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Alt view: "Having children is not life affirming, it is immoral -- just say no."

#11
Secular Sanity Offline
(Oct 6, 2019 06:24 PM)C C Wrote: For the anti-natalist (or Benatar at least) I assume beauty being an incentive for introducing new people into the world would be subject to the same reasoning he gives for pleasure. (The perspective apparently treats it as universal how people regard agony or discomfort and what that means for them, when there's actually considerable variability). The tired platitude of beauty being subjective does carry some weight (I know I occasionally have to feign liking eccentric tastes to avoid hurt feelings). So little doubt that could be trivially exploited by the philosophy, too:  "Huh, what beauty? You think going through all this #### for the past year was worth it just to observe that for two minutes?"

"The worst pains, for instance, are worse than the best pleasures are good. If you doubt this, ask yourself – honestly – whether you would accept a minute of the worst tortures in exchange for a minute or two of the greatest delights. And pains tend to last longer than pleasures. Compare the fleeting nature of gustatory and sexual pleasures with the enduring character of much pain."

Yikes!

So, basically they’re saying that we all suffer from an optimism bias, right?

C C Wrote:In regards to the Kantian imperative, the wiki article states the he rejects this position. How so, C C?


They're not so much rejecting it as utilizing it for their own ends (as far as purely going by what the article says): " ...therefore, following Kant's recommendation, we should not create new people."

Oh, sorry, that wasn’t very clear. It says that Kant rejects this position in his teleology for meta-ethical reasons.
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#12
C C Offline
(Oct 6, 2019 12:19 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: I guess pleasure can be derived from life by writing about how miserable it is. There’s only one way you’ll get that chance. This guy just might be the happiest man on Earth.

Video games (or at least the violent kind) seem to hint that people vicariously crave misery (in that there's the risk of receiving it as much as dishing it out). As long as they don't have to literally feel pain or can get out of it whenever they want. But I can very much imagine that if games get to Matrix level in the future -- so that they can feel the pain, too, then they'll still be indulging in those ultimate artificial dream trips. The ones that deliver all the pleasures of fantasy will have competition from the bondage and flogging type, the having your sentient avatar body eaten by flesh-craving zombies while still alive type (if the player makes a mistake or competes poorly).

(Oct 6, 2019 06:49 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote:
(Oct 6, 2019 06:24 PM)C C Wrote: For the anti-natalist (or Benatar at least) I assume beauty being an incentive for introducing new people into the world would be subject to the same reasoning he gives for pleasure. (The perspective apparently treats it as universal how people regard agony or discomfort and what that means for them, when there's actually considerable variability). The tired platitude of beauty being subjective does carry some weight (I know I occasionally have to feign liking eccentric tastes to avoid hurt feelings). So little doubt that could be trivially exploited by the philosophy, too:  "Huh, what beauty? You think going through all this #### for the past year was worth it just to observe that for two minutes?"

"The worst pains, for instance, are worse than the best pleasures are good. If you doubt this, ask yourself – honestly – whether you would accept a minute of the worst tortures in exchange for a minute or two of the greatest delights. And pains tend to last longer than pleasures. Compare the fleeting nature of gustatory and sexual pleasures with the enduring character of much pain."

Yikes!

So, basically they’re saying that we all suffer from an optimism bias, right?


Well, just about every cognitive orientation or "my set of interpreting and selecting" habits is a perspective acquired from personal experiences and from conditioning slash adopted prescriptions. Except for whatever evolution installed natively in us. That experts can correctly discern what the latter is will continue be contentious, also -- "fact" seems hybridized with goal-driven speculation in the unstable human sciences.

Quote:
C C Wrote:In regards to the Kantian imperative, the wiki article states the he rejects this position. How so, C C?

They're not so much rejecting it as utilizing it for their own ends (as far as purely going by what the article says): " ...therefore, following Kant's recommendation, we should not create new people."

Oh, sorry, that wasn’t very clear. It says that Kant rejects this position in his teleology for meta-ethical reasons.

As of yet I can't access Heiko Puls' paper ("Kant’s Justification of Parental Duties") without going through the tedious firewall stuff (either paid or providing them with one's life history in data) to see his arguing for that, and especially what works and passages he's referencing to construe his case. I'll intermittently try over the course of the week to spot anything in "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals" (etc) that he might be possibly appealing to, as well as checking to see if somebody on the web roguishly planted his paper in an easily accessible PDF somewhere. (Often the latter will pop-up after not much of a search, but his seems unusually resistant -- deeper digging and time consumption required).
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#13
Secular Sanity Offline
(Oct 6, 2019 07:50 PM)C C Wrote: As of yet I can't access Heiko Puls' paper ("Kant’s Justification of Parental Duties") without going through the tedious firewall stuff (either paid or providing them with one's life history in data) to see his arguing for that, and especially what works and passages he's referencing to construe his case. I'll intermittently try over the course of the week to spot anything in "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals" (etc) that he might be possibly appealing to, as well as checking to see if somebody on the web roguishly planted his paper in an easily accessible PDF somewhere. (Often the latter will pop-up after not much of a search, but his seems unusually resistant -- deeper digging and time consumption required).

Yeah, no luck here either, but he has to be referring to this, don't you think? That's all I can think of.

Kant on the Rights of Children and of Parents
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#14
C C Offline
(Oct 10, 2019 11:39 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote:
(Oct 6, 2019 07:50 PM)C C Wrote: As of yet I can't access Heiko Puls' paper ("Kant’s Justification of Parental Duties") without going through the tedious firewall stuff (either paid or providing them with one's life history in data) to see his arguing for that, and especially what works and passages he's referencing to construe his case. I'll intermittently try over the course of the week to spot anything in "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals" (etc) that he might be possibly appealing to, as well as checking to see if somebody on the web roguishly planted his paper in an easily accessible PDF somewhere. (Often the latter will pop-up after not much of a search, but his seems unusually resistant -- deeper digging and time consumption required).

Yeah, no luck here either, but he has to be referring to this, don't you think? That's all I can think of.

Kant on the Rights of Children and of Parents

The third paragraph arguably ventures into the "where rational agents have autonomy" territory that I'm at least partly tempted to credit (in Kant's scheme) for a person being brought into the sensible world for other than the parents' and society's desires. But I was hoping Heiko Puls had uncovered something else (or additional) to appeal to for a reason why Kant would reject antinatalism.

Kant's moral elements have to be universal and unconditional -- they can't rest in the consequences of acts because laws require reliability rather than mutably changing day to day in different local contexts, population groups, situations, relationships, etc. So I keep feeling such would have at least a little something to do with ignoring the supposed awful "consequences" of life that antinatalists circle the wagons around. (Benatar, again, is making it "universal" how people evaluate pain when such actually has subjective variability.)

Two works of Kant are stated as directly referenced in Heiko Puls' paper. One is is Essay on the Maladies of the Head. Which is odd since it was published in 1764, thereby written during Kant's pre-critical period. Apparently it wasn't translated to English until 2007, so because of that it's probably not in public domain.

The second, however, was translated in 1978 by Allen W. Wood, titled Religion and Rational Theology. Perhaps because it's older, it does have an accessible PDF here. But at any rate, just scanning over the latter I don't notice anything of relevance.

There's an extremely remote and ironic possibility of Puls addressing Kant's retrospectively labeled "natural teleology" instead. Organisms reproducing as part of their purpose -- but that's interpreting "meta-ethics" in an unorthodox way of being wholly beyond or outside the boundaries of ethics. I just don't see that radical deviation as what was meant.

"However, there are reasons to think that contemporary biological theory is no less committed to teleology than its eighteenth-century counterpart, in particular through biologists' use of functional language in their characterizations of the parts and behaviour of organisms. Kant can thus be seen as addressing a problem which is also of concern to present-day philosophers of biology: how to make sense of the idea that biological entities and processes can have purposes or functions without presupposing the existence of a divine designer." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/#3.7
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