/lit/ - Literature

>>10334794
Benetar isn't a proponent of suicide; he just things that human as a species should stop procreating because we invariably experience pain and suffering.

>>10334800
thinks*

>>10334800
Benatar*

>>10334794
It isn't insistence -- insist from Latin insistere ‘persist,’ from in- ‘upon’ + sistere ‘stand.’ -- but under-standing existence

I didn't choose this life, it choose me and it wants me to suffer.

>>10334800
First of all, thanks for correctly understanding his argument, I used to be into a lot of the antinatalist stuff and most people completely miss the point.

As for why I abandoned it... it's basically Hedonistic Utilitarianism. It assumes that good or ought can only derived from the suffering it reduces. There is more to life than pleasure or pain, otherwise we may as well just give in to every vice.

From a materialist standpoint, they are essentially right. However, once you start to believe in metaphysics and something beyond, they have no argument.

The belief that everything can be reduced and proven, that science will solve everything, leads directly to nihilism because the meaning which we most strongly connect to is discarded as fantasy.

If you don't think there is anything beyond pleasure/pain then antinatalism is a very rational position. However, the belief that there is nothing else is an irrational position because it assumes knowing far more than we can and stands contrary to the increasing evidence that there is more than just matter.

tl;dr Given the choice between only two qualitative states, I would choose meaningful pain over meaningless pleasure

>>10334794
I'm for one am enjoying myself

>>10334865
How about showing life you're not some random autist to be pushed around but a godmade man who picks his suffering himself?

Don't want to make my parents upset.

>>10334794
Ceasing to exist is not the same as having never existed. Take a logic class sometime.

>>10334800
Can you physically be more of a cuck than this?

>>10334916
As a Stoic I don't put much stock in antinatalism, but that said there's no reason to mischaracterise it as an argument for mass suicide.

>>10334794
is there a bigger sign of being a huge brainlet pseud than antinatalism?

>>10334879
even without metaphysics they have no argument

>>10335361
Being extroverted seems worse.

>>10334916
'nobody should have children' kills the cuckoo

>>10334800
/thread
Also, [insert obligatory "lol spooks" joke here].

>>10334879
That's not the only flaw in the argument, though. One could also argue that a birth is a benefit to the parents (or, at least, the father), or that the existence of a new person is a good thing because (in society as it stands) their suffering will be directed towards providing services to others.

The "asymmetry between pleasure and pain" is also a bit of a silly distinction, because it assumes you can't apply something like three-valued logic to ethics. Suppose a state can be either
>good
>bad
or
>neither good nor bad.
The negation of "good" is "neither good nor bad," not "bad." Likewise, the negation of "bad" is "neither good nor bad," not "good." And, for the sake of completeness, we can say that the negation of "neither good nor bad" is indeterminate, but it must be either "good" or "bad." We can go bonkers with truth tables and the like, but the main thing to realize here is that a state of non-suffering and a state of non-pleasure are both "neither good nor bad."

>>10334916
>not realizing that once your wife has kids you'll have sex way less often
If anything, childbirth is top cuck. You & your wife could take the same & money time you spend on a kid and have a fuck-around-the-world trip instead.

>tl;dr Having kids is fine, but why the fuck would you want kids?

>>10334794

I still think there is some finite chance I am a drake in a shadowrun alt-canon.

there's more to life than just pain and pleasure

>>10334794
Have you even read this? >>10334800 and >>10334911 are correct. Even in his intro he looks forward to his later chapters where he says (a) never existing is not the same thing as ceasing to exist, (b) everyone is in pain when alive which would have made it preferable to not exist, but now that we DO exist, the pain we would have to feel to prefer to not CONTINUE existing must be higher than the pain we would have liked to avoid not by living at all, so (c) antinatalism does not necessarily entail suicide.

Man does not strive for happiness,only the Englishman does.

>>10334916
Sure, it's called being a dad.

>Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child.

I want Benatar to be on the Waking Up podcast desu.

Would be fun seeing Sammy the utilitarian die of cognitive dissonance.

Buddha, Schopenhauer, benetar, etc. all argue against suicide despite the problems of life. Suicide because of suffering is the mark of a pleb.

Is «the last messiah» worth a read?

>it's another episode of /lit/ doesn't understand antinatalism or the distinction between committing suicide and not procreating
>>10336994
Yes.

To be honest i don't experience enough pain to want to stop living. If i decided to stop, i would regret it more than if i kept going, but maybe who knows, time might change my mind