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this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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chapotraphouse
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no they just think life is bad, there's inherent value in the universe. somehow.
AFAIK the reasoning is
Suffering = bad
Joy = good
No suffering = good
No joy = neutral
Therefore, life, which contains suffering and joy, is neutral. But no life, which would avoid suffering entirely, would be good. The inherent value in the universe is the avoidance of suffering.
Anti-Buddhism
yeah the leap i don't get is how you get from no life and no suffering > yes life and yes suffering to "a bunch of rocks and plasma floating around has inherent value".
value is subjective and there's no subjectivity without consciousness
Aye, I think they would probably agree with that actually. They just believe that there's a kind of derived positive value from avoiding suffering. I think you could probably agree with that, it's a good thing when you can make a decision that reduces the suffering of others, even though the value of that action is never subjectively experienced by anyone.
IMO the weakest point is to assert that "no joy = neutral". I'm not an ethical philosopher, but if my friend paid off a delivery driver to not deliver my food I'd be pretty pissed off, even though all that happened was that I didn't get to experience a positive thing.
that example isn't you not experiencing a positive thing, your food not showing up as expected is a negative thing, even if you get a refund and so on.
the "no joy" bit only applies to never being alive in the first place. The baby i don't have because of birth control will never suffer nor experience joy and boy howdy would any kid of mine have suffered the whole time because of my circumstances.
IMO if the source of the negative feeling is that something good didn't happen (regardless of expectation) it's an example of absence of joy. Like, how is it different, from a purely empirical/experiential perspective to not live a life at all, and to live a "life" that is completely devoid of any experience (e.g. a stillborn who was never conscious). That's still absence of joy either way, although another point where I differ from antinatalists is that I think life in itself has value, independent of experience.
if you're never conscious you never have a subjective self.
i'm down right miserable because of good things that don't happen, because i know they could happen. some even happened before but probably never will again. other people are experiencing them.
can your framework not tell the difference between malicious deprivation, circumstantial not-happening, and the oblivion of there not being a conscious mind to begin with?
I think you're getting at the problem with anti-natalism, then. As I said before, I do think that absence of joy is bad, unlike them. I was talking in terms that were too general to get into malicious deprivation, circumstance, and complete absence, which you need to discuss if you want a framework that prescribes culpability. As I said, I'm not an ethical philosopher, just trying to describe the philosophy and the contradictions I see in it.