True. Lots of pronatalists tend towards eugenics, so doubt they’re huge fans of adoptions.
OTOH, even nurture-over-nature pronatalists would be problematic. “I’m better than everyone else so I should have an outsize impact on the next generation by adopting as many children as possible” is only slightly better than the eugenic variant.
I was going to comment that this comic is going to draw in antinatalist weirdos but I am beaten to the punch. Lemmy has a weird overgrown community of people who are exactly as hateful as the densest MAGA blockheads but in entirely different directions, it’s wild how easily hate seeps into people about the oddest things.
Hey, the world is beautiful, do what the other user suggested and go out and experience it.
Anti-natalism is such a wild and depressing position to have. It’s not just not wanting kids personally, or even just not wanting to be around kids, but that giving birth is immoral and horrendous.
I don’t really plan to have kids myself, but I have a nephew and he is so amazing and my sister is doing an amazing job raising him.
I’ve heard (well, read) from one anti-natalist that thinking children are wonderful to be around is akin to cult language. As if anti-natalists don’t sound like they are in a cult themself.
I’ve always thought if they actually believed what they said they would be against all animal life as well. If existing is such misery and we need to like, end experiencing the universe broadly or whatever their main idea is, then definitionally we would also need to end all animal life, they have existed far longer, are also sentient largely, and suffered far worse than any humans over any stretch of time.
But for some reason they get real shifty when you start trying to dismantle their ideology.
It’s almost like it has more to do with their parents than wanting a better world.
As someone who understands, if not necessarily openly espouses, anti-natalist ideology, I can give a bit of elucidation from my perspective of the philosophy of utilitarianism, which I am happy to debate. It would be nice to be proven wrong here.
It comes down, in my opinion and understanding, to the following argument:
an entity is inherently unable to consent to its own creation. [A postulate]
suffering has a net-negative effect on the (perceived or actual) value of existence [precept of utilitarianism]
suffering knowingly enacted against any entity which cannot give informed consent is eqquivalent to the suffering of an entity which is actively not consenting [by which argument paedophilia is a crime]
The potential suffering inherent in life is foreseeable, as is the potential of a human life to harm the lives of others. [The basis of the concept of negligence]
An entity that is not created does not harm or cause others to suffer, nor does it experience harm or suffering [postulate]
From propositions 1 through 5:
You are personally, morally responsible for the life which you create, both its actions and its experiences, as all of its experiences and actions are exclusively contingent on the act of its creation. It is from this moral duty that parental responsibility derives.
there is a foreseeable possibility that the entity being created could endure enough suffering (or be the cause of same) to make the value of their life net-negative
From propositions 5 and 6, and the various observations one might make of the world (from climate change, to the renewed rise of fascism and the far-right, and a myriad of other “natural shocks which flesh is heir to”), they suggest:
On cost-benefit analysis, the expected value of a new life which I might create is net-negative.
From which:
it would be irresponsible (read: negligent) to procreate.
That is the basis. If you can prove each of those propositions, then from a utilitarian perspective, I think anti-natalism follows. I am personally convinced up to proposition 6, and I am personally waiting until I no longer feel that 7 has a chance of being valid before I have children. There are plenty of ways you can argue against the propositions, but as they stand, there is no indication of a moral duty to end already-extant life or to engage in mass-sterilisation of animals. There are certainly people who try to come at it from a nihilistic perspective, and it’s MUCH easier to argue pretty much anything from nihilism than from utilitarianism, but I, being primarily utilitarian, hold with the above.
I also think that the person saying “anti-natalists think children are awful to be around” is presenting a ridiculous strawman. I’m a public school teacher, and I love being around kids. The wonder with which they view the cosmos is forever inspiring to me, but many of my students have experienced truly awful things. I believe my moral duty involves doing everything I can to minimize the suffering of entities that exist. I think that, once a child has been created, you now have a moral duty to make that child’s life as free from suffering and as fulfilling and rich as possible (without imposing suffering on others, of course)
That’s all fine and well as an internal idea why you don’t want to have kids, but when anti-natalism became a “thing” that started attracting like-minds it became another group of insane people online pushing their anti-society ideals, and if we’re going to go out quietly into the night, we should do it with the least amount of harm, and I would rather we put that energy into taking better care of the people we already have.
If society collapses, it will be even more suffering and more harm to more people and if populations collapse, so will society. I am deeply involved in logistics and nobody really gets how much suffering a population collapse could be for billions of people.
All that aside, I still think it’s a narrow perspective, because unless you know something I don’t, we don’t know if there’s an alternative to existing and experiencing things, I mean… you’re going to die, and you will be dead forever. If you’re a teacher you should know the basic ideas about the universe and how everything appears to be probabilistic in nature. Eventually, after all the stars die and a number of years pass that make time meaningless, it will eventually all happen again. In some form or another. The universe will always be experiencing itself, not having kids now just means that conscious experience is going to express somewhere else, some distant configuration. It happened once already, and few things in nature are singular.
You are fantastically, amazingly lucky you exist in this form and in this time and space, because odds are much better that you would have been a short-lived small animal, to live desperately and die horribly. That seems to be the far more likely state for the conscious experience. You (not you specifically, but singular sense of self broadly) will likely go through quintillions of reformations where you just are crustacean that gets cronched by some predator or a primate who suffers horribly and dies after her family is murdered by another tribe. We don’t know if the alternative to this is better, odds are it isn’t, we don’t know if you are actually deciding if you’re bringing in a new life or only changing the shape of your own conscious experience in this universe. We don’t even know if you have a choice at all, and are not just post-hoc rationalizing decisions you’ve already made.
Anti-natalism has a noble idea behind it, but like so many “ism’s” it’s extremely human-biased in it’s foundational beliefs and I don’t assume to know enough to make it a “thing” in my life or endorse it because it feels dumb. Not in a “you’re dumb for believing it” way, but “we’re all dumb, this doesn’t help with that” kind of way.
I’m not saying we should breed like rabbits (but we do need to work to keep population levels from causing a mass starvation and migration crisis) but I’m also not saying the opposite. This is a neutral issue to me because the cosmic perspective makes it silly. Do you know for sure if you’re actually reducing suffering? Or just reducing your own guilt? For all we know, this is as good is as it gets.
And lastly, mostly, the idea quickly attracts people who just hate children and that’s something we need to fight with all our might as a species.
That’s all fine and well as an internal idea why you don’t want to have kids, but when anti-natalism became a “thing” that started attracting like-minds it became another group of insane people online pushing their anti-society ideals
And lastly, mostly, the idea quickly attracts people who just hate children and that’s something we need to fight with all our might as a species.
You said that anti-natalists dislike when their beliefs are challenged, but the first thing you do is concede that point and start talking about your personal perspective on the history of anti-natalism. I’m trying to present as close as you can get to a logically-valid anti-natalist argument, but it seems like your personal experience with people you perceive to be anti-natalists has tainted your ability to engage with that perspective. Claiming that an idea attracts crazy people is just an anecdotal ad hominem, not an actual issue with the idea. If you want to talk about why you perceive it to attract crazy, antisocial child-haters, then first establish that that is the case and suggest what it is about the idea which makes such an attraction dangerous. Fascism isn’t bad because the worst people rally around it. The worst people rally around it because of the things which make it bad, such as the ease with which those in power in a fascist state can exploit the weak for personal gain.
It appears, to me (though it is ambiguous, so let me know if I’m off-base), that you believe that the biggest danger of anti-natalism is in the potential of population decline. If a significant portion of the population agreed with an anti-natalist argument, such that they actually did believe it was morally irresponsible to have a child, I contend that the problem which must be solved is not their exposure to anti-natalism, but the things which caused it to be a convincing argument, namely the fact that the future of a child born into this world is a deeply risky bet, due to the reasons I’ve listed and more. I don’t think that people taking a rational cost-benefit analysis of a situation is a problem. The problem would be the situation.
In fact, it seems like (again an implication, so correct me if I’m wrong) you are concerned that an anti-natalist would try to forcibly prevent people from having children, but such an action would increase the suffering of those alive, and the actor would be morally culpable for such an act. As such, if you are, instead, suggesting that anti-natalists believe in forced sterilisation or otherwise, then I think that it might not be the anti-natalists projecting their own problems onto the world.
All that aside, I still think it’s a narrow perspective, because unless you know something I don’t, we don’t know if there’s an alternative to existing and experiencing things, I mean… you’re going to die, and you will be dead forever. If you’re a teacher you should know the basic ideas about the universe and how everything appears to be probabilistic in nature. Eventually, after all the stars die and a number of years pass that make time meaningless, it will eventually all happen again. In some form or another. The universe will always be experiencing itself, not having kids now just means that conscious experience is going to express somewhere else, some distant configuration. It happened once already, and few things in nature are singular.
As an earth and space science teacher, why yes, I DO know some things about the cosmos. For instance, I know that the “big bounce” theory (everything repeating) is only one of many potential interpretations for the future of our universe, and is by no means the most popular among astrophysicists, since it appears inconsistent with a universe in apparently-accelerating expansion. Far more likely is heat death or the big rip, which would make all effort to come before existentially meaningless, unless some method of information transfer outside of our universe or beyond our current understanding were to be achieved. It’s a good thing that none of us will be around to experience those eventualities. If you’d like to chat about existential nihilism, absurdism, or other concerns, I’m happy to do so, but I don’t perceive them to be particularly germane to the argument at hand, unless you’re trying to use a nihilistic argument to tear apart a fairly common position among nihilists. Utilitarianism itself is, ultimately, a response to the lack of meaning in the cosmos, and is an attempt to ascribe meaning by our own, subjective definition, so of course it’s human-biased, but it can be applied evenly, even to animals, which seems to be a primary concern for you.
and if we’re going to go out quietly into the night, we should do it with the least amount of harm, and I would rather we put that energy into taking better care of the people we already have.
That is… Exactly my point. Are you sure you are disagreeing with me? We need to be actively taking better care of the world, so that no one need feel afraid of bringing a life into this world, only for it to experience unspeakable suffering.
Do you know for sure if you’re actually reducing suffering? Or just reducing your own guilt? For all we know, this is as good is as it gets.
Such a thing is fundamentally unknowable, but our definition of suffering is fairly consistent, and of course It’s all about personal moral culpability, because that’s the whole idea of morality. If you’re going to take so many nihilistic and moral relativist stances, I don’t see why you’re so concerned with population collapse or animal welfare.
We don’t know if the alternative to this is better, odds are it isn’t, we don’t know if you are actually deciding if you’re bringing in a new life or only changing the shape of your own conscious experience in this universe. We don’t even know if you have a choice at all, and are not just post-hoc rationalizing decisions you’ve already made.
While it is fair to attack the postulates of an argument, this is not, in my opinion, a particularly compelling argument. Sure, I assume that not creating a life does no harm, but to say “ooh, free will might be an illusion” doesn’t actually negate my point, because, at worst, this means that it doesn’t matter whether you’re anti-natalist.
[a] crustacean that gets cronched by some predator or a primate who suffers horribly and dies after her family is murdered by another tribe.
My argument does not apply to animals in a state of nature, as those animals are not reasonably expected to have responsibility (If I were to learn that a species of animal did, in fact, have sufficient mental capacity to understand existential philosophy, then I would probably be having this conversation with a dolphin, rather than a lemming). Humans are the active cause of the current mass-extinction event, and we have the wherewithal to potentially stop it. That is, from my perspective, a moral imperative. Humans are the cause of a great deal of suffering, both human and among other animals, and one of my precepts claims that suffering can have a net-negative effect on the value of life. Another precept enjoins us to act, as the failure to act constitutes negligence. Do i believe that we must all stop procreating? no. Do i believe that there are cases in which it is actively irresponsible and negligent to bring a child into the world? Absolutely, yes. Do I think that I have a moral responsibility to stop people from fucking? No I do not. Do i believe that everyone must be educated on the responsibilities, risks, costs and benefits of parenthood, so they can be informed when they consent to engage in procreation? Yes. Do I think I have a moral responsibility to make the world a better place for the inevitable products of the aforementioned fucking? ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY
Do i believe that we must all stop procreating? no. Do i believe that there are cases in which it is actively irresponsible and negligent to bring a child into the world? Absolutely, yes.
Okay then you’re not really anti-natalist, you’re just mad at people who are irresponsible, which is relatable.
I very clearly stated “as someone who understands, if not necessarily openly espouses, anti-natalist ideology”. I am suggesting that I, personally, think that my original 7th premise is becoming closer and closer to logical truth. I believe, as something close to an anti-natalist, that everyone needs to do their own cost-benefit analysis to determine whether they can accept the culpability of deciding to bring an unconsenting entity into the horrific world in which we currently live. So, just because I don’t believe in forcibly converting everyone to the cause, doesn’t mean I don’t believe in it, just like not every Christian is an evangelical. Anyone who believes that there is a moral imperative to forcibly stop others from having children is clearly fundamentally misunderstanding the reasons why anti-natalist principles are so attractive (much like how evangelicals display a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian theology)
Wow, a very impressive, nuanced, and detailed explination about the ideology. A much better argument for anything than I can conjur up myself.
I also think that the person saying “anti-natalists think children are awful to be around” is presenting a ridiculous strawman.
Alright, I am that person. Then again now that I see you have written about some people arguing for anti-natalisim from a nihilistic perspective vs a utilitarian one. I usually see more of the nihilistic arguments, which to me I just outright ignore for having too much of a negativity bias, especially these days.
That’s fair, and I can’t speak for others, but at the very least, it’s a generalisation which I believe is unwarranted. I can simultaneously believe that it is morally questionable to choose to have a child, but also that a child, once born, places upon all members of society a moral duty of care in its upbringing, not only for harm reduction, but to work toward the betterment of society writ-large, so that we can potentially make the future act of procreation less morally concerning.
I can’t tell if you hate ducks or are simply a pro-natalist. Regardless go watch a movie or play a game or something, may I suggest Red Dead Redemption? It’s currently on sale on steam.
Can’t see any other point they were making then. Unless they are just trying to call hypocrisy towards folks thinking animals having lots of babies is cute while humans doing the same is bad. Because if that is the point that’s missing so much fucken context that if it was a physical object it’d be a fucken mountain range, mostly because most animal babies die pretty fucken often. From experience chicks alone have like a 60 percent mortality rating if humans aren’t directly involved in taking care of them, roosters apparently love to eat chicks.
They’re saying that “more babies = more success” is a funny and cute idea when expressed by a cartoon duck, but is extremely harmful when expressed by humans in the real world. I honestly can’t imagine how you reached your interpretation of the comment because it seems to have very little in common with anything they said.
Because the way they wrote their comment is often times used to draw direct comparison and critique between two different things. It’s basically the meme of the two castles fighting each other with text like “our glorious leader” vs “their ignoble tyrant”. But then again I am very much in favor of death of the author so two different interpretations of a single work can exist once published, I think that can apply to a comment.
Just hopping in to say that the RDR franchise is great and worth the money.
I’ve spent so many hours just riding around hunting or collecting herbs. One of the few games you can genuinely turn off your brain and immerse yourself in the world.
Also undead nightmare is unironically one of the more unique takes on zombies. Not necessarily because they do anything particularly interesting with the zombies themselves but moreso because the closest thing to zombie Western I know of is a bug in the PS3 version of Fallout: New Vegas where an infinitely spawn of ghouls can occur at the test site. Never been able to replicate it on PC and I don’t know if it was specific to me or not.
In cartoon ducks: overly simplistic but cute, naive, and innocent
In humans: pronatalism. weird disgusting pseudo colonial bullshit that’s the dark mirror to “just” wanting kids.
Edit: sorry for throwing cynicism into a cute comic’s comment section. Promise I’m fine 😅
I think you need to go outside and look at some wildlife or something.
But not ducks, clearly
But if she found more baby rather than “make”, doesn’t that imply adoption?
True. Lots of pronatalists tend towards eugenics, so doubt they’re huge fans of adoptions.
OTOH, even nurture-over-nature pronatalists would be problematic. “I’m better than everyone else so I should have an outsize impact on the next generation by adopting as many children as possible” is only slightly better than the eugenic variant.
I was going to comment that this comic is going to draw in antinatalist weirdos but I am beaten to the punch. Lemmy has a weird overgrown community of people who are exactly as hateful as the densest MAGA blockheads but in entirely different directions, it’s wild how easily hate seeps into people about the oddest things.
Hey, the world is beautiful, do what the other user suggested and go out and experience it.
Anti-natalism is such a wild and depressing position to have. It’s not just not wanting kids personally, or even just not wanting to be around kids, but that giving birth is immoral and horrendous.
I don’t really plan to have kids myself, but I have a nephew and he is so amazing and my sister is doing an amazing job raising him.
I’ve heard (well, read) from one anti-natalist that thinking children are wonderful to be around is akin to cult language. As if anti-natalists don’t sound like they are in a cult themself.
Thank you for coming to my TedTalk
Militant Anti-natalists are just as cringe as those Pro-natalists who pressure you to have children
Just leave people alone for their personal decisions ffs
I’ve always thought if they actually believed what they said they would be against all animal life as well. If existing is such misery and we need to like, end experiencing the universe broadly or whatever their main idea is, then definitionally we would also need to end all animal life, they have existed far longer, are also sentient largely, and suffered far worse than any humans over any stretch of time.
But for some reason they get real shifty when you start trying to dismantle their ideology.
It’s almost like it has more to do with their parents than wanting a better world.
As someone who understands, if not necessarily openly espouses, anti-natalist ideology, I can give a bit of elucidation from my perspective of the philosophy of utilitarianism, which I am happy to debate. It would be nice to be proven wrong here.
It comes down, in my opinion and understanding, to the following argument:
an entity is inherently unable to consent to its own creation. [A postulate]
suffering has a net-negative effect on the (perceived or actual) value of existence [precept of utilitarianism]
suffering knowingly enacted against any entity which cannot give informed consent is eqquivalent to the suffering of an entity which is actively not consenting [by which argument paedophilia is a crime]
The potential suffering inherent in life is foreseeable, as is the potential of a human life to harm the lives of others. [The basis of the concept of negligence]
An entity that is not created does not harm or cause others to suffer, nor does it experience harm or suffering [postulate]
From propositions 1 through 5:
You are personally, morally responsible for the life which you create, both its actions and its experiences, as all of its experiences and actions are exclusively contingent on the act of its creation. It is from this moral duty that parental responsibility derives.
there is a foreseeable possibility that the entity being created could endure enough suffering (or be the cause of same) to make the value of their life net-negative
From propositions 5 and 6, and the various observations one might make of the world (from climate change, to the renewed rise of fascism and the far-right, and a myriad of other “natural shocks which flesh is heir to”), they suggest:
From which:
That is the basis. If you can prove each of those propositions, then from a utilitarian perspective, I think anti-natalism follows. I am personally convinced up to proposition 6, and I am personally waiting until I no longer feel that 7 has a chance of being valid before I have children. There are plenty of ways you can argue against the propositions, but as they stand, there is no indication of a moral duty to end already-extant life or to engage in mass-sterilisation of animals. There are certainly people who try to come at it from a nihilistic perspective, and it’s MUCH easier to argue pretty much anything from nihilism than from utilitarianism, but I, being primarily utilitarian, hold with the above.
I also think that the person saying “anti-natalists think children are awful to be around” is presenting a ridiculous strawman. I’m a public school teacher, and I love being around kids. The wonder with which they view the cosmos is forever inspiring to me, but many of my students have experienced truly awful things. I believe my moral duty involves doing everything I can to minimize the suffering of entities that exist. I think that, once a child has been created, you now have a moral duty to make that child’s life as free from suffering and as fulfilling and rich as possible (without imposing suffering on others, of course)
That’s all fine and well as an internal idea why you don’t want to have kids, but when anti-natalism became a “thing” that started attracting like-minds it became another group of insane people online pushing their anti-society ideals, and if we’re going to go out quietly into the night, we should do it with the least amount of harm, and I would rather we put that energy into taking better care of the people we already have.
If society collapses, it will be even more suffering and more harm to more people and if populations collapse, so will society. I am deeply involved in logistics and nobody really gets how much suffering a population collapse could be for billions of people.
All that aside, I still think it’s a narrow perspective, because unless you know something I don’t, we don’t know if there’s an alternative to existing and experiencing things, I mean… you’re going to die, and you will be dead forever. If you’re a teacher you should know the basic ideas about the universe and how everything appears to be probabilistic in nature. Eventually, after all the stars die and a number of years pass that make time meaningless, it will eventually all happen again. In some form or another. The universe will always be experiencing itself, not having kids now just means that conscious experience is going to express somewhere else, some distant configuration. It happened once already, and few things in nature are singular.
You are fantastically, amazingly lucky you exist in this form and in this time and space, because odds are much better that you would have been a short-lived small animal, to live desperately and die horribly. That seems to be the far more likely state for the conscious experience. You (not you specifically, but singular sense of self broadly) will likely go through quintillions of reformations where you just are crustacean that gets cronched by some predator or a primate who suffers horribly and dies after her family is murdered by another tribe. We don’t know if the alternative to this is better, odds are it isn’t, we don’t know if you are actually deciding if you’re bringing in a new life or only changing the shape of your own conscious experience in this universe. We don’t even know if you have a choice at all, and are not just post-hoc rationalizing decisions you’ve already made.
Anti-natalism has a noble idea behind it, but like so many “ism’s” it’s extremely human-biased in it’s foundational beliefs and I don’t assume to know enough to make it a “thing” in my life or endorse it because it feels dumb. Not in a “you’re dumb for believing it” way, but “we’re all dumb, this doesn’t help with that” kind of way.
I’m not saying we should breed like rabbits (but we do need to work to keep population levels from causing a mass starvation and migration crisis) but I’m also not saying the opposite. This is a neutral issue to me because the cosmic perspective makes it silly. Do you know for sure if you’re actually reducing suffering? Or just reducing your own guilt? For all we know, this is as good is as it gets.
And lastly, mostly, the idea quickly attracts people who just hate children and that’s something we need to fight with all our might as a species.
You said that anti-natalists dislike when their beliefs are challenged, but the first thing you do is concede that point and start talking about your personal perspective on the history of anti-natalism. I’m trying to present as close as you can get to a logically-valid anti-natalist argument, but it seems like your personal experience with people you perceive to be anti-natalists has tainted your ability to engage with that perspective. Claiming that an idea attracts crazy people is just an anecdotal ad hominem, not an actual issue with the idea. If you want to talk about why you perceive it to attract crazy, antisocial child-haters, then first establish that that is the case and suggest what it is about the idea which makes such an attraction dangerous. Fascism isn’t bad because the worst people rally around it. The worst people rally around it because of the things which make it bad, such as the ease with which those in power in a fascist state can exploit the weak for personal gain.
It appears, to me (though it is ambiguous, so let me know if I’m off-base), that you believe that the biggest danger of anti-natalism is in the potential of population decline. If a significant portion of the population agreed with an anti-natalist argument, such that they actually did believe it was morally irresponsible to have a child, I contend that the problem which must be solved is not their exposure to anti-natalism, but the things which caused it to be a convincing argument, namely the fact that the future of a child born into this world is a deeply risky bet, due to the reasons I’ve listed and more. I don’t think that people taking a rational cost-benefit analysis of a situation is a problem. The problem would be the situation.
In fact, it seems like (again an implication, so correct me if I’m wrong) you are concerned that an anti-natalist would try to forcibly prevent people from having children, but such an action would increase the suffering of those alive, and the actor would be morally culpable for such an act. As such, if you are, instead, suggesting that anti-natalists believe in forced sterilisation or otherwise, then I think that it might not be the anti-natalists projecting their own problems onto the world.
As an earth and space science teacher, why yes, I DO know some things about the cosmos. For instance, I know that the “big bounce” theory (everything repeating) is only one of many potential interpretations for the future of our universe, and is by no means the most popular among astrophysicists, since it appears inconsistent with a universe in apparently-accelerating expansion. Far more likely is heat death or the big rip, which would make all effort to come before existentially meaningless, unless some method of information transfer outside of our universe or beyond our current understanding were to be achieved. It’s a good thing that none of us will be around to experience those eventualities. If you’d like to chat about existential nihilism, absurdism, or other concerns, I’m happy to do so, but I don’t perceive them to be particularly germane to the argument at hand, unless you’re trying to use a nihilistic argument to tear apart a fairly common position among nihilists. Utilitarianism itself is, ultimately, a response to the lack of meaning in the cosmos, and is an attempt to ascribe meaning by our own, subjective definition, so of course it’s human-biased, but it can be applied evenly, even to animals, which seems to be a primary concern for you.
That is… Exactly my point. Are you sure you are disagreeing with me? We need to be actively taking better care of the world, so that no one need feel afraid of bringing a life into this world, only for it to experience unspeakable suffering.
Such a thing is fundamentally unknowable, but our definition of suffering is fairly consistent, and of course It’s all about personal moral culpability, because that’s the whole idea of morality. If you’re going to take so many nihilistic and moral relativist stances, I don’t see why you’re so concerned with population collapse or animal welfare.
While it is fair to attack the postulates of an argument, this is not, in my opinion, a particularly compelling argument. Sure, I assume that not creating a life does no harm, but to say “ooh, free will might be an illusion” doesn’t actually negate my point, because, at worst, this means that it doesn’t matter whether you’re anti-natalist.
My argument does not apply to animals in a state of nature, as those animals are not reasonably expected to have responsibility (If I were to learn that a species of animal did, in fact, have sufficient mental capacity to understand existential philosophy, then I would probably be having this conversation with a dolphin, rather than a lemming). Humans are the active cause of the current mass-extinction event, and we have the wherewithal to potentially stop it. That is, from my perspective, a moral imperative. Humans are the cause of a great deal of suffering, both human and among other animals, and one of my precepts claims that suffering can have a net-negative effect on the value of life. Another precept enjoins us to act, as the failure to act constitutes negligence. Do i believe that we must all stop procreating? no. Do i believe that there are cases in which it is actively irresponsible and negligent to bring a child into the world? Absolutely, yes. Do I think that I have a moral responsibility to stop people from fucking? No I do not. Do i believe that everyone must be educated on the responsibilities, risks, costs and benefits of parenthood, so they can be informed when they consent to engage in procreation? Yes. Do I think I have a moral responsibility to make the world a better place for the inevitable products of the aforementioned fucking? ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY
Okay then you’re not really anti-natalist, you’re just mad at people who are irresponsible, which is relatable.
I very clearly stated “as someone who understands, if not necessarily openly espouses, anti-natalist ideology”. I am suggesting that I, personally, think that my original 7th premise is becoming closer and closer to logical truth. I believe, as something close to an anti-natalist, that everyone needs to do their own cost-benefit analysis to determine whether they can accept the culpability of deciding to bring an unconsenting entity into the horrific world in which we currently live. So, just because I don’t believe in forcibly converting everyone to the cause, doesn’t mean I don’t believe in it, just like not every Christian is an evangelical. Anyone who believes that there is a moral imperative to forcibly stop others from having children is clearly fundamentally misunderstanding the reasons why anti-natalist principles are so attractive (much like how evangelicals display a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian theology)
Wow, a very impressive, nuanced, and detailed explination about the ideology. A much better argument for anything than I can conjur up myself.
Alright, I am that person. Then again now that I see you have written about some people arguing for anti-natalisim from a nihilistic perspective vs a utilitarian one. I usually see more of the nihilistic arguments, which to me I just outright ignore for having too much of a negativity bias, especially these days.
TLDR: you are better than me
That’s fair, and I can’t speak for others, but at the very least, it’s a generalisation which I believe is unwarranted. I can simultaneously believe that it is morally questionable to choose to have a child, but also that a child, once born, places upon all members of society a moral duty of care in its upbringing, not only for harm reduction, but to work toward the betterment of society writ-large, so that we can potentially make the future act of procreation less morally concerning.
I can’t tell if you hate ducks or are simply a pro-natalist. Regardless go watch a movie or play a game or something, may I suggest Red Dead Redemption? It’s currently on sale on steam.
That’s an impressively incorrect reading of the comment.
Can’t see any other point they were making then. Unless they are just trying to call hypocrisy towards folks thinking animals having lots of babies is cute while humans doing the same is bad. Because if that is the point that’s missing so much fucken context that if it was a physical object it’d be a fucken mountain range, mostly because most animal babies die pretty fucken often. From experience chicks alone have like a 60 percent mortality rating if humans aren’t directly involved in taking care of them, roosters apparently love to eat chicks.
They’re saying that “more babies = more success” is a funny and cute idea when expressed by a cartoon duck, but is extremely harmful when expressed by humans in the real world. I honestly can’t imagine how you reached your interpretation of the comment because it seems to have very little in common with anything they said.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, because it looks like the duck had 1 baby, then adopted 20 others.
Obviously ducks are cuter than humans.
Not sure why you think someone hates ducks.
Because the way they wrote their comment is often times used to draw direct comparison and critique between two different things. It’s basically the meme of the two castles fighting each other with text like “our glorious leader” vs “their ignoble tyrant”. But then again I am very much in favor of death of the author so two different interpretations of a single work can exist once published, I think that can apply to a comment.
I see where you’re coming from but no, I’m very much not pronatalist, and my opinion of them is literally what I put in the comment.
I was going for “amusing juxtaposition” but the vote balance on my comment shows you were not the only one who didn’t take it that way, my bad!
Edit: I also do not hate ducks
I have never heard of this meme format, thanks for the education!
Just hopping in to say that the RDR franchise is great and worth the money.
I’ve spent so many hours just riding around hunting or collecting herbs. One of the few games you can genuinely turn off your brain and immerse yourself in the world.
Also undead nightmare is unironically one of the more unique takes on zombies. Not necessarily because they do anything particularly interesting with the zombies themselves but moreso because the closest thing to zombie Western I know of is a bug in the PS3 version of Fallout: New Vegas where an infinitely spawn of ghouls can occur at the test site. Never been able to replicate it on PC and I don’t know if it was specific to me or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGL8Fx6SOjg
No one else said, and it seems like you’re catching on, but it needs saying out loud: today, you suck.