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According to him, all affirmative ethical theories—regardless of being deontological, utilitarian or virtue ethics—end up articulating certain fundamental ideas, which he sums up in what he calls Fundamental Ethical Articulation (or FEA). He calls these classical ethical theories “positive” because their implied starting point is that the human being has a positive structural value, something Cabrera will question. For Cabrera, the human being has a structural lack of value which he or she fights against for the entirety of his or her life by trying to create positive values. . . However, there exists a grave problem which makes practicing ethics—formulated as the FEA—nearly impossible. He names this problem the profound discomfort:

a) At birth, human beings are endowed with a kind of decreasing being (or 'decaying' being), a being that starts to end as soon as it emerges, and whose final end can occur at any moment.

b) From the moment they first appear, humans are affected by three kinds of friction: physical pain (in the form of diseases, accidents and catastrophes to which they are always exposed); discouragement (in the form of a 'lack of will' to continue acting, from the simple tedium vitae to severe forms of depression); and, finally, exposure to the aggressive actions of other humans (in the form of discrimination, chatter, gossip, slander, exclusion, persecution, injustice, physical and psychological torture, and even extermination), themselves also subjected to the three types of friction.

c) Humans are equipped with mechanisms that create positive values and act as defenses from a) through b), which humans must constantly keep active against the advances of their decreasing or decaying being and its three kinds of friction, and have the ability to delay, soften, embellish and forget the frictional emergence of birth.

Cabrera calls the characteristics a-through-b the terminality of being. This terminality of being is not just linked to our final death, which he calls punctual death (PD), but to the process as a whole, from the emergence of being until its perishing. He names the process of emergence and submission of being to the terminal structure as structural death (SD), something to which we are all submitted to and can't escape. Even if we were capable of inventing a way to live forever as humans, given the characteristics described in the triple friction and the constant creation of positive values (which always end up denying the values of others, even when we don't intend to), we would still be submitted to SD.

According to him, “(...) the terminal structure of being, the original lack of value of human life as profound discomfort, the always reactive character of our positive values in relation to the terminal structure, and the presence of suffering in its triple structural manifestation, pain, discouragement and, especially, moral impediment (...)” (CABRERA, 2018) requires from us a different kind of normative ethic than hedonism, eudaimonism, deontological, utilitarian, etc, since all of these positive ethical theories end up disappointing the FEA at some point. Exemples: when a hedonist seeks to build positive values via pleasurable experiences, more than likely he or she ends up affecting others negatively, regardless of his or her intentions; when a eudaimonist seeks to be virtuous, he or she ends up ignoring or harming others in their terminality, whether wanting it or not; the deontologist might cause harm to other morally impeded beings—the famous Kantian categorical imperative which prohibits lying even in order to save a human life is a great example of how deontologists may end up harming others by pursuing this type of positive ethical theory.

Therefore, positive ethics are not capable of maintaining the FEA. Sooner or latter they will fail. When striving for a “good life”, the eudaimonist ends up stepping on someone's toes. While fulfilling a moral duty, the deontologist ends up causing harm to someone. In his search for maximizing well-being or minimizing discomfort, the utilitarian ends up making choices that will also cause someone to be harmed in some way, whether or not he or she wants it. This moral impediment makes Cabrera think of a negative ethic, an ethic which makes the FEA absolute, above life itself—contrary to Nietzsche, for example, who proposed making life an absolute parameter that is above all other things, even ethics.

https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2020/11/pessimism-and-antinatalism-in-south.html