Re: Ukraine reprezent
Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2020 1:55 am
That is not the argument.
The point is that some lives will be better than non-existence if happiness outweighs the bad in those lives, while others will be worse if it does not.
The point is that it's an empirical argument as to whether somebody should be born or not.
Everything has risk, the question is one of empirical analysis of those risks against potential benefit.
The gambling analogy is covered here:
wiki/index.php/Antinatalism#Gambling_Thief_Analogy
That doesn't make it bad or wrong, as long as more will have good lives than bad. The point of consequentialism is to weigh harms against benefits. If you want to be an absolutist and say that if anybody ever has a bad life ever then it's always wrong to reproduce, then you wouldn't be a consequentialist -- that's deontology territory.
You can try to fudge the numbers and redefine terms and the baseline you expect, but how can you claim that's credible when the people living those lives are telling you that their lives are more good than bad?
It's not you, but the people IN the lives who have the more appropriate vantage point and reference for personal judgement to assess if that life is more worth living or not. You can make unfalsifiable claims of biases, but that doesn't change the fact of the null hypothesis here. We assume somebody is informed and telling the truth about their own qualia when it's in their interest to do so, we do not assume some random anti-natalist with an ideology to promote has more insight on the matter.
Did you miss the point where I explained how intuition isn't very credible most of the time?
The point is only that IF you are to trust intuition on some topic (and some topics may be argued to be more suited to intuition than others), then it is the majority's intuition that has more credibility.
It's not a fallacy if you are treating the human brain as an instrument for a priori measurement of facts of the universe -- in that case, we're trusting the overwhelming majority of instruments, not the one that is an outlier and is more probably defective.
Do you get it?
If you're a subjectivist, how can you tell other people it's objectively wrong for them to have children? That is what anti-natalism is. It's not just about your personal choice, it's about telling others what they are wrong to do.
If you just personally don't want to have children and are not attempting to make philosophical arguments against others having children, then that's entirely different.
Following mental health evaluation, sure. Sometimes those states are transitory, often even due to drug interactions. You have to establish that people really feel that way and there's no easy fix available to make their lives better so they don't feel like that's their only way out.
Very very few, compared to the overwhelming majority who prefer to be born. Thus, procreation is not wrong and antinatalism is not a valid moral philosophy -- it sounds like yours is more of a personal choice to be childless than antinatalism.