How are you going to ask somebody for permission when they don't exist.
Not to mention the majority of people you ask would rather be alive than not existing.
Thankfully I have great parents. No, I wouldn't want that. I'd still like to be alive, though.
You bring kids into the world because that's what we do. It's how we're here, it's how you're here complaining about being born.
Because you have no attachments?
You guys have been arguing in circles for 10 pages. Suffering has value. Of course nobody likes suffering, but we gain understanding from it.
Then "pragmatic" is simply the wrong word to use--I honestly don't believe that abstention from childbirth is really too much to ask, especially considering that the only countries that are reproducing en masse also happen to be the most impoverished and dilapidated shitholes on the planet. So I'm really not asking for much.
I reject the notion that the universe is infinite on its face,
and I'm really not sure what that has to do with anything. A lot of people try to say that if there's aliens, that's supposed to debunk anti-natalism. Somehow. The existence of sentient beings on other planets somehow justifies the further creation of them.
No... it doesn't. It just means that, now, we have this whole universe to clean up.
Am I just supposed to give up? Don't fight for causes that I believe in? Fuck that shit.
Not necessarily, but preventing a cancer is always going to be a good thing. If there's two cancer patients, and only one patient is gonna live, well, that's the best you could do. That's all I can really ask for. If there's other life out in the universe, we can't do anything about it. Not for centuries, if ever.
Consensus among scientists is that it's probably infinite. I can provide sourcing if you'd like.
That's literally an unattainable goal for humanity at anything near our level of advancement. If you want to clear the entire universe up, you have to retain some agents to, well, do the cleaning.
No, you're supposed to realize that even though your philosophy may be right, now is not the right time to enact it on a widespread level.
No you're not. We've found bacteria.
And the fact that you're advocating killing all life in the universe is disgusting.
If there's bacteria in our galaxy, there's sentient life in the universe.
Pretty sure you just did.
Well, not really. Obviously, two broken legs is worse than one broken leg, and so forth. The idea, as you've been forced to repeat ad nauseam to the ignorant, is that all disutility in accumulation tends to outweigh decisively all that could be considered utility in the world.
Also, you used the plural there--how many other anti-natalists other than myself have you spoken to? Or read the works of?
I don't know where you got the idea that all disutility is equal in magnitude from, but it couldn't have been from me.
This assumes that, after we've finally augmented our lives to such an extent that we'll never suffer to any excruciating or gratuitous degree, that life is still something that ought to be experienced by everyone. Not to mention, it's extremely vague--you'd have to outline how to prevent literally every type of significant disutility in order to show that it all can be prevented, because right now, the very notion seems kind of... if not bogus, then totally unfeasible. I just have to ask--what, precisely, will make it worth it in the end? It's not enough to prevent bad shit, you realize. It's good--but now your task lies with justifying the imposition.
Why should we continue to keep pulling the unborn from the perfect, sublime, comfy realm that is nonexistence?
I disagree, for pretty much the reasons stated above. After you get significant disutility out of the picture (however it is we manage that), that's not going to remove all the conflict and the bullshit in the world.
I like the idea of quantifying levels of comfort/discomfort, but you need more than two parameters.
You gotta be talking about some crazily advanced technology--practically science fiction.
Someone has to exist to be killed, Chally. The only cause of death in that situation would be father time. I get what you're saying- that he's advocating mass extinction and this could be considered a negative for a species- but that's not the same thing as genocide.
Quote from: Verbatim on February 04, 2015, 12:00:36 PMNot having kids = Genocide.K.Telling a species to stop reproducing is pretty much genocide, yes. Who are you to decide whether they should exist or not?
Not having kids = Genocide.K.
It wouldn't be voluntary, it'd be forced. That's the only way for it to be possible.
So, would voluntary extinction count as a form of genocide?
Quote from: Meta Cognition on February 04, 2015, 03:23:35 PMSo, would voluntary extinction count as a form of genocide?No. I don't even know how you could contrive that.