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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> This doesn’t hold up. It is effectively denying that people will be born in the future

No, it merely denies that people that do not exist can have moral duties owed to them.

We could destroy the planet leaving all future generations screwed and that's okay because they are owed nothing? If that thinking passed muster we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's obviously maladaptive.

I don't think that is the argument, because it presupposes those future generations exist. The argument is that if we somehow prevented those future generations from existing (without violating our duties to any currently existing peoples) then we wouldn't owe a duty to them. I think this is pretty obviously true. But some people do disagree and say that we have a duty to ensure that future generations do exist.

*You* are the future generation of your ancestors. I assume you would not have wanted to live in a universe when humanity was wiped out aeons ago, or left to some Mad Max existence. The people making that argument do so from the luxury of not having had many ancestors that held such misanthropic beliefs.

I would ask them to contemplate Kant's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

> I assume you would not have wanted to live in a universe when humanity was wiped out aeons ago

I am pretty sure it would be impossible for that to occur, unless you are talking to a non-human (in which case they very much might want that.)

This is a thought experiment where we consider the ramifications of holding this belief. In a universe where this belief is held, your existence may be thoroughly miserable. Would you accept that? And even if you did personally, on what basis do you have the right to make this decision for everybody else? The rational and moral behavior is for you to decide your own fate and leave others alone.

> This is a thought experiment where we consider the ramifications of holding this belief.

If we are waving away the natural laws of the universe (which we must for the hypothetical to be possible) than the consequences can be anything anyone in the sevate chooses them to be, because there is no longer any rule between cause and effect.

We are not waving anything away. If you mess up the planet, you will be worse off and cursing your anti-natalist ancestors. Antinatalism negates itself on a timescale longer than a generation. It is anti-Darwinian. We exist because such idiots already killed themselves off, or others smacked some sense into them.

>I assume you would not have wanted to live in a universe when humanity was wiped out aeons ago, or left to some Mad Max existence.

But if that had happened, none of us would have been born to care anyway.

I'm not arguing for antinatalism, but this seems like a strange argument.

Nope, I'm saying that that which is not born, is owed nothing. There's no "future person" that you owe it to, to create..

There will be persons in the future, and those persons, you do have an obligation toward.

But the argument here, is about whether there is a duty to create a person, so that they can have good.. And, as there is no person before that person has been created, there is nobody to be owed this good, therefore, there is no obligation to create that person..

If your anti-natalism does not harm people with the intention of having children, that is fine. People who have an intention to have children do have moral obligations to meet before the child is conceived.

I don't believe in harming anyone who exists. I do think that it is in principle, less wrong to harm someone by denying them the right to violate another. It has been shown elsewhere that it is a fundamental violation of the created, to create them, regardless of their life-outcome.

The Value-null perspective is that it's not needed to consider the life-outcome, the moral wrongness of creating someone stands without it, and so, eliminates the weak side of Benatar's asymmetry argument.

However, I don't believe morality and policy should always go hand in hand, and my stance on policy is that, people should be allowed to have children if they wish so, but they should do it with the implications in mind, and they must be able to stand up to the duties involved.

I am a parent myself, I feel a tremendous responsibility, duty, towards my child, I do not regret having them, I do not wish that they were never born, I love them more than anything. People do wrong things all the times, often for the right reasons, but people should understand what they're doing, and why it might be wrong, before making the decision, they should understand the responsibility, both practical and morally, that comes with their actions.

I'm not arguing that this means to prevent your child from all pain in the world, but to prepare them for life in a way that maximizes the likelihood that they have a good life. I'm merely arguing that life in and off itself is not inherently a gift (though it can certainly be a net positive), and that there responsibilities therefore reach widely beyond the fact of having created the kid and kept them alive.

> We could destroy the planet leaving all future generations screwed and that's okay because they are owed nothing?

I’m not saying it is okay, I’m saying that, for people who reject a moral duty to non-existent people, any argument that it is not okay must rest on something other than a duty to hypothetical people that may or may not ever come into existence depending on events that have not yet occurred (and which may include the very thing whose moral acceptability is being debated.)

> If that thinking passed muster we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's obviously maladaptive.

I mean, if chattel slavery never existed, we (the specific people having this conversation) wouldn't be having this discussion, either, but I don’t think “it is in the course of history leading up to the present discussion” is an argument for an idea being correct.

This is confused thinking. People who support slavery would not want to trade places with their slaves. A moral position that depends on such accidents of birth are not worthy of consideration, and this applies to the anti-natalist argument. Only people where anti-natalists haven't wrecked the planet could and would support anti-natalism. Who wants to be worse off?

If the actions I take now will affect someone I know will exist in the future and who will be owed duties, I effectively have a moral duty. You can say the moral duty is not in existence until the person is actually born, but my duty to that future person has to be taken into account now so it already exists in a meaningful sense.

The argument is specifically treating the duty to create new people, not any other duties. A common argument against antinatalism, is that we have a duty to create new people, because if we don't create them, they can't have good lives..

That would be true, if there was an actual pool of unborn people, like, some metaphysical vault of people yet to be born, waiting for their turn.. In _THAT_ case, we _would_ have a duty to create them, so that they can have good lives, and experience all the amazing stuff we get to experience..

However, since there's no such vault, there is no duty to create them, there is nobody that is owed life on the grounds that if they do not get it, they are deprived of it.. because people that are not born yet, do not actually exist in any way.

That does not eliminate any duty towards the unspecific mass of people that will indeed be born in the future, regardless of whether creating them is wrong or right, there is still a moral duty to attempt to make the world as good a place for them to be in..

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