When I said your views are self centered I meant that you only weighed in your experience of suffering as good enough justification to cancel all life. You extrapolated your aversion to suffering and to life as a universal right to be free from pain by eliminating life as if everyone has consented to do so. I think it is very narcissistic.
Not just my own suffering. I'm not gonna exist in the far future in either case. The future suffering of future people is the thing that I'm using to argue for why extinction would be preferable. On its face it's no more or less self-centered than someone arguing for life's continuance because of the good it contains. I just have better and more consistent arguments to back up my position than they do.
You really shouldn't bring consent into this, that's not an argument in your favor. If you worry about consent then worry about where it's originally not acquired, at the point of bringing new people into the world.
You denied that you were advocating for human extermination before as the solution to end suffering and you said you were just against reproduction. Now you are saying it is the lesser evil to exterminate the whole human race if technology is advanced enough to accomplish that painlessly because all life dies eventually so why dont we just take charge of choosing death for everyone all in the name of eliminating suffering!
How's that not advocating for mass genocide?
It's an unrealistic thought experiment. But in the context of that thought experiment, I'm willing to bite that bullet. I'm not advocating for it because in actual reality I can't see it achieving anything other than increasing the total amount of misery in the world.
In any case, this is a weak gotcha. You're going a lot further in examining the implications of my position than you are in examining your own. By advocating for the continuance of life, you're arguing for its totality. You can't pick and choose. Either life overall covers its costs or it does not. So you're saying every past, present and future atrocity has been worth it on balance. You're giving your blessing to everything that's ever happened, every genocide, rape, murder, torture, abuse, disease, etc. In the context of this discussion, it's all or nothing. We're talking about whether life as a whole is worth it. If you say yes, there's still gonna be a lot more blood on your hands than I'll have on mine if we tally up the full implications of our positions.
Another logical conclusion of not opposing life is that most suffering people want to live too and they dont think that they are a collateral damage of happy people existing
First of all, those people would be wrong. If they're not enjoying their lives, they're collateral damage whether they admit it or not. Second, that's not a logical conclusion, that's an unrelated fact. Why aren't you arguing with what I'm actually saying? Are you willing to tell a person that *is* suffering enough to want out that it's really too bad they feel that way but in the full context of life, their suffering is justified? You have to be willing to do that if you want to be consistent. And you also have to be willing to take their punch.
it is repugnant because it is a false assumption. Happiness of some doesnt have to exist at the misery of others. It is not a universal law and it doesnt justify eliminating all life.
You must be wilfully misunderstanding me at this point. On this planet at least, happiness can only exist along with misery. They're inextricable. As long as life exists, misery will exist. If you affirm one, you affirm both. Thus all the people that get ground up by life are acceptable collateral damage for the existence of these supposedly happy people.
No abuser is just an abuser, they're also a parent or a partner or whatever. The point is that the good doesn't make up for the bad in either case. And I didn't admit I was any more self-centered than anyone else. Probably a bit less than the average person. Which still means pretty self-centered of course. That's just the reality of people. But that gives you no leg to stand on to blame me as being *especially* self-centered.
