Start of a new page so let me bring up some of my old points that were ignored before they get completly buried.
Reigning_King posted...
"Say you desire Outcome X and will do anything to avoid Outcome Y. You believe that by following Plan A you will obtain Outcome X. Later you learn objectively and without question that following Plan A will result in Outcome Y, not X. Would you still go with Plan A or try to develop a Plan B?"
"Try thinking about it this way, why does anyone do ANYTHING? Hunger comes naturally without any action, we have to go out of our way to satisfy that hunger, every single thing we do is to satisfy some desire or another. Desires, wants, needs, deprivations, negativity in other words, that comes to us naturally. Many of these desires we can only partly satisfy if at all, plenty of people have starved to death after all, and of those who do get their daily bread, the need to empty their bowels will result soon after because of it. Even if we could somehow satisfy them all then we would be left with boredom, yet another negative. Life is a trial of trying to avoid and reject the negativity inherent to it, but as with all human endeavors it can only be done"
"So say you have a beggar in some filthy slum in some war torn 3rd world country who is blind and missing both his legs but has been in his position for so long and so many of the people who have been around him his whole life are also in awful positions or even worse ones that he doesn't see his lot as particularly bad... you would say that he honestly wouldn't be better off with his sight, legs, and money?"
"In the past when life expectancy was low a man dying at 35 might not be seen as anything particularly tragic, and a man dying at 60 could have been considered to have lived a good long life. Now the reaction to both would be very different, the family would suffer more grief than their ancient counterpart most probably. Today if a man reaches 100 years old it is a major milestone to be celebrated and no one ever feels bad because so and so didn't live to be 200 instead because such a thing is (currently) impossible. Why shouldn't the inability to live to 200 (...) be seen as a harm?"
"...you (...) say that the extinction of humanity would "rob" future people of the chance to experience happiness... so you do actually think people have a duty to have as many children as they can? I mean otherwise those people are being immoral for "robbing" their potential children right? Tell me, every time you see a woman who isn't pregnant do you feel sad for her potential child who could have fun one day if only she got knocked up?"
"Optimism is the cause of untold amounts of harm."
"A given person might enjoy their own life and be thankful they were born despite the hardships they've suffered but that doesn't mean they should have free reign to make that same choice for someone else who might not have their positive personality or might simply suffer vastly more than they have."
"You can not guarantee with any certainty the type of life a child will have. Harming someone, causing them suffering with certainty without their consent because you think it might be in their best interests is unethical unless you can prove the chance of that benefit is 100% [and outweighs the suffering you caused them]."
"People can't control luck but they can control if they deliberately endanger people which is what having a child is."
"To all pro-natalists... what is your end goal? (...) I would like to hear your own individual end games, how long you think it will take to achieve them by following a pro-natal path, and how sure you are you will get what you want after that time. I assume it must be something fabulously noble if you think that the [relatively quick and painless] end of human suffering is a bad idea since it would interfere with your own"
"['Humanity should reject extinction and keep progressing forwards'] Progress towards WHAT?"