/lit/ - Literature

Forgot to mention, I am a the one tied on the tracks.

>>22295000
>he says that the absence of pain is better than the presence of pleasure
The answer is not to not procreate, but to simply an hero. This entire worldview is a projection of the miserable onto the masses, whose pleasure outweighs their pain. If the common man actually preferred nothingness to life then antinatalism wouldn’t seem so ridiculous to literally everyone who isn’t a woe-as-me pseud.
Antinatalism is a meme because its proponents have no balls. At least Mainländer actually practiced what he preached.

>>22295038
>The answer is not to not procreate, but to simply an hero
benatar addresses this objection. there's a difference between "a life worth living" and "a life worth starting."
antinatalists aren't saying that existent persons should die. they are saying that nonexistent persons shouldn't be forced to live.
why? because of the axiomatic asymmetry between pain and pleasure, which this thought experiment is intended to test.
so would you pull the lever or not?

>>22295038
>At least Mainländer actually practiced what he preached.

I was almost agreeing with the post until you threw out this giga low iq "just kys" rhetoric. Let me tell you one thing straight up, without a biologically ingrained sense of self preservation people would be killing themselves by the millions DAILY

>>22295061
I don't disagree, but you're missing the deeper philosophical point.
antinatalism has nothing to do with the current conditions of human life on earth.
even if things were great and everyone were mostly happy, we would still have a moral obligation not to force someone into existence

>>22295000
David Benatar is an antinatalist by necessity, not by choice

who is on the tracks? a normal male? ain’t pulling. a tranny? smash that mf lever.

unironically.

>>22295137
bruh I thought smashing the lever stops it

>>22295118
>sound though I believe my argument to be, I cannot but hope that I am wrong
this is why I take him seriously. he feels the gravity of the matter. he is no armchair nihilist.

>>22295148
you have enlightened me

fuck I hate my life

>>22295118
Because he is ugly?

>>22295000
Fuck. You're back.
Your mental illness has consumed you. This is your 100th thread.

>>22295248
would you pull the lever?

>>22295248
pepe troll

>>22295000
Which of the parties are non-white?

>>22295248
Answer the question. A naive utility maximizer (skinnyfat Yudkowsky) will pull the lever. A real person won't.

>>22295332
yes this is what I was hoping to get at it. The instinctual human response is to avoid inflicting pain, even if it means withholding pleasure. this suggests to me that the antinatalist argument has merit, although I'm not 100% sold

>>22295061
>without a biologically ingrained sense of self preservation people would be killing themselves by the millions DAILY
There is no biological anti-suicide mechanism. Suicide is an essentially human invention, the result of our enhanced consciousness leading us to make value judgements on pain vs pleasure. If it were inherited we would see animals choosing immediate deaths, like jumping off cliffs or running towards predators, but we can't even be sure that animals understand what death means; at best they can starve themselves out of depression, that's it.
One's feelings about suicide are more akin to a political stance, an abstract concept that's learned and subsequently judged, rather than something ingrained from birth. They're influenced by external factors, such as disease or a relative's suicide, which tip the scales of the pain vs pleasure judgement and feed the motivation to end it all. The drive towards suicide bypasses one's ingrained self-preservation by being a purely abstract judgement rather than something physical; your instincts can't stop you from pulling a shotgun trigger because they don't intrinsically know what that means, nor drinking poison or hanging from a rope. It's why survivors of suicide attempts mention feeling regret only after they've taken the leap; the brain cannot prevent suicide in the same way it can prevent you from biting off your own finger.

Millions more people would not kill themselves daily because suicide is a problem of abstract motivation, not biological influences. Ironically it's antinatalists who should have the most motivation to an hero, since they value void over life so clearly, yet they don't. They try to defend this argument as them solely not wanting to bring more children into the world, because those kids would inevitably experience more pain that it is "worth," yet that judgement is entirely subjective. The movement is viewed as ridiculous by the general population because its proponents are effectively telling people "You would have been better off had you not been born," which is no less annoying than when your retard coworker insists that you should vote for Biden / Trump / whoever because they're objectively the best candidate; it's a subjective judgement built upon abstract influences that can in no way be ascribed to a global population.
If life is not worth living from birth then life is not worth living at all, as things only get worse perceptually as the bliss of your childhood disappears. There is no such thing as killing yourself "too late", as Cioran says, if you believe there is reason at all to kill yourself. Antinatalists aren't respected because they're posturers who have the answer right in front of them but make believe the question is different.

I don't really experience life in terms of quantities of pleasure vs quantities of pain. It seems more to involve unique qualitative experiences and meanings. As they say: if given the option to live the rest of one's life in a blissful opioid-induced fugue, most people wouldn't take it. So the whole premise of this question feels like an abstract dead-end.

>>22296251
>If life is not worth living from birth then life is not worth living at all,
You are confusing actual lives with possible lives.
Some actual lives may very well be worth living. possible lives are never worth starting

>>22296268
Yeah point taken, but I'm just looking for a way to isolate variables. I think there is a pain-pleasure calculus going on behind every "unique experience"
Also its important to recognize that thie thought experiment (and anitnatalism more broadly) is about the ethics of giving pain and/or pleasure, not the subjective qualities of receiving it

>>22296251
>Ironically it's antinatalists who should have the most motivation to an hero, since they value void over life so clearly, yet they don't.
Antinatalism isn't nihilism

It's selfish to birth people because, because... they might get boo boos if they're born!

>>22295000
I'm not engaging another trolley argument Benatar is just eating and regurgitating shitty utilitarianism, and he's probably doing it backwards from the conclusion that gets him grants or awards or whatever oversocialized goodboy points he lives on.

Benetar should play more final fantasy

>>22295000
>he says that the absence of pain is better than the presence of pleasure. thus, we are morally obligated not to procreate.
Immediately refuted by the fact that this is his opinion.
KWAB (kek what a retard)

>>22295116
What makes you think you are forcing someone into existence? This is a completely materialistic viewpoint. If you consider the soul and spirit to be real, then the spirit existed before the body and will continue to exist after the body dies. In this instance it's not unreasonable to think that the spirit that inhabits the body chose to be there once the body is concieved.
I have no idea if any of this is true, but my point is that antinatalism has materialism as its foundation, which basically means that antinatalism is retarded

>>22295272
Id slam your bussy down on the lever faggot
Let's see how much pleasure or pain you get from that
Homo

>>22295118
Perhaps we should come up with a term for this: involuntary antinatalist—or, “invant” for short, and perhaps then “infant” for phonetic reasons.

>>22295000
If >>22295008 is true, run the fucking trolly. Antinatalists are complete retards, as the dumb OP also proved, and eliminating them creates future benefit.

>>22297287
Arguing with antinatalists is pointless unless you just want to make fun of them, anon. Their entire argument is based on insisting you accept their axioms and allow them to maintain a monopoly on how they are to be interpreted. You can lay out reasons as to why their axioms should be rejected (both by way of making qualitative arguments and/or flaws in their logic), point out that their worldview can be used to justify bad-to-horrendous moral outcomes (i.e. undermining the idea antinatalism is about eliminating suffering), and punch holes in Benatar's interpretation itself--all of this will flow in one ear and out the other with them. They're ideologically possessed cognitively rigid retards who really just want to project their own sense of misery out into the world.

>>22295248
>According to replicated research, those who profess anti-natalist beliefs are more likely to suffer from personality disorders and mental illness. 1/
Yeah, so let's remind him why he should fuck off.

>>22297987
While this doesn't necessarily mean that anti-natalist arguments can be dismissed solely due to this fact (inb4 "REEEEE AD HOM!"); it does add context to why autists make these threads and are completely unable to understand why they are wrong. It also has direct implications regarding Benatar's quality of life argument (i.e. anti-natalists are stuck in a rigid ideological system as a cope for to sustain their defective worldview).

2/

>>22297987
>>22297990
Anti-natalists are at a complete poverty when it comes to weighing quality of life. Their defective nature simply precludes them from accepting any rationalization outside of their own self-indoctrination. They don't necessarily mean to be disingenuous because such is simply written into their nature. This is why the same autist has been repeatedly making these threads for months while ignoring any criticism of his ideological nonsense.

3/3

>>22295050
Death would also entail the absence of both pain and pleasure for a person, just as not being born would. Why does the asymmetry apply in one case but not in the other?

>>22295000
>obligated to procreate
lel no

>>22298020
>Death would also entail the absence of both pain and pleasure for a person, just as not being born would. Why does the asymmetry apply in one case but not in the other?
because, again, existent persons must die. Nonexistent persons do not have to be born
>>22297990
>it does add context to why autists make these threads and are completely unable to understand why they are wrong.
i should clarify that I am not making any absolute assertions. Im not an antinatalist myself; i am simply interested in testing the validity of the theory. My mistake for assuming that you retards would be willing to assist
>>22297287
>This is a completely materialistic viewpoint
Correct, he is a materialist through and through. Which does bother me a bit. i think, tho, that one has to be a materialist (at least functionally speaking) in order to do any kind of rigorous philosophy. Otherwise you veer off into either mysticism or solipsism. neither of which is "wrong", just not as conducive to communicable or usable theories in the traditional sense
but maybe (probably) im off base
>>22297173
>Benatar is just eating and regurgitating shitty utilitarianism
He has nothing nice to say about utilitarians.

>>22295000
>Better Never to Have Been Born
>he says that the absence of pain is better than the presence of pleasure. thus, we are morally obligated not to procreate.
That's stupid.

>>22298640
Interesting analysis. care to explain how you reached that conclusion?

>>22295008
is this sexual for you?

>>22298652
Why didn't he just kill himself? Take his stupid beliefs to their logical end point. Clearly he didn't really believe in them. Clearly life isn't all bad that it would be better not to live. Just another vain philosopher saying stupid vain things.

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them,] because they are spiritually discerned.

>>22298710
You obviously didnt read the thread.

>>22295000
You don't pull the lever but it has nothing to do with the problem. All retrospective moral dilemmas fall flat because they try to deny the properties of time. In this case mauling one person is a bad descision because it's a betrayal of this person. You cannot decide to harm a person in past or in future (because of unpredictability). Their suffering is their own responsibity to bear while your trolley problem puts the responsibility on the actor and benefactors.

>>22298731
What this experiment draws out is our intuitive understanding that inflicting pain is worse than withholding pleasure.
By choosing not to bring a child into the world we may be withholding possible pleasures, but we are also avoiding certain pains, which--ethically speaking--is the more important factor
your points about temporal uncertainty and self determination are well taken, but they apply to all thought experiments, even those designed to prove the opposite

>>22298798
It doesn't prove anything then because I would pull the lever if everyone was on the track and shared pain and suffering between all for the delivered goods. Your thought experiment doesn't demonstrate what you think it does.

>>22298815
>I would pull the lever if everyone was on the track and shared pain and suffering between all for the delivered goods
thats an interesting variation.
But the reason theres only one person on the tracks in my version is to show how even one person's pain outweighs many people's pleasure.
that "one person" in the context of antinatalism, is the possible life that you could (but should not) create, no matter how much joy doing so might bring to you and others

>>22298491
>Im not an antinatalist myself
You're the retard that always makes these threads and you lie about that in 2/3 of them. You fool no one.

>>22298960
That's the point. The pain of one person doesn't outweight the pleasure of many. The reason not to pull the lever is guilt and injustice.

>>22295050
Disagree. I think all anti-natalists should start with themselves. That way they can never, even if accidentally cause someone else harm or displeasure.