100% of children would die. The world was awful, is awful and continue to be awful. We bring sentient beings to life to only subject them to the inevitable death.
The world sucks? Maybe so. It also contains food, love, music, children, laughter, grandparents, trees, cats, and just fuckin' pathos, man.
Try not to waste it!
As for the pathos, I've a hard time believing it compensates for even a billionth of say, the suffering of an abused child. There's no doubt that it would have better (impersonally, as Derek Parfit used that word) if the world didn't exist. But now that you're here, might as well enjoy it, but perpetuating it doesn't seem wise.
I strongly doubt this, for what little that's worth.
Better by what metric? Better for whom?
From Derek Parfit's On What Matters, chapter 126 (Has It All Been Worth It?):
> If someone dies a slow and painful death, it would have been both better for this person, and impersonally better, if this person’s life had ended earlier. The last part of this person’s life was worse than nothing, or in itself bad. We can reach similar conclusions about the whole of someone’s life. If someone’s life contains much prolonged suffering, and nothing or little that is good, it would have been both better for this person, and impersonally better, if this person’s life had ended just after it started. Things may be in one way different if we suppose instead that this person’s life had never even started. Perhaps we could not claim that this alternative would have been better for this person. But when we ask which alternative would have been impersonally better, there is little difference between these two comparisons. Since it would have been better if this person’s life had stopped just after it started, it would also have been better if this person’s life had never started. In other words, it would have been impersonally better if this wretched person had never existed. And since such claims make sense when applied to one person, they also make sense when applied to all conscious beings, or to the whole of reality.
Parfit thinks it was/is worth it, given the good things in life, and using future improvements in QoL as one of the arguments.
I don't. What amount of pathos, pleasure, love, beauty, could justify the life and suffering of even one person who say, was raped and murdered in childhood? It would be very difficult to justify the creation of a world given that tradeoff, but people are much hesitant to accept that it is unjustified now that it already exists.
As for this question:
> What amount of pathos, pleasure, love, beauty, could justify the life and suffering of even one person who say, was raped and murdered in childhood?
I'm not really in the business of doing these sorts of utilitarian calculations, and I think this back-and-forth is a great example of why I don't think they lead anywhere useful. But it seems to me that you could make the same argument as Parfit above in reverse.
If someone led an essentially perfect life for 100 years, filled with all the things we all agree make life good, but then was subjected to 30 seconds of torture and then murdered, that's still a good life on net, and I think you'd be hard pressed to make a serious argument that those 30 seconds of intense suffering at the end are terrible enough to make that life not having been worth living.
So, by the same kind of induction that Parfit does above, it seems you could contrive a situation where the vast amount of universal conscious flourishing being experienced by, let's say, quadrillions or consciousnesses would "outweigh" the suffering of however many millions of apes it took to get there.
And even in the particular case of a horribly murdered child, is it universally true that no life ending in that manner could have been worth the suffering at the end? If a child lives ten wonderful years with loving parents, doing all the best things a child can do, but then dies horribly, can we be sure that life wasn't worth living? That it would be better on net had it never happened?
I'm not sure, and like I said, I don't typically go in for arguments that work on this basis. I'll admit that's probably partially because they feel distasteful, but I think there's also an intuition worth examining that those types of arguments don't really work, that they miss something critical about subjective experience when we try to sum up all the goods and bads of a life into some metric that can assign that life into a bucket of "worth living" or "not worth living."
tl;dr - I'm not convinced, and I'm happy I exist.
That's incredibly boring though.
You might feel it's your place to say things like "don't waste your life" or "seek therapy", assuming I haven't tried or don't know about these options. For a long time, I envied people like you, those who wake up every day with a reason, thinking there was something wrong with me. But the truth is, I was just born this way.
So, unless you can magically ensure that any life you bring into this world won't be burdened with a brain predisposed to unending existential suffering, I'd argue that you're not seeing the full picture.
Antinatalism (the philosophy that having kids is immoral) has nothing to do with life expectancy.