to form babby, or not to form babby

culpable

that's my point

free will doesn't exist, ergo there is no culpability

Maybe we should find a way to talk to fetuses

shakey I did not invoke fucking free will, jesus

"do u want 2 be born? Yes/no"

"Oh btw shakey mo would be yr daddy"

asserting something many times isn’t quite enough to make it true afaik

I mean whose fault is it I exist?

Maybe we should find a way to talk to fetuses

Xxpost Idk, Lisa *did* need braces

I mean whose fault is it I exist?

the universe?

to the extent my parents are part of the universe, sure, but the universe isn't a moral agent

citation needed

but then I'm a pretty strict determinist. everything is as it is because of all the events that went before it, determining precise points of causality for something general like "suffering" (or even the particulars of your specific existence) is a fools' game with no end.

xps

silby, why did you think my creative act would be macaroni-collage level?

There’s still nobody arguing positively that it’s in a child’s best interest to be born regardless of impact on its parents.

This is exactly what I argued, when I said that the average person's desire to continue living should be our expectation of how anyone would view starting life from behind the veil of ignorance.

(and wanting to continue living doesn't imply dreading death. dreading death is culturally specific. it's an avoidable phenomenon.)

Thread is now a Charles Ives piece

christians: fetuses have rights

ilxors: fetuses have rights before they're created

I mean whose fault is it I exist?

mine, because you are all figments of my imagination

silby are you a Buddhist by any chance?

seems more like a nihilist

silby, why did you think my creative act would be macaroni-collage level?

― kinder, Friday, February 14, 2020 10:30 AM (one minute ago)

I mean it could be Beethoven's 9th or Don Quixote, the moral standing of any work of art vanishes to nothing set next to a human person

I'm a Jew

Well if your chief claim is that existence is dukkha then the sole way out is through nirvana.

I mean Kohelet has things to say on the matter

Sure, but you seem to believe that to escape the endless wheel of birth and rebirth so as to achieve some form of nothingness or oblivion, i.e. return to the non-existence when we came, is the greatest good. Or not really, but you catch my drift.

*whence

Although I quite like 'when' too in this context.

No I believe extant people should live full and vigorous lives and expect nothing, my concerns are for pre-extant people who might be spared having to post on messageboards if they are not born.

There’s still nobody arguing positively that it’s in a child’s best interest to be born regardless of impact on its parents.

Well, that's a completely unfair type of gotcha! because of how you asked the question. You asked parents to explain themselves, and to explain why they had children. So of course parents will answer in terms of what parenting provides them. They list their particular joys and satisfactions and reasons etc. And then you whirl round on them to say "ah HA! You are using the children instrumentally, for your own selfish ends."

Do you see that that's kind of a shitty rhetorical trap?

Imagine if you asked people in romantic relationships why they are with their partners. You might presumably get answers like "she makes me laugh" or "I love having sex with him." They would speak primarily in terms of what they get out of the relationship. (Jeez, how selfish!) It doesn't follow from that that the relationship is not a two-way street.

It seems to me that a heck of a lot of people like being alive. So to them, having-been-born is a gift, not a punishment. So go find some people who are glad they are alive: that's your positive argument. Evidently you disagree about life being, on balance, a good thing. Which is of course your right. But to impose your rather bleak and hostile view of the world on everyone who's ever been born seems kinda insane to me.

I didn't mean to trap anyone, I've obviously gone around the bend a bit in the course of this conversation

my concerns are for pre-extant people who might be spared having to post on messageboards if they are not born.

b/c nothing bad is happening to you when you're pre-extant, just like nothing bad is happening to you when you're post-extant

the inherent riskiness of embodied life as a human being on planet Earth.

Considering the risks involved in being any other living creature on earth, a mouse for example, or a sparrow, humans on average live remarkably secure, long lives and have unique opportunities for fulfillment. But risk occurs at a granular level, so that no matter how it averages out, some people are going to live lives of incessant pain, deep terror, or unrelieved despair. And because a capacity for pain and unpleasant emotions is literally hard-wired into our apparatus, it is absolutely guaranteed that everyone who is born will experience these before they die, even if they live only a few minutes.

So, if one requires parents to guarantee their children will evade every ill turn of fortune before procreating, all I can say is 'u mad'. If all you require is the freedom personally to choose not to procreate, all I can say is, who ever said you didn't have it?

how do you know that xp

as an extant person, things are happening constantly that make me feel bad, and I have to eat food every day, and yet enough good things keep happening to make dying abhorrent

Are we certain that what preceded birth was an infinite void?

as best I can remember.

Is that good enough for your argument to possess sufficient heft?

lol this is getting even more nonsensical

all that travolta sperm? it's travolta's fault. But the one sperm that wins the race in the beginning of look who's talking? travolta can't be liable. that sperm had its own ideas.

This is just the beginning.

xp

listen, I'm an idiot who hasn't read enough books, I'm getting to the end of my rhetorical rope here, all I want is for parents to accept that they've inflicted a potentially grievous harm on their children by having them

"getting"

oh eat a dick

fine i accept and i’m okay with it

existing is the most unpleasant thing I've ever had to do

all I want is for parents to accept that they've inflicted a potentially grievous harm on their children by having them

That 'potentially' has been doing quite a bit of work throughout.

all that travolta sperm?

So, if one requires parents to guarantee their children will evade every ill turn of fortune before procreating

I'd assumed silby was saying even that wouldn't be enough.