it” responses are unsurprising, though your question does open up some worthy exploring. Your OP is, from the average perspective, very off balanced toward pain relative to where most of us make the judgement – and I note well your statement that you are not dark about your own life and prospects, it’s a question, not the dominant theme in how you live your life. You are already getting over it, in the sense that it isn’t dictating ugly decisions. There’s really a world of subtlety in this thread, what it says about each of us.
I think I found it: this 1980 bookby Davis, Eshelman, and McKay.
The OP is trying to make ennui when it’s just on-her.
And my own life is a testament to the simple FACT that absolute liberating ecstasy can last for your entire life, and can happen to literally anybody (etc.).
60 years to liberate his mind? Bring it on! I can work wonders with people in a single year; give me 60 and by the end he’ll be the 2nd reincarnation of the Buddha himself. I might be nothing more than a disembodied head in a box by then, yes, but it would have been worth it. After awhile he’ll get bored of torturing me when all I do in response is tell him, “Hey that tickles!” and then we can begin a dialogue. He’s just as much trapped there as I am (according to your stated scenario).
You see, your mistake is to privelege your limited, dualistic, egoic existence, and be unable to see other, viable, alternatives; ironically, it was only by transcending all of that that I found my bliss. Happy, but not attached to it.
We know the answer to this already. He/She is probably 16 years old.
Who among us didn’t date that 16 year old girl/boy that reminded you constantly of the horrible pain they live in every day while living a good life, with good friends, and no physical/mental illnesses?
Life would be pretty boring if there were no moments of pain and distress to highlight the joy and happiness. Why bother to live at all if you never know pain of one sort or another? Pain and happiness and the like are all relative. Given human nature, I’m sure that if you tried to guarantee someone a pain free life full of fun and happiness and good things always, that person would still be dissatisfied with something. And, since they had nothing to compare it to, the most trivial thing (in the real world) would become this huge excruciating problem. A paper cut would seem like an amputation. The loss of a penny could feel as disastrous as the stock market crash.
You can’t have ups without downs, and the downs make the ups better.
I get where you’re coming from. If I lived in poverty in, say, Bangladesh, I’d think long and hard before I brought a child into that existence.
But, and I say this with all due respect, who the fuck are you or I to make that decision for those prospective parents?
The good in life usually outweighs the bad, unless one has a mental illness that takes away the enjoyment of being alive.
As I write this there’s a parent in Bangladesh looking at the face of their sleeping infant and knowing a joy beyond description that makes all of the shit they have to go through worthwhile. There’s a child in some other third world hellhole who is watching the ripples sent out by a stone falling in a pond, and marvelling at the wonder of nature.
Who are you, exactly, to deny them that pleasure? Some well-fed kid at a good college who can’t quite get over their contempt for their own parents?
I’m just guessing here, but my $0.02 says you’re a college “libertarian” of the Ayn Rand variety who sees fit to mete out judgement on the worth of other entities lives.