this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
988 points (96.2% liked)
memes
14746 readers
3120 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How about I do something which will make life better for people who are actually alive already instead of increasing total human suffering by making new people.
Having kids can be extremely fulfilling, doesn't increase human suffering at all. Having kids subjectively improved my life and the lives of many people adjacent to me, e.g. the lives of my family members and friends and my kids' friends.
I don't understand how the Internet is so anti kids, it's pretty baffling.
Virtually every sentient life experiences a non-zero amount of suffering. Progeny that doesn’t exist categorically doesn’t suffer; progeny that does exist is virtually certain to suffer to some degree. The hedonist argument that progeny may get to experience some joy falls apart because progeny that doesn’t exist categorically doesn’t experience any lack of joy (i.e. that would-be joy is not mourned by that which does not exist).
Ensuring the certainty of the sum total of suffering in another person’s life just for one’s own self-fulfillment is incredibly selfish. Procreation is a cycle of blithe selfishness that perpetuates universal suffering and is at best wrought by apathy for others’ suffering and at worst wrought by enthusiasm for others’ suffering.
I’m anti-kid because I didn’t consent to the sentience that I have experienced and I have the empathy to want others not to suffer.
Sure, life is imperfect, but is that really a reason to espouse something as radical as nonexistence? I find that the imperfection and thereby dualism of existence is part of what makes it beautiful; we get to experience both the good and the bad, pleasure and pain.
I guess in some sense what I understand you're saying is that to you, being thrust into the pain inherent of becoming and being alive, is the consequence of a bad moral or ethical (selfish) action and therefore wrong even if the children are able to adapt, because there is always more potential suffering throughout the course of a life. I get that, I think most of us would love to be in situations where we could have no-suffering-guarantees for our children.
Maybe the point of friction is that it seems to me like you believe that there should be no suffering at all for it to be ethically permissible to have children (lest it be selfish) while many of us believe that the "base level" of suffering inherent to life (eg. death of parents, the setbacks of infancy, social interaction, etc.) is permissible, and it then falls on us as parents to make sure that there is no or as little additional or unnecessary suffering as possible by means of safe environment, education and tools to cope and overcome so that what could potentially be suffering doesn't become so. When it comes to that I believe it to be more reasonable to discuss who ought and who oughtn't be a parent than whether it's ethical or not to have kids.
Eugenics is not going to reduce suffering in the world.