LogFAQs > #956394010

Truth_Decay posted...

Ah, but this is a complex issue, and my entire point is meant to be taken as a whole, not broken down into pieces and argued word-for-word, or paragraph to paragraph.

I've seen you dismiss other posters rebuttals as "irrelevant", and your response to my post is very telling. You're unable to see the big picture. You're so laser-focused on this one thought: eliminating *all* human suffering, that you're wholly incapable of seeing anything else.

Your deeming other responses as irrelevant because they don't align with your very narrow viewpoint is indicative of not only your ignorance, but your willful ignorance. And your condescension and derision speaks to an unflappable arrogance. I see no point in continuing a conversation with someone so pigheaded as they won't even entertain an opposing viewpoint, such as I have:

^ this is called ceding a point. I can agree with a certain part of your argument without agreeing to the whole.

Yes, I agree there is no way, currently or in the foreseeable future, to end human suffering.

No, I do not believe antinatalism is the solution to ending human suffering, as ending humanity is not an intelligent, empathetic solution. It's a callous, psychotic solution.

Your whole argument rests on the notion that you're some champion for those who don't even exist. It's a ludicrous argument, and frankly not one worth having.

As I've already stated, though I'll repost as you have a tendency to gloss over and dismiss everything:

Speculation is worth as much as one can reason against it. That said, I'm fully comfortable saying that a majority of people, if given the choice, would choose a life with some suffering over no life at all, and that would mean that your "solution" of stripping away their chance at that life is no solution at all. It's not sensible, or practical. With that in mind, antinatalism cannot be "correct", regardless of how you spin it.

Would I trade my life for one with more suffering? No. Why would I? Unless I was looking to put myself into a scenario where I am attempting to help those less fortunate than myself by immersing myself in their world to offer direct assistance (example: Doctors Without Borders, Peace Corps, etc. Practical solutions to ending human suffering, mind you.) then there's very little incentive to opt for more suffering. Those who do choose that life are truly the noblest among us. Not those who would see complete destruction to make their point. Those who choose to glom onto these silly fantasy "solutions" only serve as a distraction at best, and an obstacle at worst, to a true solution to ending suffering.

This is one of the worst attempts at saving face I have ever seen. Let me reiterate:

Reigning_King posted...

I never said you were ONLY talking about humans who were alive, I was saying you're making the mistake of mixing the two groups and treating them like they were the same, which they aren't

Maybe stop ignoring key parts of my post. Even if you want to act like I was in the wrong for not taking your "complex" post as a whole it doesn't even matter either way because you still fucked up as I pointed out and that makes your singling out my first paragraph pure hypocrisy on your part. I really should end this post here since you've proven without a doubt you can't admit to your mistakes or faulty reasoning even when carefully spelled out for you but I'm a nice guy so I'll keep going, using the same format I've used for the entire topic.

Why is it strange that I'm focused on the main point of my argument? It's the one being discussed now isn't it? You people have ignored various other ends of it, so for now I'll talk about ending all human suffering.

If you haven't noticed this thread is basically just me verses everyone else, I don't have time to fully entertain every tangent like how long it will take the sun to make the earth uninhabitable or what the meaning of the word philosophy is. Even then I've tried to at least touch on them once or twice to see if the person who brought them up is going anywhere relevant before I write them off. If you can find a single instant of me calling a given point irrelevant the first time it is brought up and without elaborate on my part then I'll admit to having made a (understandable) mistake. Even then at least I have the decency of stating my stance on an issue instead of just acting like it was never brought up the way you do with the majority of my points.

Ending human suffering necessarily involves human extinction, so if anti-natalism isn't a good way to go about that what is? Global genocide? Waiting for a cosmic event or catastrophic natural disaster to wipe us out? If you think that preserving humanity is more important than ending human suffering just say that outright, because you have to ultimately pick one or the other.

What would you say of someone who hands out contraceptives to the homeless because they want to spare their future children from that fate or being wards of the state? Are they doing something wrong? Are they doing something that ultimately doesn't matter because the people they want to help don't exist?

I see you still haven't learned the difference between people who exist and those who don't but could. You're talking about unborn people "with full comfort" saying things like "if given the choice" as if someone who doesn't exist can have a preference the same as a living person. That type of thinking is actually insane, the unborn can't think or feel or weight the good and bad of the world and decide if they want to be born or not. You're anthropomorphizing a concept here to justify the blatant unethical action of bringing babies into the world without their consent by telling yourself "well they probably would have consented to this if we could ask them" when there was no one to ask in the first place.

Why wouldn't you want a life full of pointless suffering? Weren't you the one who said humans are adaptable? If they can adapt to horrible situations and return to the same mental baseline, if they can still find happiness in their situation than there is no objective way to measure how well off someone is except their own self assessment. Suffering is all in your head (apparently) so you wouldn't be changing anything if you were born in poverty or blind or in chronic pain because you would just adapt to it and therefore there is nothing wrong with such states, right? I mean the human ability of adaptability can't possibly cause people to become comfortable in situations that are factually not good for them, right? You were singing the praises of it so I have too assume that's the case.