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SvetlanaButosky t1_j7glo6j wrote

Reply to comment by Joe_Fart in /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | February 06, 2023 by BernardJOrtcutt

That's the thing, they dont care about the numbers, they will say its not worth it and annihilation is the only moral thing to do, because as long as we cant 100% totally prevent suffering for all living things, then life is not justified.

They dont care about asymmetry, its the perpetual existence of suffering that they focus on, unless we could give them a guarantee that suffering will be eradicated for all living things in the next 10 years or something. lol

1% or 99% makes no difference to them because they want 0% suffering, if they cant get zero, then they will continue to advocate for total annihilation.

Is this philosophy convincing enough for most people's moral intuition and valuation of existence?

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Joe_Fart t1_j7gufc2 wrote

It is not convincing and even though I cannot find any phil survey about this, I would say a brutal majority of philosopher would dismiss it independently on their moral theory preferences (virtue ethics, consenquentialsts, deontologists, other)

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j7n2k3r wrote

Well, virtue ethics and deontology are kinda arbitrary so not that great at refuting or supporting such a claim either way.

But I do agree the consequentialist and even positive utilitarian would have much better counter arguments based on the quantity and quality of current existence.

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Joe_Fart t1_j7omeqa wrote

They are arbitrary but good luck to someone who would like to pick as his virtue or a rule to annihilate everything and then try to justify it by dialectics or with the God or the system in case of deontology. That is why the most of ethic theorisrs would just dismiss this idea as absolute non-sense.

Of course the positive utilitarists are the closest one in sense of similar approach or reasoning so they arguments would be the most comprehensible for negative utilitarists or promortalists.

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j7potp3 wrote

I agree, Antinatalism, Pro mortalism and Negative utilitarianism have become dogmatic beliefs more than rational arguments.

Their underlying premises dont inform their conclusions about existence.

"Life has some suck in it so we must end all life" is not a convincing argument for most people, lol.

Life having some suck simply doesnt lead to we must end all life, not without some really dogmatic glue to stick them both together.

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Joe_Fart t1_j7puz6g wrote

Yeah, I totally agree. Even if they are logically consistent with their reasoning, not many people will agree with their premises and conclusion. Hopefully it will stay on the ground of bad philosophy.

However there is some interesting challanges like repugnant conclusion for a future philosophers to solve. Hopefully, there wont be so many negative utilitarists. We need more Nietszches not more Schopenhauers.

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j7szadd wrote

>repugnant conclusion

I dont think this is as big an issue as some people exaggerated, I mean once you have a good benchmark of what is decent living, you will not lower it dramatically just to accommodate more people, that's ridiculous, people just dont live like this. Humans prefer quality way more over quantity, this is why the birthrate is dropping despite increasing quality of life.

Its a bizarre philosophical thought experiment that assumes people will behave like calculative AI. lol

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Joe_Fart t1_j7tw6cp wrote

I mean people may prefer quality over quantity in our developed world, but it is not a case for some developing countries. There is some shift or realization point where the curve changes. Anyway it is funny that you mention AI cause for a discussion like this we can just feed the chatgpt with request for an answer and the n pretend its us who wrote it. The discussion on internet will never be the same, I enjoyed this.

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SvetlanaButosky t1_j7w2gbd wrote

I tried ChatGPT with antinatalism, it gave me very crappy generic answers.

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ddd12547 t1_j7hftjq wrote

Ill take a stab at trying to help your point as i see it... imagine that the subscribers to this belief are or feel like ants or automatons, or beings or something that are small and inconsequential, and the reducible of all things from to 1 and 0 isn't a large leap of number crunching. from infinite down to zero, more like something small down to zero (Reduce before reducing) continuing in the system as the small who feel smallest see it, to work/live struggle to further add to suffering et al would seem unconscionable so long as suffering et al (you use the perennial trolley problem) would be continuing to grow even as a byproduct of any work or efforts.

In this particular zero sum trap... which I take it you seem to find more funny than tangible as a working philosophy (not saying I disagree)... annihilation is like a death wish.... I think a more fair evaluation would be what is annihilated is the effort and motivation to continue contributing to living (which isn't quite a death wish but no less problematic, I hope we can agree). Like a bug that won't work, or a piece of a system or robot that lies down or spins in place instead of finishing its task/job. The death of traction, or motive to build or create or add to anything is their illness, and that illness can only be described (to them) as suffering.

Which is to say the valuation of that philosophy is that its a problem akin to depression or mental illness that probably doesn't need to be laughed away or casually dismissed but Rather dissected carefully like in an autopsy and studied closely.

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