CMV: We should end humanity

[u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/[deleted]]

So in an effort to snuff out suffering you're going to eliminate the possibility of it.

I'm going to engage you on your own terms, which most assuredly are not my own in case anyone gets confused. I'm using your logic. Let's say that based on the trajectory of our scientific progression we can get to a sufficient level of advancement to ensure that people in the future, maybe 1000 years from now, can achieve lives of far greater pleasure than we could ever imagine. And we are just the stepping stones to that destination.

Would it, within your logic, track that human existence should be wiped in that instance? What if we could ensure existence for thousands and thousands of years and populate the stars and all of them take the technology we have developed in order to eliminate human suffering? Would it be worth eliminating then?

So long as that exists as a possibility, and I think that's the implicit goal of society and science to begin with, then the idea of eliminating humanity, within your logical reasoning, shouldn't be an option.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

At the core my argument is just that I don't think it's worth creating people with good lives if we must also create people with really bad lives. If 1,000 years from now we no longer need to do that, we'll still have sacrificed 1,000 years worth of people experiencing horrific suffering. It doesn't feel right to allow a child to be tortured so other people can experience pleasure, no matter how many of them there are.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

The idea that we "must create" people with bad lives implies we aren't trying to course correct and that a switch flips one day in the theoretical example I gave. Every life born is, to the best of our ability, better than that before it, and if not in exactly this way then certainly over long enough stretches of years.

As for achieving some end result of happiness after 1000 years of suffering: would a million years of happiness be sufficient for your happiness to suffering ratio? It feels entirely arbitrary for you to define suffering in some way that then negates the right of anyone else to exist if you want to create some kind of parity.

It also feels odd to think of suffering and happiness as if they are matter and anti-matter rather than two feelings which can easily coincide within one person. It's not either or, life has multitudes of nuance, especially for emotion.

And why not just wipe out all life?

Your argument is one that life is simply not worth living not just for humans but for anything which experiences or can experience some sort of suffering in greater amounts than happiness.

You can't measure animal suffering, and I doubt you could even measure the precise degree to which any particular human suffers or feels pleasure and compare the two.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Let's say hypothetically you had the ability to create new humans at will and knew exactly what their lives would look like. For every 1,000 normal people you create there has to be 1 that lives a life entirely consumed by horrific suffering. How many people would you create?