64
I'll give mine to get the ball rolling.
There was a user that, before getting banned, declared that every single living human being alive on Earth right now should not exist because no one had the benefit of a pre-conception device on hand to somehow determine each individual's consent to exist before they started to exist.
I don't know if that take would make David Benatar blush, make David Benatar cackle with glee, or if that was posted by David Benatar himself.
I summarized, yes, and it had been a while, and I did find the take unserious, but the core of their argument truly was that no living person got to consent to being born before being born, and therefore reproducing was immoral, and it would continue to be so unless technology found a way to derive consent from the unborn before their births.
idk they sound technically correct to me
I wasn't asked to be born, yet here I am and I'm glad to be alive. It is an unserious take to have, especially if applied to an entire society, to forbid births until a magic machine can seek birth consent.
You're glad to be alive after the fact but you still didn't consent to it and it is kinda fucked to bring people into a world that is literally filled with suffering
I agree I mean I'm just saying I think it's technically correct but at the same time also stupid and useless for the real world
Well, I was warned about provoking the antinatalists, and here we are.
Again, society dies in a generation and humanity ceases to exist if your ideological puritianism is successfully applied.
im not an anti natalist dawg
I said it's technically correct but stupid and useless applied to the real world
Idk why it's such a common thing on this site for people to not separate arguments being made, me saying it's technically correct that nobody consented to be born and that that's kinda messed up doesn't mean I'm a proponent of nobody being born!
Like instead of some absurd baby consent machine, just think "If you could ask and receive consent, should you?" and idk I think the answer in that case would be yeah, you should get consent before subjecting a living being to... gestures around
that doesn't mean I'm a proponent of ending the human race over an unanswerable, inactionable bit of philosophical wankery
we don't need to fight ulyssest when we agree on 90% of this
You lead with this, that's why.
If I had a big shiny button to build communism yes I'd press it but I don't have that button and that button isn't coming anytime soon, so I'd rather discuss things with more plausible presence than the big shiny communism button.
K. The thought experiment is silly to me anyway, and because the old user that leaned hard on it seemed to have an actual inclination toward "all reproduction is bad actually," that's why I brought it up to begin with.
a materialist (and i'm assuming non-malthusian, because the concern is consent) antinatalist wouldn't think such a machine is possible. if he's not making that part up or misremembering someone's strawman then my best guess is that it's a hyperbolic misunderstanding of "you'd have to meet an impossible standard"
Even with a fully hypothetical magical consent asking machine, any being capable of giving consent necessarily already exists.