Comments to Is universal harmony worth the tears of one tortured child?

To be honest, I've only red 'On the suffering of the world' by Schopenhauer. I'm not so much interested in any particular author as in the subjects, so I'm reading a bit here and a bit there.

valid reason to keep reproducing and trying to achieve human happiness is to give those who have suffered so far a justification for their suffering.

Who are those exactly? The dead? Or the living? Because I don't think you can do smth for the dead any more, they died without seeing the justice. So will countless more in the future.

Only if we achieved a future of absolute and perfect happiness, however you define it, could we look all these tortured souls in the eye and tell them that their suffering was worth it.

If. No guarantees. So we keep raping more victims in a hope of some future where no one would be raped any more.

If we give up prematurely, by stopping reproduction altogether for example, all losses in the history of humanity, wars and famines, etc, would have been in vain.

But if we don't stop reproducing, then what?

But then we should have done it a long long time ago.

Yes, we should have. But we were too stupid then. This world isn't perfect, there aren't any perfect solutions available in it, unfortunately. We can't change the past but we can prevent future suffering, isn't prevention worth anything? To not create people who will see the 3rd world war or a nuclear disaster?

Thanks for the 'Respect!' and Im always curious how people find this blog.

however miserable their lives are, they serve the greater purpose of a brighter future yet to be reached; utopia

Doesn't sound like a much solice to me: to be used a manure for somebodys future harvest. And if a person grows out to be quite intelligent they may coclude the probability of utopia in this world is really low. For me - impossible. A perfect world for me would necessary include one where animals wouldn't be eating each other, and thats obviously impossible to change, this will always be. The only thing we could achieve is to develop pills that'd desensitize humans to all animal suffering. I don't think such world would be a great idea.

So if somebody told me they had me because they want me to serve their dream of utopia I'd ask them why do I have to be involved to fulfil their dream. I may not share their fascination with building a perfect world, I may just think it's pointless and stupid and I'm entitled to my opinion. All the purposes, dreams, desires and meanings that we the living have are ours, not those of the non-existent.

Having a child to impose a harmony building role on them is just as bad as having them in order to make them work on your farm.

Hi Zenner! Thank you for such a substantial and positive feedback! Regular readers are most flattering)

I agree, filrabat. [Though I am not sure why you're raising this point here, I get the feeling you're responding to someone else] Every person alive is at risk of grave suffering. Even in world's wealthiest cities people can get infected with flesh eating bacteria, get raped, tortured and murdered by some maniac, develop cancer and keep fighting it for years...

I also hear opinions like 'yeah, maybe people in poor countries shouldn't, but us living in the best place on Earth...' Bullshit. No place on Earth guarantees 100% satisfaction. We all know that. The point these people are making is that if that's a small risk, its all right to assign it to a future person. No it's not. Got no right to assign any risk to anyone but yourself. Only in the case of preventing a bigger tragedy are you justified in risking somebody else's welfare. Procreation isn't one of those cases.

Yeah, the 'would you create a world' one. It is great. Curious where you're going to incorporate it.

There is an argument being made constantly that 'well, not everyone is miserable, it's a small percentage that is'. I just don't see how even a small percentage of harm is acceptable, indeed, even if it was just 1 innocent human being that would be sacrificed for the mythical everlasting happiness of humanity.

Thanks, DoNadie, I've heard about this book but haven't read it. Maybe others would like to though.

I welcome any book that questions the default state of affairs of having children as a norm and a decision not to - as a perversion.

But all in all the author is still a pronatalist, claiming that there are good reasons for having children. That's why I'm not too enthusiastic about reading it yet. Maybe later.

I didn't say it was a pronatalist propaganda. It's just a half-measure from an antinatalist's perspective (the conclusion that some people should have children (those that have the 'proper motivation')) that nontheless is better than nothing. It drives peoples thinking in the right direction. I started from the same point before finally embracing antinatalism.