Anti-Natalism - A solution for ending materialistic human suffering

[zazen]

21 minutes ago, zurew said:

Just to be clear, under your view  -  it wasnt rape , because there wasnt any conscious subject who could agree or disagree to the act. 

 

Also again under your view, the mother who is using heroin during pregnancy isnt doing anything bad, since its just a clump of cells and there isnt anyone (a subject) who is being harmed.

What kind of moral responsibility are you talking about there, the welfare of a clump of cells?

 

 

Yes and its very obvious that this is the case. 

 

I can easily generate more examples. 

One psychopath pays 10 million dollars to a dude to rape the next future sentient person. Its guaranteed that the rape will happen but the person who will be raped is just a clump of cells right now. Is the act of paying 10 million dollars to the future rapist a violation of future consent or not?

I already wrote “Someone who is unconscious still exists as a subject with right to bodily autonomy. Their capacity for consent exists even when they’re not currently exercising it - and that anyone overriding it makes it unethical to begin with.”

I also covered how moral responsibility still applies to actions that foreseeably affect a future subject. You’re responsible for what those cells will become, but you can’t “violate consent” of what doesn’t yet exist just as Basman is pointing out to you also. 

Your mistaking the intention to cause harm for the act of violating consent. 

Paying someone today to commit a future rape is morally evil because it expresses premeditated intent and complicity, not because it “violates future consent.” Consent can’t be violated until there’s a consenting subject - what exists now is your corrupt intention, not the act itself. The moral wrongness lies in planning harm, not in breaching an imaginary contract with a being who doesn’t yet exist. 

Your just doubling down, collapsing categories and trying to strawman me because your logic is incoherent and your Saturday night live performance of gotcha flopped.

[zurew]

2 hours ago, zazen said:

I already wrote “Someone who is unconscious still exists as a subject with right to bodily autonomy. Their capacity for consent exists even when they’re not currently exercising it - and that anyone overriding it makes it unethical to begin with.”

Making the subject a p-zombie who never was a subject and because of that never had bodiliy autonomy doesnt make the rape any more okay (at least not under my view, under your view it might be okay, because there isnt any such thing as future violation of consent).

2 hours ago, zazen said:

Paying someone today to commit a future rape is morally evil because it expresses premeditated intent and complicity, not because it “violates future consent.” Consent can’t be violated until there’s a consenting subject - what exists now is your corrupt intention, not the act itself. The moral wrongness lies in planning harm, not in breaching an imaginary contract with a being who doesn’t yet exist. 

Its entailed in the example that there will be a consenting subject (at the time when the act will be executed). Its literally entailed and decided at the moment of paying the psychopath for it. Its not just a plan to do it. Its a deterministic event  which caused at the moment of payment.

2 hours ago, zazen said:

Your mistaking the intention to cause harm for the act of violating consent. 

No im not mistaking it, you are trying to reduce the example down to just intent, but its not just intent, because in the example its entailed that it will necessarily happen once the payment is done.

The payment is the causal factor that necessarily leads to the rape.

Some guy already made this argument for me:

Quote

3 hours ago, zazen said:

The act was unethical the moment it began because it was done without consent. The subsequent reaction can bring about forgiveness  or trauma - but it can’t retroactively change the immoral nature of the initial choice. Consent is the necessary condition that must be present before the act, not a lucky outcome that might appear after.

 

2 hours ago, zazen said:

Your just doubling down, collapsing categories and trying to strawman me because your logic is incoherent and your Saturday night live performance of gotcha flopped.

No the main point  still stands regardless who wins the label battle. The only thing that was done is  a re-labeling and the categorization thats put on it.

Whether you want to label necessarily subjugating your future kid to having capacity for experiences and to a set of really negative experiences (including the realization that he/she will die) as a "violation of future consent" or  just "moral responsibility" doesnt change the substance in any way and it doesnt really refute the main point that most anti-natalists make.

You didnt show how they are wrong in any way, all you did was you appealed to a different set of moral intuitions that you have.

You also  managed to somehow tie another topic yet again back to"west is bad"  as if that would be relevant to anything. We understand your traumas dude, but this is not a therapy session. Is the west in the room with us right now? 

You also managed to bring up the beyond stupid bro science "argument" against veganism by appealing to history like how all low tier debaters approach the topic.

Edited 12 hours ago by zurew

[ryoko]

Those who had children and is somewhat "functional" will reject these ideologies, because experience makes them "feel" otherwise. It's essential for their survival. You have to feel good while having children and looking after them. There's no point debating anti-natalism to most of the world, when having children is like the default, and it's a lot of work to get into a non default frame. 

I love non-existence. I'd rather never be born. The best gift I can give to my children is non existence, by never making them in the first place. 

I love life, I enjoy life despite all the suffering(of others). If that's a bucket of fun, non-existence is an ocean of fun, infinite. What I call life is inclusive of the non existence. May be that's why I love it, and I see earthly life as a pain in the matrix, what's the point of pointless distractions. 

Edited 9 hours ago by ryoko

[Basman]

6 hours ago, zazen said:

Agreed. It's difficult for many people to get by on their own let alone support a family, if they can even partner up with someone to begin with. The problem comes when suffering is taken and universalized as a moral stance in the form of a philosophy in order to cope with that suffering. People feel a need to identity their stance and choices as ''positions''.

They journey from identifying as childless - which sounds negative (because less implies lack), then it becomes childfree (which sounds more noble because ''freedom''), but then that sound selfish so it must go the next step and become a ethical concern that shows how much you care - anti-natalism.

Lifestyle choices are elevated into ''identities'' and moral philosophies as a compensation for being metaphysically displaced and uprooted from any sort of transcendent identity or belonging - that a mechanised, scientifically rational, materialist culture stripped from them. That's why we have all kinds of subgroups propping up and peoples identities tied to them.

It's not simply ''I don't want to have children due to my personal circumstance not being viable'' instead its ''having children is unethical due to lack of consent and introducing them to a life of suffering they have no say in'' and subjecting this moral standard onto others who fall short of it. The philosophy itself is self-negating and self-terminating if adopted at scale and if it were to be a universal ethic or truth. But it’s just a circumstantial choice in a persons life.

I'd be very careful with characterizing ethical beliefs as instrumentalizing as it can quickly become a kind of charicature. They might be influenced by certain factors, but that doesn't mean that their values aren't genuine necessarilly. Its more important to look at the validity of their arguments. 

[Basman]

8 hours ago, zurew said:

So under your view this is not a violation of future consent - One psychopath pays 10 million dollars to a dude to rape the next future sentient person. Its guaranteed that the rape will happen but the person who will be raped is just a clump of cells right now. 

You can't rape somebody without it being a consent question by definition. Consent is a material factor when the conspiracy to rape you does materialize unlike being born, which is not possible to consent for or against. 

The subtle logic here in relative to natalism is that being concieved is something that happens to you (in the negative sense), but for something to happen to you technically requires a past self which is changed negatively by being concieved. You don't exist prior to conception therefor conception can't be an infringement in of itself since you have nothing to compare it to. 

[zazen]

20 hours ago, zurew said:

 

20 hours ago, Something Funny said:

It's about consent.

No it isnt.

So in a hypothetical where there is no chance of any suffering at all and there is guaranteed pure bliss , you are telling me that these people would still be against having children?

 

@zurew Didn’t you already discuss how anti-natalism isn’t about consent with somethingfunny?

If you reject the anti-natalist view of “non-consent to being born” because “you can’t ask a non-being”, yet insist you can violate the consent of a non-being that doesn’t yet exist in the future - that’s self-refuting.

 

On your rape example - an unconscious person still exists as a subject with bodily autonomy - they have a continuing identity and rights that persist through unconsciousness. Even a corpse has rights despite no capacity for consent because ethics is relational - it arises from continuity between beings who exist or have existed. The dead still exist in relation - through memory and continuity. The non-existent exist in abstraction -without relation or continuity.

Assaulting someone in a coma is still rape - because consent is temporarily inaccessible, not ontologically impossible. Latent rights belong to existing subjects whose capacity to exercise them is currently dormant - their rights persist because their being and subject hood persists. Potential rights, on the other hand, refer to non-existent or not-yet-subject entities - possible persons.

You can’t wrong a non-subject or one who hasn’t existed as one - only prepare conditions that may later affect one ie be irresponsible but not “violate” consent when no subject exists to grant it or not.

A living subject has intrinsic rights (active). A dead person has derivative rights (symbolic/relational). A non-existent has no rights, because they’ve never entered relation or continuity.

 

On your latest example - you’re mixing up intent and violation. Just because one act leads to another doesn’t mean they’re the same act or carry the same kind of guilt. Paying someone to commit rape is wrong for the intent - the rape itself is wrong for violating consent when it happens. Determinism doesn’t erase that difference - it explains how one led to the other. Mixing up cause and morality is like blaming gravity for murder because it pulled the bullet down.

Honest question - how do you live day to day by your logic? Every meal, car ride or consumer choice would be a “violation of future consent” from someone not yet born but guaranteed to exist. You’d need prophetic knowledge of every potential consequence before acting.

Also - you think our brains grew this large because we ate grass and nuts and not all the other nutrients derived from non-vegan sources?

[zazen]

10 hours ago, zurew said:

No the main point  still stands regardless who wins the label battle. The only thing that was done is  a re-labeling and the categorization thats put on it.

Whether you want to label necessarily subjugating your future kid to having capacity for experiences and to a set of really negative experiences (including the realization that he/she will die) as a "violation of future consent" or  just "moral responsibility" doesnt change the substance in any way and it doesnt really refute the main point that most anti-natalists make

“Whether you call it consent violation or moral responsibility doesn’t matter” - of course it matters. The rhetorical position of antinatalism rests on framing procreation as a consent violation. That’s what elevates a personal choice into a moral emergency and totalizing ethic.

Strip away the consent language and what are we left with? “You’re subjecting someone to experiences including negative ones and mortality” Yeah - that’s called existence lol you’ve discovered the human condition. 

If that’s framed as consent violation then suddenly we’re not just describing reality - but making parenthood analogous to assault. We’re weaponizing liberal individualist frameworks (autonomy, consent) and extending them into metaphysical absurdity (demanding consent from the non-existent).

Your collapsing the distinction to maintain your narrative - which depends on treating potential people as right bearing individuals whose consent can be violated.

@Basman Related to your comment and to Zurew bringing up how I tie in an unrelated topic when it’s very much is related.

These stage green philosophies aren’t errors due to compassion or their original intent that is sincere and valid - it’s that they’re taking what are situational individual choices and universalizing them into a cosmic ethic. Why can’t lifestyle choices remain as such? Why do they need to become moral crusades and isms?

The wider point about this phenemona emerging in the West is that these moral overextensions keep emerging in the context of a culture trying to re-soul itself through moral absolutism - because for a long time it submerged itself in rational scientific materialism that metaphysically unmoored it.

They are symptoms of what happens when you have a correct moral intuition (suffering is bad) but no metaphysical container for it (no understanding of suffering’s role in growth, or a transcendent meaning that contextualizes earthly pain, or spiritual framework that grounds existence as fundamentally good despite its difficulties).

So that moral impulse - which in a traditional framework would be tempered by wisdom, cosmology or initiation into life - instead becomes absolute. It eats itself. “Suffering is bad” becomes “therefore existence is bad” becomes “therefore reproduction is unethical.”

This is the West’s particular pathology: we rejected a transcendent metaphysics, kept the moral sensitivity, and now that sensitivity has nowhere to go but into increasingly totalizing, life negating philosophies that we call progress.

Spiral Dynamics assumes a linear, universal trajectory of development that’s actually Western centric in both its aesthetic and milestones. It interprets progress through the lens of the Western psyche: material mastery (Orange), then moral overreach and empathy (Green), then synthesis of the tensions and contradictions in the below stages (Yellow).

Other cultures with a spiritual or metaphysical anchor already resolved these tensions without collapsing into nihilism. Spiral Dynamics can’t see that because it reads history through a Western teleology and developmental arc, where everyone else looks like a “lower stage” for not following. It universalizes the Western developmental arc - as if that trajectory is the natural path for all humans. Every other culture is measured against this Western timeline and implicitly cast as “behind in development” rather than “differently developed”.

The West lost its metaphysical grounding and then tried to reconstruct it through psychology - then mistake its own rediscovery of balance as “the next stage of evolution.” It’s civilizational amnesia posturing as progress. As if these colour coded values never existed before and only “came online” in Ken Wilber’s terms - in recent history. How does stage green or yellow values only come online recently - as if they never existed before lol. It’s called spiral dynamics yet approached as if it’s ladder dynamics in some linear manner.

Concern for the environment and marginalized is a recent evolution? Tell that to Jains who’ve been practicing radical non-harm for 2,500 years, or indigenous cultures with sophisticated ecological wisdom embedded in their cosmologies, or mystics who experienced universal divine love. Tell that to every traditional culture that understood humans as embedded in - not separate from - the web of life.

Apparently none of that counts because it was wrapped in “mythic” or “magic” worldviews. It only becomes a real developmental stage when white Western baby boomers discovered empathy after dropping acid lol. The model literally takes Western culture’s temporary pathological detour through mechanistic rationalism and calls it a necessary path of evolution for the entire globe. It treats these values as novelties that “emerged” rather than a recovery from lost and found.

I’m not saying spiral dynamics is junk - just that “the map is not the territory” - and this map doesn’t map onto the territory of reality so cleanly and neatly in the way we think it does.

Edited 2 hours ago by zazen

[zurew]

15 minutes ago, zazen said:

Yeah - that’s called existence lol you’ve discovered the human condition. 

The whole point is that anti-natalist consider the "human condition" to be bad.

Your are not making it not bad , by harping on it not being a consent violation.

 

[StaraX]

On 1.11.2025 at 9:40 AM, Leo Gura said:

This makes no sense.

The economy requires procreation to be robust.

There is no problem with over-population. The Earth can easily sustain 10B+ people. And those extra people will invent new tech.

@Leo Gura What about the idea that AI will replace more than 90% of jobs this decade? The economy wouldn’t need people at all then.

[zazen]

35 minutes ago, zurew said:

The whole point is that anti-natalist consider the "human condition" to be bad.

Your are not making it not bad , by harping on it not being a consent violation.

 

You haven’t engaged any of the points but instead moved the goalpost because I keep playing whack a mole by shutting down your points. You haven’t even responded to Basman making the same point about consent and responsibility being distinct.

Anti-natalism can’t survive on its own logic, because it keeps borrowing the language of life to argue against life. They talk about ethics while denying the subject that makes ethics possible, talk about consent while erasing the being that can consent, and  talk about compassion while annihilating the context where compassion has meaning.

It’s the terminal stage of a disenchanted, disillusioned and metaphysically displaced culture. How sad. I don’t even say this as a dig - I am Western and in the West myself.

You still haven’t answered how you live day to day life and make decisions - haven’t you made multiple consent violations of future non existent people before breakfast this morning?

Your logic is only for the prophets who can forsee the future and teleport in some multi-verse to seek consent of the non-existent. Maybe you are a prophet and ahead of us - maybe when we’re all prophets at stage turquoise we’ll take up this logic and incorporate it into our own laws.

If this logic was sound, coherent and most of all applicable - we’d see it codified into law and practiced.

From Chat GPT:

Zurew’s logic doesn’t appear anywhere in real-world legal or medical ethics, because it’s philosophically incoherent and legally unusable. Let’s break that down with examples:

⚖️ 1. 

Criminal Law (Rape and Consent)

In criminal law, consent is strictly present and relational — between existing persons capable of giving or denying it.

Example:
In a rape case, if a victim is unconscious, the act is considered non-consensual because the person exists and has rights that persist during unconsciousness.
However, no court recognizes “future consent violations.” You can’t be charged with “violating the consent of a person who doesn’t exist yet.”

 

That’s why paying someone to commit a rape is punished under conspiracy or solicitation, not as “violating the future victim’s consent.” The law distinguishes between intent and violation — exactly what Zurew blurs.

 

🏥 2. 

Medical Ethics

Medical ethics operates on informed consent, again requiring an existing, identifiable patient who can understand and agree.

 

Example:
Performing a medical procedure on an unconscious patient is only ethical if prior consent was given (e.g. a DNR form) or if the situation is life-threatening and consent is presumed.
No medical system treats a future person as a moral subject whose consent can be violated. That’s why doctors don’t need “consent from future generations” to perform life-saving research — they’re judged by current professional duty, not speculative future consent.

 

So in both criminal and medical ethics, Zurew’s logic fails completely.

It doesn’t map onto any framework because consent presupposes subjecthood, and subjecthood presupposes existence.

If his logic were real, you’d have absurd results like:

Doctors being guilty of “violating the consent of future patients” by discovering antibiotics.

Parents being guilty of “pre-consensual harm” for conceiving children.

That’s why no legal or medical code uses it — it’s philosophically fanciful and legally unusable.”

I’m only this cheeky and blunt because you called my comment stupid, weird and claimed me to be butt hurt. Next time you’ll think twice about being naughty and rude. Naughty zurew.

 

Edited 2 hours ago by zazen

[zurew]

 

4 hours ago, zazen said:

@zurew Didn’t you already discuss how anti-natalism isn’t about consent with somethingfunny?

Yes I said that, but I didnt mean what you mean by that sentence. I meant the fact that most people are not against all consent violations in a principled way not that there cant be consent violation.

 

22 minutes ago, zazen said:

They talk about ethics while denying the subject that makes ethics possible, talk about consent while erasing the being that can consent, and  talk about compassion while annihilating the context where compassion has meaning. It’s the terminal stage of a disenchanted, disillusioned and metaphysically displaced culture.

There isnt any internal contradiciton shown there.

Spell out the p and not p if you think there are internal contradicitions.

Also, again, none of what you said  shows to antinatalists that the human condition is not bad.

16 minutes ago, zazen said:

You haven’t even responded to Basman making the same point about consent and responsibility being distinct.

Where do you think I made the point that those two are not distinct? My exact point is that these two things are distinct and that both of them are important to consider.

Violation of consent means that you subjugate an individual to a set of unwanted experiences. Future violation of consent means that you subjugate a future sentient being to a set of unwanted experiences. Now try to apply and use my semantics and show under how I use these terms whats the contradicition or the incoherence without switching back to how you use these terms.

Like knowing that once your daughter will be born she will be a sex-slave. You know before your kid is born what set of unwanted experiences she will go through and that was the meat of the 'violation of future consent' all along.

Quote

4 hours ago, zazen said:

You can’t wrong a non-subject or one who hasn’t existed as one - only prepare conditions that may later affect one ie be irresponsible but not “violate” consent when no subject exists to grant it or not.

This is why I implied that you using a different definition of consent that is incoherent with there being a future violation of consent doesnt really change substantially anything. Applying your semantics to the sex-slave example doesnt at all change the gravity of what you do once you decide to birth the kid. You know what set of unwanted experiences you will make her live through.

Applying it to the p-zombie example, you know that once it actually becomes a sentient being for the first time and its reminded about the rape, that it will go through a set of very negative experiences. 

The same goes for the comatosed and the sleeping example.

 

You having a broader definition for moral responsibility doesnt change the core of what the antinatalists saying. Using your semantics antinatalist would just say that you cant be morally responsible then, because the very act of creating life is morally irresponsible rather than a violation of future consent (under how I use the term).

50 minutes ago, zazen said:

From Chat GPT:

I was suspicious that I was arguing against AI, but now I can be sure about it.

Well, in that case I will open a new tab and will argue it out with chatgpt and claude then and  see what other things they have to say.