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Also, we're talking about morality here, not a "value system that is destructive to human values". The mere existence of a value system makes it 'morality', even if you happen to disagree with it.

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"This person has no conscience. They care nothing for other people and their values. They kill, steal, torture, and abuse, and have no problem in doing so."

Why would a person who has no conscience logically kill, steal, torture, and abuse? Wouldn't such a person have no motivation to do anything, or if he does have a motivation, to care for only his own interests and won't kill/steal/torture/abuse if he feels that doing so would harm himself?

And furthermore, why would a person who has a conscience not kill, steal, torture and abuse? I could see systems of morality where doing these sort of things is justifiable for the 'greater good'.

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Can you show me a citation of a serious debate about forced pleasure drug consumption where a reputable classical utilitarian had a problem explaining why that is not utility maximizing?Bentham received, heavy criticism for simplifying all pleasure so that it was equivalent, although I don't know if he talked about heroin per se. John Stuart Mill argued against heroin use from the pragmatic standpoint that having lots of heroin users would make it hard to maintain society (although I think he opposed drug prohibition because it had even worse consequences), and that there were qualitative differences between intellectuals and physical pleasures.

I am arguing that a naive form of pleasure utilitarianism that held no other values than pleasure and did not distinguish between bodily and intellectual pleasures like Mill did would conclude that the best society is one where everyone is blissed out on drugs.

There is the argument that a society consisting only of heroin users would fall apart, but that is a pragmatic argument in response to technological and social constraints. Imagine a world where those restraints were removed. Imagine a world where we had nonsentient robots that could take over all the work. Then would not the best way to maximize pleasure be to keep everyone blissed out on drugs 24/7 while robots did all the work?

A good moral system has to produce good results in any situation that is physically and logically possible, not just in ones you can reasonably extrapolate from the present day. You can't dismiss some horrible conclusion of that moral system because it's impractical, you also have to dismiss it in the least convenient possible world where it is practical.

For the record I am a utilitarian, but I am also a value pluralist and think true utility consists of weighing many complex values that can't be reduced down to one thing.

Assuming that those lives are otherwise net neutral (the good and bad cancel each other exactly), and assuming the definition of “very satisfied lives” contains a utility equivalent of no more than one billion of the satisfied preferences. in the quintillions’ lives, then yes. But in that case, why is it repugnant? It means many more good experiences in the universe, while the rest is net neutral.Because it would result in the universe having a very low average utility. You can't just detach all the happy experiences from the people having them and add them up like that. Having them concentrated among fewer people would increase the average quality of life, which would be good.

Now, you might reply that the logical conclusion of that reasoning is to have one very happy and satisfied immortal supported by nonsentient robots. But that's only true if you think that average utility is the only value. If you value both total and average utility then it becomes better to have a fairly large amount of people living fairly high quality lives than to have either trillions of people with mediocre lives, or one ecstatic immortal (incidentally, it's also probably good to value equality distribution of utility to a limited extent).

Morality is about improving quality of life per life, not per life years experienced. If you want more evidence, consider the way when people find out a loved one is dying, they spend more time with them and try to make their last moments better. That is likely because they realize they didn't have as much time as they used to improve the quality of their loved one's life, they have to fit in more quality experience more quickly. The type of utilitarianism you describe would consider that behavior insane. If you can just detach positive experiences from the people having them and tally them up, it wouldn't matter whether the dying person was having them, or someone healthier. In fact, it might be worse, since the dying person might experience diminished returns from all the attention. But if you measure utility by life rather than life year it makes perfect sense. (you might argue that they're caring for the loved one to compensate for the pain of dying, but people behave the same way even if the cause of death is painless.)

If you want more evidence that aggregating utility separate from the people experiencing it is irrational, imagine two societies: One consists of 99 slaves who have a net total of -1 positive experiences in their life (that is, their good and bad experiences balance out except for one negative experience) and one slave owner with a net total of 201 positive experiences in his life. The other society consists of 100 free people with a net total of 1 positive experiences in their life. The first society has a net total of 102 positive experiences, while the second one has a total of 100. Yet I think we can agree the second society is morally superior.

[I skip the discussion of antinatalism as evil because I have a different view of what evil is than you do. Let's leave it at that.]I think I can show that the reasoning behind antinatalism is logically incoherent if one has something close to a normal human utility function, which I believe antinatalists do:

Benatar's argument is basically:1. It is good to stop pain and dissatisfaction.2. Implying that it is bad to stop pleasure and value satisfaction logically implies the Repugnant Conclusion. You cannot reject the Repugnant Conclusion and believe it is bad to stop pleasure without being logically incoherent.3. The Repugnant Conclusion is obviously wrong.4. Therefore, it is good to stop pain, but not bad to stop pleasure.5. Therefore, having children is bad, even if they live satisfied and pleasurable lives.

The most vulnerable point of his argument is points 2. If someone finds a way to simultaneously believe stopping pleasure and satisfaction is bad, but also reject the Repugnant Conclusion, without being logically incoherent, then anti-natalism is false. Alan Carter figured out how. Therefore, anti-natalism is false. (Incidentally, it's also false if you reject 3 and accept the Repugnant Conclusion, as you seem to have done, but I have other reasons for believing the RC is false.)

I can't really imagine how your conception of evil can be that different from mine. If I was to ask you why Joseph Stalin or Ted Bundy were evil would you say "Because they are irrational in some cosmic sense" or would you answer "Because they tortured and killed people"? Evil people are people who destroy human values (not being tortured and killed in the case of Stalin and Bundy), not people who are cosmically irrational.

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Because of the consequence of removing all moral agents. The future light cone of a world where all moral agents have been removed is (morally) chaotic.No, it's not. If the moral agent has a plausible model of what probably happens in that world, it has a clear outline of the expected utility of bringing about that world, compared to the expected utility of bringing about worlds where moral agents still exist. If the expected utility of the former is higher than that of the latter, it is rational for the moral agent to bring about that world, ending its own existence in the process. I thought that was obvious by now, I think I even gave an example.

I'll end the discussion here due to time constraints.

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[I skip the discussion of antinatalism as evil because I have a different view of what evil is than you do. Let's leave it at that.]

However, old-style “greatest pleasure for greatest number utilitarianism” did have this as a problem.Can you show me a citation of a serious debate about forced pleasure drug consumption where a reputable classical utilitarian had a problem explaining why that is not utility maximizing? I suspect you're making stuff up here. The negative consequences of forced heroin consumption are so obvious that I won't waste our time even outlining them here.

The Repugnant conclusion states that it is better to have quintillions of people who have one moment of satisfied preference in all their lives than billions of people with very satisfied lives.Assuming that those lives are otherwise net neutral (the good and bad cancel each other exactly), and assuming the definition of "very satisfied lives" contains a utility equivalent of no more than one billion of the satisfied preferences. in the quintillions' lives, then yes. But in that case, why is it repugnant? It means many more good experiences in the universe, while the rest is net neutral.

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@Dremora

An antinatalist could say “X is making children suffer; if you want to be a good person you shouldn’t make children suffer; the most reliable way of achieving is is to stop reproduction entirely.” It’s completely logically consistent, there’s nothing objectively evil about it.I don't use the word "evil" to refer to an objectively irrational value system that is somehow irrational in some cosmic sense. I use "evil" to refer to a value system that is destructive to human values. Antinatalism would destroy the entire human race, and the most human-like of animals, so obviously it's evil.

To put it in a more concrete sense, imagine someone who has antisocial personality disorder. This person has no conscience. They care nothing for other people and their values. They kill, steal, torture, and abuse, and have no problem in doing so. There is nothing intrinsically irrational about their behavior. But their behavior is objectively evil, because it is destructive to the values of other people. An exceptionally honest and reflective sociopath might well acknowledge that their behavior is evil, but this would not motivate them to stop, because they don't care about not being evil.

That being said, I do not think that anti-natalists are some bizarre sort of sociopath. I think they have the exact same kind of conscience that I do, but are failing to execute its desires properly. I think they are people who are trying to do good, but when reasoning about how best to do good effectively they screwed up and made a serious error (value monism) that cause them to do evil instead. This error causes them to monomaniacally focus on one value (pain minimization) and ignore all the other ones.

Moral disagreements are rarely about totally alien value systems. They are usually about "blind men and the elephant" type scenarios, where someone correctly identifies some aspect of value, but fails to realize value has other aspects, and hence maximizes one aspect to the detriment of others.

No, they would calculate the side-effects of such coercive action and realize it’s not utility maximizing.Modern preference utilitarianism would do that. However, old-style "greatest pleasure for greatest number utilitarianism" did have this as a problem. Bentham received a lot of criticism for not ranking some pleasures as more important than others. Preference utilitarianism fixed that, but until it was invented a major objection to utilitarianism was the supposed duty to force-feed people heroin.

I could always invent some hypothetical scenario where it was possible to force-feed people heroin with minimum coercion. But even in that scenario it would be wrong to do that because pleasure is not the only value.

No, because creating a “hell” of any kind is not maximizing total wellbeing. The Repugnant Conclusion is not repugnant if you take the realistic conditions for utility maximization seriously. The Repugnant conclusion states that it is better to have quintillions of people who have one moment of satisfied preference in all their lives than billions of people with very satisfied lives. That is bad because, while increasing the total amount of satisfied people in the world is important, it is a value that must be traded off against other important values, like increasing the average preference satisfaction per person.

The practical concerns you cite aren't relevant, I could always a construct hypothetical scenario that avoided things like existential risk, but still forced quintillion of people to live lousy lives. Such a scenario would still be immoral.

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People don't reproduce because of "aristocracy", the tiniest knowledge of Darwin should explain reproduction!

You seem confused about group selection. I am not here making a knock-down argument that it can never exist, but an individual limiting its own reproduction in order to lower the total population is exactly the sort of thing we shouldn't expect to see. That's basically the experiment Eliezer Yudkowsky discussed in The Tragedy of Group Selectionism.

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Shouldn't protection from disease/predators & deprivation REDUCE stress, just like liking in a developed country should? I believe in the mouse study the issue was overpopulation within a confined space. I'm not sure but I don't think birth rate gradients among humans map well on population density. Female education is generally considered the most important factor. And why should that increase stress?

As for the top-level post, there's really no basis for believing in moral facts at all.

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"Why"? Because of the consequence of removing all moral agents. The future light cone of a world where all moral agents have been removed is (morally) chaotic. Once the agents have no influence, it is impossible to steer the future toward moral "shouldness". This state is automatically lower in the agent's preference order simply because the agent has a moral system at all. It goes directly against the goal of morality which, as stated (far) above, is to constrain the future into a stronger probability of being higher in the agent's preference order of all possible futures.Preferences for the existence of life, pleasure, personhood, &c. may or may not follow from a less general specification of morality, but a preference for morality itself necessarily follows from the more general case I have stated.

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Antinatalism isn’t objectively wrong, but it is objectively evil.No. It is subjectively evil, from the perspective of someone who has other value priorities, such as you.

Being an antinatalist doesn’t violate any categorical imperatives, but it does violate the hypothetical imperative “if you want to be a good person you shouldn’t do X.”No, it doesn't. This depends entirely on how you define X. You implicitly assume that X should be defined by your personal value system, which is of course not a cosmic objective perspective, it's just yours. An antinatalist could say "X is making children suffer; if you want to be a good person you shouldn't make children suffer; the most reliable way of achieving is is to stop reproduction entirely." It's completely logically consistent, there's nothing objectively evil about it. You just personally disagree with the value prioritization.

Finally, to correct two misconceptions of other value systems:

Classical utilitarianism recommends forcing people to consume heroin because it focuses on pleasure at the expense of other values.No, they would calculate the side-effects of such coercive action and realize it's not utility maximizing.

The Repugnant Conclusion recommends creating a Malthusian hell because it focuses on total wellbeing at the expense of other values.No, because creating a "hell" of any kind is not maximizing total wellbeing. The Repugnant Conclusion is not repugnant if you take the realistic conditions for utility maximization seriously. Creating more starving children in a world of starving children does not increase total wellbeing, it decreases it. This is one reason why "the poor still smile" is a non-starter as an argument; it cannot replace sophisticated empirical analyses about the distribution of affect in those populations. Not to mention side-effects like sustainability issues and their effect on existential risk.

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Of course morality should exist. If you understand morality to be the sum total of all human values in a reflective equilibrium, then obviously it would be a very bad thing for morality to not exist, since it would mean that creatures that value things have ceased to exist.

Most forms of morality that are so counter-intuitive as to appear insane are bad because they focus on one tiny aspect of human values at the expense of all others. Classical utilitarianism recommends forcing people to consume heroin because it focuses on pleasure at the expense of other values. The Repugnant Conclusion recommends creating a Malthusian hell because it focuses on total wellbeing at the expense of other values. And anti-natalism recommends wiping out all life on Earth because it focuses on pain minimization at the expense of other values.

I think anti-natalism is one of the craziest of all because pain minimization isn't even a very important value on the hierarchy of values. People submit to pain to achieve other values all the time. I occasionally hurt myself on purpose just because I'm curious about the sensation. And occasionally people have hurt me against my will, for what they believe will be for my own benefit, and I've realized upon reflection that they were right and thanked them for it.

@Dremora

Why? This only makes sense if you already have a morality term for the mere existence of life, or of other positive values requiring life, such as pleasure or personhood and if you think that the expectation value of these positive terms compensates the expectation value of the negends. Where do all these assumptions come from, and why do some people here treat them as axiomatic, so that they do not simply consider the antinatalists as people with different values, but people with somehow broken or objectively incorrect values?It's not that their values are incorrect from some sort of cosmic objective perspective. It's that their values are incompatible with their desire to be good people (that is, people who effectively fulfill human values). Being an antinatalist doesn't violate any categorical imperatives, but it does violate the hypothetical imperative "if you want to be a good person you shouldn't do X." Antinatalism isn't objectively wrong, but it is objectively evil.

Similarly, I don't think the values of a murdering psychopaths are objectively wrong, I just think they're evil. The concept of morality exists independently of the desire to obey it. Fortunately, most people have an innate desire to be moral. I do use the term "morally wrong" on occasion, but I always mean "wrong if you want to be a good person," not "wrong in some cosmic sense."

From what I understand, anti-natalism originated from a failed attempt to systematize morality in order to "be good" more efficiently. Benatar's reasoning seems to be:1. The Repugnant Conclusion seems counterintuitive.2. One reason why that might be is that it is good to prevent pain, but not bad to prevent pleasure.3. If that is the case then it is bad to create people, since they will feel pain.

The flaw in Benatar's reasoning is that 2 is not the reason the Repugnant Conclusion is counterintuitive. The reason the Repugnant Conclusion is wrong is that it maximizes one value, total wellbeing, at the expense of all others. Benatar falsely assumes from this that because singlemindedly maximizing total well being is bad, it is bad to value total wellbeing at all. Alan Carter calls this "moral monism" and effectively demolishes it here here.

The Repugnant Conclusion and anti-natalism are to morality what being a Munchkin is to RPGs. In the same way a munchkin maximizes combat prowess at the expense of storytelling, atmosphere and camaraderie, those two moral systems maximize one tiny facet of value at the expense of the whole thing.

@Alrenous

If you believe in any ‘shoulds’ at all, you believe in morality. The only way to get out of it is to deny the existence of ‘should’ altogether, which then means neither Bryan nor counter-Bryan nor Hanson can be shown to be wrong. .I repeat: The concept of morality exists independently of the desire to obey it. You can believe in morality without believing in shoulds.

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Not really. It is preference.

My morality says it should exist. I prefer to follow my morality. And even if it is written on some rock of objective morality out there in the Tau Ceti star system that life shouldn't exist according to it, well gee wouldn't it be more fun to ignore it in favour of my own values?

What possible reason in the world do I have to conform to alien value systems?

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Meh the amount of suffering people experience today is overrated.

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@ Matt

No perception = No reality. That fallacious reasoning. No perception = no perception of reality. That does not infer the nonexistence of objective reality.

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Let me speak only for myself: I want to have the option to commit suicide at any time I choose, with any means I choose, as long as I am not putting others in physical danger by doing so. And no, by "putting others in physical danger", I don't mean by refraining from protecting other potential suicides from the consequences of their own choices. I mean direct danger like jumping on their heads.

If I want to go to a drug store and buy a painless deadly drug to take, I should have that right. If other people deprive me from it, they are aggressors.

I don't care about your moral crusade against the rich. You can tax them all you want if you have the political clout. But don't tell me I am not allowed to die simply because you say so, or because you think you can remove all potential reasons for rational suicide by political activism. This was never realistic, and it will never be realistic. There are countless non-psychological reasons why a person might want to end their lives. Rational suicides aren't idiots. They don't kill themselves for no reason. They kill themselves for instrumental reasons.

If I were to choose to reliably and painlessly die tomorrow, I want to be able to reliably and painlessly die tomorrow. Any person or institution who actively works to prevent me from having this option will be treated by me as an enemy. They are hostile agents actively working to undermine my liberty and increase the amount of suffering I will have to experience, against my explicit will.

Spoken as a true libertarian, concerned with the oppressiveness of providing food to starving children because it deprives their parents of the joy of providing for them by working 16 hours a day.I don't know where you find starving children in my post, but the oppressive part in your position is the reduction of personal options, such as suicide, that I personally want to have. That said, since we are in an antinatalism thread, parents are indeed responsible for creating their children, and I do think that they should not have the right to do so unless they have the means to provide food, clothes, shelter, medical services, water, and a baseline of education for them.

Tyler Cowen recently linked to a discussion about restricting the total number of children per family in Nigeria to 3. Cowen and many commentors on his blog seemed to see it as an unacceptable invasion of personal liberty of the parents. But if the antinatalists have one strong point, then it's that reproduction isn't about self-determination only, it is primarily about other-determination. After all, whether you judge it as good or bad or something in between, it is clearly a non-consensual imposition on third parties, namely the children. It seems clear to me that this is more of a privilege than a right, and it should be conditional - the least you can expect is that parents are willing and able to compensate the needs of the children that were non-consensually created by them.

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Spoken as a true libertarian, concerned with the oppressiveness of providing food to starving children because it deprives their parents of the joy of providing for them by working 16 hours a day.

Much better to allow them “freedom through work”? Most infamously remembered in the German;

Arbeit macht frei.

The cause of suicide is the feeling that one's life is so painful that one would be better off dead. Feelings that one's life is so painful that one would be better off dead is a pretty good definition of depression.

Is that the mental calculation that the Nazis did? Work and starve the slaves in the concentration camps so hard that their life was a living hell and so tortured that their tormentors could imagine they would be better off dead and feel that killing them was actually a benefit for them?

When you want to facilitate the ability of people to kill themselves while simultaneously exploiting them and increasing the likelihood that they will want to kill themselves aren't you doing the exact same thing?

When someone bullies a victim until the victim commits suicide, is the bully guilt-free? Who benefits from making suicide easier? You must think that the people who benefit are those who kill themselves to escape being bullied. The bully certainly doesn't benefit, the bully loses a victim.

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