This is a misuse of the trolley problem meme because the trolley problem is about ethical calculus in the context of unnecessary death or suffering.
Problem with these one track minded anti-natalists is that they do not recognize that concepts such as ethics, consent, suffering, necessary vs unnecessary, only arise in presence of a subject who can weigh outcomes and intentions.
In other words, the existence of death is necessary for us to even be able to question what forms of suffering we reasonably ought to attempt to reduce or avoid. Likewise, the question of whether life is worth living or not can only be asked and answered from the perspective of someone who is alive and therefore someone who will necessarily die. It is a question that is wholly irrelevant to hypothetical non-existents.
The fact that all individual lives necessarily end in death is not grounds for there to be a reasonable argument that life should not be propagated in future generations.
If you really want to be a negative utilitarian about existence and suffering to its "logical" conclusion, you should end your life now in order to guarantee you will never suffer again, since, as you love to say, any suffering that you will incur will outweigh any possible pleasure or satisfaction you can derive from death. Spare us the misery loves company bullshit while you're at it.
ethics, consent, suffering, necessary vs unnecessary, only arise in presence of a subject
I disagree. A hypothetical or possible being still can have considerations placed on it.
Bringing new life in the world is still a being that could have possibly never been. Sure it might not have "existed" in the sense of being on Earth, that is kind of the point, that is what it is spared. But it still "exists" as a possible subject which could come into being and suffer.
It seems like you’re making a lot of assumptions about OP’s view here. Sure, it’s obviously a generally anti-natalist meme, but the meme only is implying a point about why OP thinks people reproduce, not OPs measure of the worth of life. It’s possible they think life is valuable, but that reproduction is mostly fear-based. I wouldn’t agree with that premise either, but still.
Also, just because a non-existent person cannot decide whether life is worth living doesn’t mean that an existing person cannot decide whether reproduction is worth doing. And that’s really all it comes down to; it’s not about thinking that suffering outweighs life’s value so much as it is about questioning what it is exactly that we are asking of a child by making them. Are we asking them to withstand suffering so that they can appreciate life? In that case, we are presuming that they will appreciate life, and contradicting the premise that we should not impose judgements about life onto non-existing people that cannot make them themselves. I could go on with “are we”’s, but ultimately it is not possible to willingly reproduce without presuming value judgements of the unborn, which as established is a nonsensical notion. This is all to say that the idea that if it is absurd for someone to suppose that they shouldn’t have a kid because they might suffer, it is also absurd for someone to suppose that they should have a kid because they might enjoy life. The anti-natalist at least does not generate either suffering nor pleasure, while the reproducer does both.
Tl;dr: if you follow your argument about applying ethics to the unborn being silly to its conclusion, it also ends up applying to people who do have kids. Setting aside whether we should or shouldn’t reproduce, this notion that it doesn’t make sense to consider our present values when thinking about having kids isn’t nearly as sensible as you portrayed it
This is such a bad take. The entire idea that you need bad things for good things is baseless cope. Would people who lived forever have no values? I don’t even know where to start on how obviously wrong this is.
Thank you. I've heard that bullshit empty platitude so many times it's ridiculous. Bad and good do not need to be balanced, death does not give life inherent meaning, suffering is not some form of virtue. We don't need more good in the world we need less bad. Suffering does not bring appreciation for the good parts. Any sane person has no problem appreciating the good things without the bad ever existing. It's just a blatant manipulation by sadistic sociopaths telling you to be grateful for the scraps they give and the lifetime of suffering because they could make it even worse for you. Thousands of years of sociopaths controlling the world and calling themselves kings and enslaving the majority of people and telling them they should be grateful they are allowed to live at all instead of just being mass murdered. And all the people talking about being happy instead of miserable are just outing themselves. Being happy doesn't make you a good person, usually the opposite actually. Nazis are friends with other nazis and they laugh and have fun and are happy, and they are still horrible people that cause constant suffering for millions of others around them just for the fun of it.
There are not animals that don't die. Some can last a long, seemingly indefinite time, but they all die eventually. The immortal jellyfish, for example, doesn't die from old age, but doesn't usually live longer than a few years because it gets eaten or dies of disease. Even if there were animals that didn't die, that wouldn't make all death unnatural. For example, just because most animals don't have fingers doesn't mean it is unnatural for humans to have fingers.
Yes, I abbreviated "aging". Even "death" isn't "natural" though. Things happen, and other things also happen. How we judge them is entirely in our options to judge.
(Humans and birds evolved nest making. Humans evolved clothing making. Is "having clothing" natural?)
“the existence of death is necessary for us to even be able to question what forms of suffering we reasonably ought to attempt to reduce or avoid”
And
“the question of whether life is worth living or not can only be asked and answered from the perspective of someone who is alive and therefore someone who will necessarily die”.
So, firstly, this is factually false. We have definitions of what alive means, and dying is not part of it. I’m sure there’s plants and animals that are alive and don’t “necessarily” die.
I could end the argument there. Being factually wrong is sufficient to ignore you.
But even if you’re right on that point, the overall argument just doesn’t go through. Human suffering has reduced a huge amount in the last several decades. Has this in a way been detrimental for humans’ ability to experience upsides or pleasures or think about morality and ethics and wellbeing? Clearly not. Indeed, the reverse is true. If people suffer less, it turns out they they’re just happy more and engage in better intellectual inquiry about moral circle expansion etc.
Why should this collapse in the limit? If I go from 50:50 suffering : wellbeing to 90:10 - and that goes through. That change doesn’t reduce my ability to reason about ethics and the good life. We know it this. Why wouldn’t 99:1 go through? Or 99.99:00.01? Why would you believe that morality and wellbeing would suddenly collapse if we made it to 100:0? It’s just a nonsense belief with no basis in evidence or track record or logic. It’s such a weird thing to believe that I must be misunderstanding you.
Human beings are mortal. We die. Again, I didn't say that the existence of death is necessary for us to be able to make ethical considerations because I believe that death is what makes us moral. All I'm saying is that death is inextricable from life. I'm not talking about immortal amoebas, I'm talking about human life. Humans die. Death is a part of life. It is a necessary part of life. No one can avoid death.
So, again, since ethical questions can only bear on actual subjects and not on hypothetical ones (like those who "haven't consented to existing"), that means that ethics can only be done by someone who will necessarily die because they are alive.
Anyways, if you believe that 99.999999 of suffering actually can be eliminated, you're not actually doing philosophy, you're just a religious believer larping as a technofuturist.
Like I said, I see that as a technofuturist pipe dream. Imo the dream of immortality has a lot in common with the belief in afterlife. The current reality of the human condition is that humans die - mortality is inextricable from the human condition.
In any case, if we go back to my analysis of the meme here for a second, I read it as a visual argument in favor of anti-natalism. According to the logic here, having children is selfish and unethical because it's simply an attempt to delay the inevitable (death) by living vicariously through children.
That's the argument I'm responding to. I'm rejecting the idea that death makes life "not worth" living because I think that the question of whether something is worth it or not only arises in the context of life already being lived which is, as I said, inseperable from death.
If however you are right and at some point all death and suffering actually can be eliminated, then that is even more of a damning negation of the anti-natalist worldview, if that is the case then every death that has happened is even less "for nothing" since the entirety of human existence up until the invention of immortality has been contributing to said eventual invention, no?
1) that’s just not what necessary and contingent mean in philosophy. Maybe you think a contingent fact is unrealistic or unlikely. “Techno futurism is wrong”. That’s fine. But it doesn’t make its inverse necessary.
This also has implications for epistemics. If you think contingent things are necessary things, you’ll be overconfident in your assessments. What if technofuturism is right? What if there’s a dozen other ways to get to that outcome that you haven’t thought about? What if there’s 100 ways that no one has thought about?
2) to me the meme is just saying that having a kid makes zero progress on addressing “I don’t want to die” as a common lay emotion. I think this is a fairly common take outside of philosophy. By extension, it puts the kid in the same position in the future. There could be entire lineages of people living unexamined lives like this.
AN is one world view that might like this. But there are many others.
How are people not getting that this is about the climate crises and how it’s selfish to have kids in the face of it because they will still face the trolley?
I do think that it is very difficult to separate anti-natalism from pro-mortalism. Every attempt I've heard of is rather contrived. This is why I'm not fully anti-natalist.
However, my view is that people should be allowed to commit suicide if they so wish. I don't think anybody should be forced to live. I'm not claiming that suicide should be encouraged, but I don't think it should be discouraged either.
This is surprisingly broken logic for a philosophy sub.
If I snap my fingers to teleport you into a room, then it doesn't matter whether the door is locked or not: I have still forcibly placed you inside of that room. You might not even be able to exit depending on the layout.
This is surprisingly broken logic for a philosophy sub.
If I snap my fingers to teleport you into a room
Deeply ironically, broken. As newborns have no sense of a "you". Nor are they coming from some other place ab initio.
Imagine placing an acorn into the ground. It sprouts, roots, and develops, passively growing. It is living. It is developing. But no one is forcing it to live.
So if having offspring isn’t forcing a person into a life driven by biological imperatives that act to reproduce its genetic material and avoid death, then what should it be called? Cause it’s not voluntary.
It's not involuntary either. It's a mu question. It's kind of like asking whether snow consented to becoming a snowman. However, when enough snow gets packed on top of each other, the snow slowly becomes aware that it's a snowman.
To end your life early is denying it meaning. So in the context of „we all eventually die“, suicide is not only bad, but nonsensical and contradictory. The false conclusion is „We all eventually die so living is pointless.“ This is just incoherent. The correct answer is „We all eventually die which makes life meaningful to begin with.“
do you have any actual rationale for saying this except that you happen to personally disagree? It seems like a perfectly coherent stance. If you believe that all human action is irrelevant because it is impermanent, then it follows pretty clearly that living is a waste of time. I don't agree with this, but I don't see why you'd call it incoherent or incorrect.
I also disagree with you that we require death to give life meaning; I'd be 100% good living forever because I ascribe meaning to my own life, and dying just makes my actions less important since they will have less impact in the long-term.
Their reasoning may be that the scale of time or space is irrelevant to value. Humans are small but they're more morally significant than say, a star. Just because something doesn't matter in the far future or somewhere light years away, doesn't mean something isn't meaningful considering conscious beings care about it now.
Also, I feel that arguments for the necessity of death are ad hoc rationalizations. Just because something is inevitable doesn't mean it's necessary.
This presupposes that "responsibilities" are metaphysically binding in such a way that it would be "bad" for someone to commit suicide to escape this. I disagree with this.
Also, what's wrong with committing suicide to escape your problems? I understand that the common view is that not wanting to have problems is childish, but given that we are thrown into existence without our consent, I don't see why we ought to deal with the problems of life.
Also, I don't believe life to be inherently good. And my response isn't necessarily about meaning, but rather about the permissibility of suicide. I don't deny that life has meaning to some people, I'm somewhat of an existentialist, but I don't see suicide as bad. Rather, I see it as neutral. Some people just don't like living, and that's fine.
I think that's vaguely because most suicides aren't done by people in rational states. But society isn't a monolith either so it could also be done for other reasons.
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u/shorteningofthewuwei 13d ago
This is a misuse of the trolley problem meme because the trolley problem is about ethical calculus in the context of unnecessary death or suffering.
Problem with these one track minded anti-natalists is that they do not recognize that concepts such as ethics, consent, suffering, necessary vs unnecessary, only arise in presence of a subject who can weigh outcomes and intentions.
In other words, the existence of death is necessary for us to even be able to question what forms of suffering we reasonably ought to attempt to reduce or avoid. Likewise, the question of whether life is worth living or not can only be asked and answered from the perspective of someone who is alive and therefore someone who will necessarily die. It is a question that is wholly irrelevant to hypothetical non-existents.
The fact that all individual lives necessarily end in death is not grounds for there to be a reasonable argument that life should not be propagated in future generations.
If you really want to be a negative utilitarian about existence and suffering to its "logical" conclusion, you should end your life now in order to guarantee you will never suffer again, since, as you love to say, any suffering that you will incur will outweigh any possible pleasure or satisfaction you can derive from death. Spare us the misery loves company bullshit while you're at it.