We had this thread recently. I won’t go in circles on this because my odds of changing your point of view is somewhere between 0% and 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%.
Being alive for most people is a net positive. The vast majority of people who are alive prefer to be alive. The vast majority of people who are alive do not wish they had never existed. This is true even for people who are critically ill and in pain.
Most of us believe the being has to exist first. Most of us do not believe it is wrong to impose harm, death, and suffering on beings that don’t already exist.
The vast majority of heroin addicts are also prefer to keep using heroin than to not use heroin.
So why would you deny your hypothetical children the pleasure of shooting up heroin?
Nor can they be harmed against their will since they have no will. Talking about harming the nonexistent is gibberish. When you say,
That’s even worse gibberish, since the nonexistent are the textbook opposite of “beings”, and there is no place in which they exist, since they don’t exist.
As near as I can tell, your argument circles back inevitably to these self-defeating assumptions–if “nonexistent beings” is necessarily oxymoronic, then any discussion of harming them is gibberish.
We can only talk of harm done to existent beings. And the best way to judge whether something done to existent beings is harmful is to ask them.
Which brings us back to the foolish heroin addict analogy. We know that a person addicted to heroin can have a better existence, and so we help them reach that even if they might resist at some point. But you’re trying to argue that existing beings are better off not existing, and again, that’s oxymoronic gibberish: nonexistence precludes the use of variants of the verb “to be” and its use to link to any adjectives.
You say that, but I prefer Kahlil Gibran on this topic:
This is a silly semantic game.
Not remotely. Your entire thesis revolves around the idea that a move from nonexistence to existence harms the entity who exists, but that’s a nonsensical idea.
It may be that you don’t understand the difference between zero and null. You seem to want to weight pleasure/pain on a positive/negative scale, and you believe that existence necessarily moves the scale into the negative zone. But that doesn’t work, since the scale doesn’t start at zero; the scale is nonexistent prior to existence, so there’s no move initiated by the moment of existence.
As long as you confuse zero and null, your argument is going to sound totally convincing to you and totally ridiculous to anyone who understands this difference.
irony!
Again, silly semantic games. By this logic, any moral discussion on something that may happen in the future is automatically invalid, since the future and future beings "don’t exist. "
I used the heroin addict analogy to show that just because someone is attatched to a thing does not make that thing good.
People who currently exist become people who will exist. Changing the quality of their existence from good (currently) to bad (future), or from good (future) to bad (farther future), or even from possibly good (one possible future) to possibly bad (another possible future) involves a sensible discussion of existence.
Yours is gibberish, because a being that doesn’t exist necessarily cannot have its existence worsened by existing.
Yes, and I refuted it to show why it’s a shitty analogy. I think we’re both clear on what the other person is doing.
Oh are we already at the building silly non-equivalences? That was quick.
If you stub your toe, it would best if you never had a foot at all because the joy of being able to walk is not worth the risk of stubbing your toe.
Future people do not exist.
Yes*, but by definition they will, and we can therefore apply some of the analysis I already discussed and you quoted:
Those future people who WILL not exist are by definition not future people.
Again, you’re confused about what “null” means. Once you fix this misapprehension and apply it to your argument, you’ll see it crumble; until then, you’ll misunderstand every objection made to your argument.
Are you telling me you would not be opposed to two people trying to conceive a child in the midst of a genocidal war and apocalyptic famine/plague?
If you would be opposed, why?
I’m happy to address this question–it’s an entirely different argument from the foolish one about how nonexistence is better than existence. What I won’t do is to hop back and forth as though they’re the same.
So: do you concede that your previous argument, the one I was addressing earlier, is foolish? If you do, and if you’ll stop making it, I’ll move on. Otherwise, let’s stick to one subject at a time, please.
I like existing, even though I’ve experienced pain and suffering. That my existence will probably eventually end doesn’t mean I’d rather not exist. And most of the people I’ve talked to about this feel similarly. Thus I’m fine with creating more people to exist when the resources exist to make sure they’re able to have a good chance at an enjoyable existence.
is this guy machinas sock? because the posting style is the same…
Your future child may have the answer to end the suffering of all humanity. Or just some.
Wrong! If we are biologically programmed for anything, it is to breed.
If your parents didn’t have any children, odds are you won’t either.
Well, I didn’t impose life on 99.99999% of my sperm, and my wife didn’t on some smaller but still large percentage of her eggs.
And they never write. Humph.
The two we did impose life are pretty damn happy about it. The older happy enough to create a new life also. Who is young, but still pretty happy.
We impose some suffering on others all the time - surgery, shots, excessive physical activity. It is for the greater good.
And I’m sorry for you. Your life must be so miserable that you want to withhold pleasure from others.