So your argument is that it's ok to gamble with another's future in a high stakes game aslong as the odds are deemed reasonable? Reasonable by whom exactly: you? Everyone? All humans who suffer and would rather not have been born at all?
I seem to remember you were trained in law: would it strike you as legal if someone gambled with another's money without their consent?
The fact that there is no way to know beforehand who is going to be miserable is exactly the reason why it's completely and utterly irresponsible to have children.
It's very well known all life ends invariably in death so those who procreate knowingly and willingly visit death on their very own children.
"... in most cases people actually enjoy living". When? When they're faced with imminent death? When they're faced with the imminent death of their parents, friends, children... When any of the myriad shitty things happen that make people utterly destitute, dejected, broken and so unhappy that they want to die?
The ancients were quite right: it's foolish to judge a man's fate and happiness untill after he's in the grave. Every moment we live we are exposed to danger and the possibility of grave suffering. Even the happiest individual may lose all that he holds dear in the blink of an eye.
Anyone who claims to enjoy living should be struck in the face and immidiately asked the question: 'are you still happy now?' That's how fleeting and illusory happiness really is.
Ask a 1000 people who are about to die whether they think their life was worth it including the fact that they're going to die very soon. If the great majority said yes you might have the beginning of a semblance of an argument but it would still not negate the fact that it's highly immoral to gamble with another's fate and expose them to the possibility of extreme suffering and the certainty of death. Without their consent which cannot possible be given.
Immanuel Kant stated the moral principle that no-one has the right to use another solely as a means to an end as this would violate human dignity and morality itself. Procreation is using another solely as a means to end. Ergo: procreation violates the categorical imperative and is therefore immoral. QED.
It's well known people are predisposed to optimism but that doesn't mean life is actually swell and it certainly isn't an excuse to expose other human-beings to all the pain and cruelty life has to offer only to put them through the excruciating ordeal of dying.
To be fair: you're wrong. Parents do deserve to be blamed for forcing their children to suffer and die just to gratify their own selfish desires.
Parents are the ultimate reason their child suffers: without conception and birth no suffering. This is an undeniable truth.
Comparing oranges to apples.
That analogy with money gambling doesn't make any sense. There is no such thing as consent to be born, since the person who will be brought to life simply doesn't exist to give that consent.
Go ask people if they actually would kill themselves should they get a chance to do so peacefully and see how many will give you a postive answer. Most people enjoy to live and that's a fact. You can't possibly think that just because some people actually don't enjoy living and wish to die that extends to most of the human population. You aren't thinking out of the box. Maybe you are spending too much time here and have started to think that everyone else out there is like us.
Been to Angola and Mozambique, talked to starving kids, kids with amputated legs because of the mines still lurking on the fields of the post colonial war with the portuguese.
You know what one of those kids told me after we gave him some candy and played with him for a while on a videogame console we brought, and asked him if he would enjoy coming with us to Europe as he was an orphan and was waiting to get adopted? "Life is indeed better with all of these fancy foods and "electronic games" but i would never trade what we have here. The hardships we face, they may be difficult to deal with, but at the end of the day it's by surpassing these trials that we learn to enjoy being alive". That's a rough translation to english, he spoke in portuguese.
Only a small portion of people seriously want to end their lives. As living beings, humans like to live and will do anything to keep being alive just like any other animal.
Exceptions don't make the rule.
Also what makes you assume that every parent wants to have kids as "a means to an end"???
Don't you believe people actually enjoy giving birth to life? Are you so blindsighted as to think that everyone is as mentally damaged as any of us here?
And why bring Kant to this discussion? Do you think that i take another man's propositions just because he was an intelligent philosopher?
Also thinking that life ain't worth it just because "shit happens" is too farfetched. I would bet that most people, even on their deathbed, consider that being born was actually a good and don't wish they weren't born as you appear to to claim. And do you know why? Because people aren't so weak as you paint them to be. They endure pain and they come through and are still able to find enjoyment.
Sure some people endure more pain and suffering than others during their life but what about the things and the moments that gave them pleasure? Are they forgotten or spoiled just because their life wasn't 100% perfect? No, they are even more valued because of the sufferings and adversities that made it harder to obtain said pleasures and victories.
"Parents are the ultimate reason their child suffers".
And aren't they also the reason their child have breath in their lungs, eat their favourite meals thousands of times during their lifetimes, make sex and have orgasms, play football with their friends and see the beautiful sunsets and night's stars?
You are entitled to your opinion and i am to mine.
I may be a miserable sack of shit and my life surely is nothing but stupid and meanigless but I don't go as far as to presume that everyone else's lives are the same as mine. That surely ain't what i have been seeing over the world.
"Without conception and birth there is no suffering" And there is also no survival of the species...
Should have our predecessors never cultivated the fields because of an ever present possibility of a storm that woyld destroy the crops? Should they have remained at home and never gone hunting because they might gotten hurt?
Some will suffer, some will be sick, some will be miserable? Sure. But that's the way of things. Humans,as a species, and as every other species, have it in their DNA to spread themselves and guarantee their survival. Some are unlucky with the genes they inherit and they suffer for it. But i never heard of any parent with knowledge of his/hers bad genetics, purposefully planning to have kids so they can inherit these bad traits and suffer because of it. In most cases it doesn't even cross the human mind.
Some believe in the bible. And in the bible, the God who supposedly created us, at some point almost erradicated the entire human race from the planet with a Great Flood that lasted 40 days and 40 nights.
He chose a small family to be kept alive and repopulate the Earth again. And here we are, at least according to the believers. So even the Creator of the human species doesn't mind to kill millions? of people as long as a small group of survivors continues on His legacy.
So why should the imperfect and feeble human being think of their descendents possibly remote chances of failure in life?
Should the current world population take notice of us here on this website and just stop having children so they won't end up being suicidal? I'm sorry but i don't think suicidal people are that important to the world. There is too few of us to even make people wonder if their kids will be like us or not. It's not as if there is a "suicidal virus" going rampant and making people worried about their child's possible mental health.
