rationaldeath
Member
- Dec 10, 2021
- 84
One of the reasons my decision to ctb came easily is because of my philosophy on life and death. I believe morality is ultimately subjective, and good/bad are merely expressions of one's desires.
While our desires are not completely uniform, I think if we stripped away all of our ungrounded societal beliefs we would find we are entirely driven by our own experience of suffering and pleasure. This includes selfless acts, as empathy for another person still requires ourselves to experience one of these two states.
Now assuming you do have empathy how do you determine which actions to take towards other people? Something I notice about our societal moral system is we use quantity of people as a primary metric, in the sense that it's better for one person to suffer immensely than a million people to suffer moderately. This makes sense on a societal level as larger groups have more influence to dictate beliefs that cater to their interests. But stripping away those societal level beliefs as an individual we're left with just empathy.
How do you empathize with another person? You recognize that they are like you, they also have consciousness and experience suffering and pleasure. You put yourself in their shoes, and act according to how you would want them to if roles were reversed.
Now can you empathize with a group of people? You can with each individual member of the group. If 100 people stub their toe you can relate to what each of them is feeling. But can you empathize with the entity "100 people"? Is there a conscious experience of "100 people stubbing their toe" that you can relate to? If not, I think drawing arbitrary lines around sets of people then assigning it higher value than an individual doesn't make sense if you base your actions in empathy.
So the last question is this: is preventing suffering or creating pleasure more important? Those who are against antinatalism usually argue that continuing humanity is a net good because the experiences of pleasure outweigh the suffering that will occur. If we remove the "more people = better" societal belief this all comes down to deciding whether creating the person with the best life is worth creating the person with the worst life.
In the end it's all just intuition, but to me the depths of suffering are more bad than the heights of pleasure are good, and it doesn't feel fair that one person suffers so another can be happy. Looking at most people's actions it seems we already prioritize the prevention of suffering in most situations anyway, so I don't think antinatalism would necessarily be that far of a leap if carefully considered.
I also applied this same type of negative utilitarian thinking to my own life. I view the future good experiences I will have as not worth the future bad ones, and death being without experience is completely neutral so I concluded suicide is the correct choice for me to make.
While our desires are not completely uniform, I think if we stripped away all of our ungrounded societal beliefs we would find we are entirely driven by our own experience of suffering and pleasure. This includes selfless acts, as empathy for another person still requires ourselves to experience one of these two states.
Now assuming you do have empathy how do you determine which actions to take towards other people? Something I notice about our societal moral system is we use quantity of people as a primary metric, in the sense that it's better for one person to suffer immensely than a million people to suffer moderately. This makes sense on a societal level as larger groups have more influence to dictate beliefs that cater to their interests. But stripping away those societal level beliefs as an individual we're left with just empathy.
How do you empathize with another person? You recognize that they are like you, they also have consciousness and experience suffering and pleasure. You put yourself in their shoes, and act according to how you would want them to if roles were reversed.
Now can you empathize with a group of people? You can with each individual member of the group. If 100 people stub their toe you can relate to what each of them is feeling. But can you empathize with the entity "100 people"? Is there a conscious experience of "100 people stubbing their toe" that you can relate to? If not, I think drawing arbitrary lines around sets of people then assigning it higher value than an individual doesn't make sense if you base your actions in empathy.
So the last question is this: is preventing suffering or creating pleasure more important? Those who are against antinatalism usually argue that continuing humanity is a net good because the experiences of pleasure outweigh the suffering that will occur. If we remove the "more people = better" societal belief this all comes down to deciding whether creating the person with the best life is worth creating the person with the worst life.
In the end it's all just intuition, but to me the depths of suffering are more bad than the heights of pleasure are good, and it doesn't feel fair that one person suffers so another can be happy. Looking at most people's actions it seems we already prioritize the prevention of suffering in most situations anyway, so I don't think antinatalism would necessarily be that far of a leap if carefully considered.
I also applied this same type of negative utilitarian thinking to my own life. I view the future good experiences I will have as not worth the future bad ones, and death being without experience is completely neutral so I concluded suicide is the correct choice for me to make.
