neural douche
Antinatalism is the view that creating new, sentient life is an act of cruelty. The philosopher David Benatar argues for antinatalism using the argument from asymmetry. The asymmetry argument is best summarized as claiming that while existence entails some good and some bad, nonexistence entails no good (which is neutral) and no bad (which is a positive.) He uses several common intuitions to back up this claim. For one, he notes that while individuals who are able to provide a good life for a child do not have a duty to have children, we generally consider those who cannot provide for a child as having a duty not to have children. Benatar also claims that while it is possible for life to go so wrong that we may conclude some unfortunate individuals would have been better of not being born, we cannot regret the non-lives of the non-existent. Much of Benatar’s argument can be traced back to a quote by Arthor Schopenhauer, “… it is quite superfluous to dispute whether there is more ...