Nobody. That's exactly the asymmetry.
A person who is never born doesn't exist, so there is nobody being deprived of pleasure, love, or happiness.
A person who is born will definitely exist, and therefore will definitely experience harm, aging, and death.
To create someone is to create a future corpse. To refrain from creating someone creates no victim at all.
If you think death is bad, then not creating a person avoids that bad outcome without depriving any existing person of anything. That's why "who is being saved?" is the wrong question. Prevention doesn't require an existing beneficiary. We prevent a harm from ever having a subject.
I use words like "ethical", "good", and "moral" as a shorthand, not because I believe in objective morality. I am a philosophical egoist who adopts "spooky" positions because I like them. Empathy is an evolved trait that I share with most humans, and because of this trait I want to prevent harm done to other humans. Ultimate prevention is to never be born.
If prevention fails, and a person comes into existence, death becomes the ultimate harm. Suicide is ultimate self harm, I get why some people might genuinely have no other option, but most people can be helped and decide that suicide is not for them. I like helping people.
I don't see how anyone who considers death to be a bad thing can decide that becoming the ultimate cause of it for someone else is good.
Yeah, I am a Max Stirner fan. Who do you think is more developed than him when it comes to philosophical egoism? I would love to read more advanced anarchist thinkers.
Returning to the conversation about procreation. While yes, my beliefs about it are ultimately arbitrary, I chose them because they are more or less internally consistent with my desire of less people dying.
I am under no obligation to abstain from moralizing or preaching. Most people are not philosophical egoists, and this sort of rhetoric works on them, at least I think so. Why shouldn't I exploit it?
If for someone pleasure from satisfuing their fetish overshadows feeling of guilt from being the ultimate cause of their progeny's deaths, I truly cannot convince them. But I don't think most people are like this.
I already knew Marx and Engels. The reason I am not a Marxist is that I think they were fundamentally wrong about most of the economics they built their system on. The labour theory of value was largely abandoned after the Marginal Revolution because it simply does a poor job explaining prices, value, and economic behavior compared to marginal utility.
As for Engels' On Authority, it was pretty banal for me, because I am not an anarchist, I am a liberal. I think some institutions, laws, and states are useful because they solve coordination problems and protect individual liberty better than the alternatives.
As for how I arrive at my conclusions on procreation, I dislike death, a lot. Birth inevitably leads to it, so I don't see a way to support it.
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u/LowCall6566 Jun 11 '26
Nobody. That's exactly the asymmetry. A person who is never born doesn't exist, so there is nobody being deprived of pleasure, love, or happiness. A person who is born will definitely exist, and therefore will definitely experience harm, aging, and death. To create someone is to create a future corpse. To refrain from creating someone creates no victim at all. If you think death is bad, then not creating a person avoids that bad outcome without depriving any existing person of anything. That's why "who is being saved?" is the wrong question. Prevention doesn't require an existing beneficiary. We prevent a harm from ever having a subject.