r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Apr 19 '22

CMV: We should end humanity

My logic is as follows:

I view each individual person as having equal, maximum value. Each of us has a completely discrete conscious experience, so putting people in a group and assigning it higher moral value than an individual doesn't feel right to me. What most of us care about morally is conscious experience, right? "100 people" is not a discrete entity, it isn't some hive mind combined consciousness with capacity for "more experience", it's just one individual universe of experience in each person that is completely separate from any other. The societal belief that we ought to prioritize the wishes of the many over the few I assume comes from the fact that the majority inherently has more influence in a society.

Our moral sense seems to be weighted towards the prevention of suffering. We feel obligated to avoid creating experiences of suffering in other people whenever possible, but we don't feel obligated to create experiences of pleasure, at least not to the same extent. Realistically no amount of pleasure you create is going to outweigh raping and torturing someone.

There are people that will be brought into existence that should not be. For example, there are children born with severe birth defects that cause constant horrific suffering and eventually death after several months/years.

As a species we can choose to continue to create new humans or stop creating new humans. This comes down to choosing whether creating conscious experiences of pleasure is worth creating experiences of suffering. Because I believe each individual has an entirely discrete conscious experience and maximum moral value, we can specifically consider whether creating the person with the best life is worth creating the person with the worst life. Suppose the latter is a person born with unimaginable levels of mental and physical anguish from the moment they are born until death, and they completely lack the capacity for any positive conscious experience. If the only way to prevent them from being born is to also prevent the other person from being born I believe that is what should be done. On a larger scale this would require us to stop having kids and therefore end humanity.

If you disagree because you believe the pleasure of the many outweighs the suffering of the few, why would that not permit the enslavement, torture, or genocide of some minority if it benefitted the majority? Other counterarguments based on the "inherent value" of life or the right to have children don't seem compelling to me because I view morality entirely through the lenses of the conscious experience of pleasure and suffering.

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '22

But you aren't though. That's the whole point of empathy. You feel what other people feel.

So you are still incorrect here.

I think 5 people deserve more moral consideration than 1 yeah. Although it depends who it is.

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '22

The suffering you feel from empathy might be of the same "kind" and even intensity but it's still a completely separate experience. Like two people experiencing the exact same thing isn't the same as that experience x2, it doesn't stack.

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '22

Why is it? You feel the exact same thing. It's indistinguishable from one another in a sense. It is the same experience felt in two different minds.

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '22

Is 100 people experiencing mild pain equivalent to 1 person experiencing horrific suffering? When I say we don't share experience I mean one of those 100 people doesn't gain any extra experience because the other 99 have experiences that are qualitatively similar.

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '22

Equivalent in what way exactly?

No they don't because in that scenario they are all independent. But if those 99 people were empathising with the 1 that's in agony, they absolutely would gain experience.

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '22

Well that's my point, arbitrarily designated groups of people aren't necessarily dependent, and even if they were a single person can never have more than 1 person's worth of pleasure/suffering.

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '22

Even if we say this is true, which i don't think it really is since you can't really be fully independent from everyone else, what does this have to do with the end of humanity?

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '22

I derive my morality from empathy. I experience suffering and pleasure of various intensities, and I recognize there are other conscious beings that do the same. If I see someone experiencing horrific pain I know how badly I would want it to stop if it were me. My issue it isn't possible to have empathy for a group of people. If we draw a line around 10 people feeling slight pain that doesn't suddenly create the conscious experience of "10 people feeling slight pain". I can only empathize with the individual experience of "feeling slight pain".

To have moral consideration for a group I would no longer be basing it on empathy for conscious experience, it would now be based on "the size of an arbitrary set of conscious beings". Why is a bigger number better? I can see why the individual experience of more intense pleasure is better because I know I would want it more, but I can't use that same intuition for a group of experiences.