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I think you might be confused. This is not about abortion. It is about choosing to conceive and then not abort a child that will likely be afflicted with a serious condition. I am not talking about the woman's right to have an abortion. I am talking about the woman's right to give birth. I am saying that there is a point at which the woman's rights interfere with the future human's rights. The point at which it stops being ethical is when you are causing serious pain without getting the consent of the person. Since a fetus cannot experience loss, deprivation or pain then it is not unethical to kill a fetus. My belief is that she is not depriving them of their rights by aborting them, but by allowing them to be born with a serious condition. I think you will understand if you read closely again. I do not think that a fetus has any rights, only a future human (which is only an idea at the time of being a fetus). The parasitic nature of a fetus does not mean that the mother is justified in bringing it to life with a serious disease. Since the mother willingly takes on the pregnancy and all of its downsides, and since the fetus non-willingly is brought to life, you should give more of your thought to the future humans best interest and less to the mother's. To kill the fetus is a neutral action toward the future person because he does not yet exist, but to allow him to be born could be very wreckless.

I noticed that there was already a topic on eugenics, but it seemed to focus on the negative effect that unregulated birthing has on the human species. This topic will focus on the negative effect that unregulated birthing has on the individual. Let us assume that a couple is considering having a child. There is a considerable chance that the child will inherit a disease that will cause him or her significant pain over the course of his or her life. Let us say that one of the parents has the disease. Despite great suffering, the parent is glad to be alive and feels that life is worth living. Is it ethical to take this chance? It is realistic to say that there is a chance that the child will regret being born. Discounting this chance is indicative of optimism bias. The same can be said anytime a child is born, but let's just stick with this one example for now. If the parents give birth to the child anyway, it will show that they ultimately care more about having a child than they do about the child itself. The child does not exist, so it cannot be said that it will suffer from not being born. This is my position: The reproduction rights of a woman and a man (if it can be said that a man is given any) should never be in violation of the rights of the prospective human. If there is a chance of a low quality of life, it is wrong to assume that the child would be consenting. In our legal system, infants cannot sign contracts, and if they could it is doubtful that they would understand what all those words meant. I admit that the point at which a life becomes worth having is arbitrary, so I will simply say that it is not right to assume that a child will be satisfied with a sub-par quality of life. For the moment let us assume that the average life is generally good to have. Base opportunity is the objective thing here. As long as a child is in its mother's womb, it has no rights because it has no wants or desires. The only rights that a fetus has are the result of personification. I believe that some liberals go too far with these reproductive rights and assume that it gives a woman a license to inflict misery on another human being by giving it a heritable disease. A new baby can feel pain and it can feel wants and desires. When before it was nothing, now it lives in a world where it knows what it wants but cannot have it. It lives in a world where it prefers not to feel pain (as opposed to having no preferance) but cannot always avoid it. This form of eugenics does not denote contempt for certain biological traits but sympathy for future humans. What do you guys think?

If you are trying to convince someone of something contrary to what they have built their life on, then admitting wrongness will cause severe mental distress. Take a Christian, for instance. One may pretend to look hard at the evidence against him or her, and then laugh at it and say that it has been refuted. But in reality, the Christian never seriously entertained the idea that there might not be a God or an afterlife. It is easy for one of you to say that life is good without God, but to a Christian this is preposterous and your skepticism comes tied to dread and misery. I say don't bother with such things. It is hard enough to get people to understand that bigfoot does not exist, and that is of no consequence to them.

You realize that arguing for the existence of a loving God is utterly hopeless, right? Are you just trying to change religious people's minds? Your current methods are not going to work. I know, I used to be a religious person.

Just to clarify, I only said it was a simplification because I do not think that the average person has an accurate idea about death. They assume that something bad will happen, which is not true from what we can currently know. So I do not think that the average person would be making an informed decision. But, yes, I think it would be for their own good in a great majority of the cases. It's fine that you don't think it's fair, I am just saying what my decision would be. Inevitably, it cannot be a perfect solution since we are going for all or nothing here. I am picking the "lesser of two evils" as they say.

That sounds a lot like solipsism. I was just saying that none of us as individuals really exist in a physical sense, but we do not exist metaphysically either, so our mind don't really exist except as the product of physical processes. I might be making a fallacy or something, because I haven't read many official writings on this kind of thing and I am just trying to reckon from my own knowledge and ideas.

Can you try to explain this better? I'm not too Matrix-savvy. It's something about taking a pill and finding out the world is fake, right?

My position is that the fear of death and the need to find meaning in life leads most people to the incorrect belief that their birth was fortunate rather than unfortunate. I think that people believe life is good either because they are are too absent-minded to have empathy for others (an overly-stimulated American who exists from one pleasure to the next) or they nullify their doubts with an optimistic confirmation-bias or metaphysical beliefs. My belief is that, while life is bad more often than it is good, people cannot be trusted to leave it behind because it is all they know and it is a sure thing. Of course, there are a few who despise their life but cannot commit suicide, either because they are physically unable, too afraid, or mentally blocked by the prospect of guilt or a fear of Hell. I would be doing these people the largest favor, but most of the others would still be benefitting to a smaller degree. Perhaps the long-suffering doormat type of person who is just waiting to die and go to heaven would be as equally benefitted as the hopeless suicidal person. I just don't see any reason to suspect there will be experiences after death. Maybe I am being closed-minded. I don't know if this was directed at me, but I can give it a try at answering. I'm only a layman in science and philosophy, so my explanation might be crude sounding. I see from my eyes, I hear from my ears, I smell from my nose, I taste with my tongue and I feel with my multiple parts of my body, mostly my skin. As an individual with thoughts and feelings, I am only an illusion, but as a physical object, I surely exist.

A bit of an oversimplification, but basically yes.

Of course I don't think this. If I thought that it was a widely held belief, I would not have bothered making this thread. The point is not to consider whether people deem it worthwhile to bring a child into existence (it is obvious that most people do) but whether it is truly good to live in the first place. My conclusion is that it is not. I honestly don't care if John Smith down the road wants to keep his life. How can you say that someone really wants to live when they have been programmed by evolution to fear death irrationally? Do they truly enjoy their life, or do they just want to cling to it because it is a sure thing and all they have? The fear of death, the sex drive and the desire to have offspring make it impossible for the human species to voluntarily go extinct, so it means nothing that we haven't decided to stop reproducing or commit mass suicide. Also, it is not worth it for John Smith to have a swell life if millions of other people have miserable lives. Humanity is not a collective organism. The woman in Fritzl's basement does not benefit from Smith's fun activities and high-paying job. John Smith's opinion is worth nothing to me. So I should I should try to concern myself with every living being that will ever exist? If all of this that you speak of is inevitable, it is futile for me to factor it into my decision. If you cannot permanently fix a problem, that does not mean that you should never try to temporarily fix it. I might as well not bother to mow my yard because it will just grow back. Anything less than a perfect solution is not worth doing, apparently. How about instead of throwing my hands up in the air because some stuff will probably happen eons from now, I make the decision that doesn't involve hundreds of billions of people needlessly suffering?

I knew when I started this thread that there was a chance of people making highly emotional responses. So far, I have been pleased that everyone has managed to remain civil. I would not have even attempted it if these forums did not appear to have anti-flaming policies. Isn't it fair to assume that there isn't one with the information that we currently have available (NDE is another can of worms but the people still had brain stem function). One thing we do know is that everything that makes you "you" can get destroyed by brain damage and you will still be alive, so if you continue to exist after death but are no longer "you" then I think you might as well be a different person. I came to my conclusion after a several-months-long existential crisis. Well, I am sure that it could be done. Despite what I say about killing all life, I don't have anything against life on principle. You fail to understand that, if I was given this opportunity to exterminate our species, and I turned it down, I would be making a decision for hundreds of billions of future people anyway. How is it any more wrong for me to make a decision for seven billion? You act as though the instant cessation of consciousness for seven billion people is as bad as misery for hundreds of billions of people. No one ever chooses to be born. This is a choice that someone else makes. And if I did not cause extinction, I would be allowing hundreds of billions of people to have a choice made for them. I would be doing this with the knowledge that many of them will be mistreated and abused, suffer from mental anguish, live in destitution, be born with severe defects, etc.

His deeds are not worthy of rebuke or praise. Yes, there is no cosmic regulation of happiness at all. This is why some people can go their whole lives without being very happy. All metaphysics aside, it seems like altruism is just another way of saying mutualism (or attempted mutualism if the giver or recipient experiences remorse afterwards). From our point of view it is certainly unethical, but from an outsider's POV ("God's" I suppose) a human's suffering could be looked at as meaningless since it is only temporary. If I were a god, I could conclude that each human never even suffered at all because their death invalidated their entire life. Look back at a dead person and you will see that they are no better or worse off for ever having lived (or died for that matter). But yes, from my view as a human, I would destroy the universe or at least the human race without a second thought if I had the option. There is no point in feeling guilty about ending other people's pleasure, because they will not care after they cease to exist. It is the bereaved that you owe an apology, and there will be none in this scenario. In other words, the absence of pleasure is not bad but pain is bad. Therefore taking away someone's life can only be considered bad if it causes pain to others. If you take away all life, you are not doing anything bad but you are stopping species-wide misery from continuing.

I do not believe that anyone can actually stop being selfish. Any attempt at justifying existence falls under my category of avoiding pain (in this case, existential depression) and doing good is only ever done to prevent or assuage guilt or to experience the pleasurable feeling of being a decent human being. I have given to the homeless before, and I know that in actuality it was all about me. Sure, I didn't want the guy to be hungry or cold. I wanted him to have a nice meal, but underneath it all it was so that I could affirm that I was a good person and so that I wouldn't be burdened by any further thoughts of the homless man. Giving to him was a way to satisfy a psychological need for me. This "giving" action is justified even more if you are doing it in return for pleasure (such as buying flowers for a special lady in return for the psychological feeling of love and physical intercourse) but in my case I was just doing it to avoid psychological distress. To me, the case of the quadriplegic seems to be that he must strive to be as happy as everyone else without any reason to be. This is true for all people, of course (excluding the few most happiest who live in ecstasy for this reason or that). It is true that happiness is largely determined by attitude, but the degree to which each person needs to adjust their attitude has a very large range. I realize that very wealthy and attractive people can be miserable. I am talking about self-actualization and not simply hedonism, although hedonism if it is thoroughly uninterrupted can make quite a happy life (Brave New World). Of course, I understand that feeling trumps thinking. I can sit around and think about how the man's life is pointless and lousy but if he feels satisfied then who am I to say that he ought to be dead? Those people in ecstasy that I mentioned earlier are not sitting around philosphizing and overcomplicating things.

Yes, I tend to think of death as being a gentle, soothing sleep, but this is just my imagination We have a hard time processing nonexistence because we are really trying to process nothing. I did not start this thread just to be depressing. I was actually hoping someone would come along and change my mind.

I would not say that these are "easily" avoidable, but I understand that you are saying they are not hopeless. I think that dealing with shame is more complicated, because shame is when you cannot live up to your own standards (or usually the standards that everyone else has taught you to value). Rather than thinking positive thoughts, you would have to completely rewire the way you evaluate things. As for frustration, all I can say is that it is easier said than done to stop wanting something, especially if you are a quadriplegic (or something similar) and are missing out on what most people take for granted. Of course, all matters of contentment are relative so I suppose a quad could be happy too. Nevertheless, my point seems to remain that none of this would have been an issue if birth did not take place at all. Would you care to explain why you think life is preferable and not just acceptable? Yes. The desire for pleasure and the desire to avoid pain both result in suffering if they are dissapointed. Perhaps a better word instead of "desire" would be "need." We need not to feel intense physical pain and we need to fulfill our psychological desires with reasonable consistency, or else we are unhappy. This kind of "need" I am talking about it not the kind that can be solved by saying "you can't always get what you want." I am talking about the minimum (and it is different for each individual) quality of life that a person can have to be satisfied.

The "desires" that I speak of are the psychological driving force behind every action that someone does, either to gain pleasure or avoid pain. Were I talked of how many will you somehow interpreted this as me saying that "I want existence to be like X." I never said what I "want" existence to be like. I spoke of the objective nature of existence. And the desires that people have are indeed part of the objective nature of existence (even if they are just chemical and electrical events inside a brain). This is the point I am trying to make about desires: Before we are born, we have no desires, so we are less unhappy than the most happy man on earth, who will eventually grow old and die in physical and mental pain and be forced to lose his beloved memories and wisdom. I am saying that it is better not to be born even if you live the best life possible. As I said, there is no problem that being born fixes for you, but it creates many.

This has nothing to do with what we "want." I am merely asking whether life can truly be considered a good thing when it usually causes more problems than it does delights. You seem to think that I have idealistic expectations for life, but this isn't true at all. In my view, the potential quantity and intensity of pain outweighs that of pleasure (far past the threshhold of ideal and into the realm of woefully inadequate), so life cannot be considered preferable to nonexistence since there was never a problem that being born fixed for you. I also find it strange how I laid out several points, and you didn't bother to address any of them and reduced my argument to killing oneself based on unmet expectations. Dissapointment was not a factor (as a human is not necessarily aware that they have not met a desire). What do you mean when you say "other options?" Humanity would not benefit from being extinct but they would not suffer either. On the other hand, they would suffer more than they would benefit if they did exist. So, while it is impossible for humanity to benefit from going extinct, it would still be preferable to survivng and thriving. The very fact that an embryo or a fetus has no desires is why there is no point in being born. Being born is like playing Russian Roulette. It isn't necessary. It does not fix a problem that a fetus has, it only creates many. If everyone died in utero, would it really be a game changer? As I said before, a nonexistent entity wants for nothing. What would be the point in existing? I think that the bottom line about mass extinction is that it would solve all of our problems of suffering and all of our problems of desire. It would not satisfy our desires, it would just erase them. I am not delusional, I am not saying that we should commit mass suicide or abstain from ever having children. I am just philosophizing. I think that this is a bit of a taboo topic so I wanted to see what you guys thought.

I think that any species that became aware of itself would eventually ponder whether living is a good thing. Even before industrial society (which is the cause of much suffering due to how unnatural it is) came to be, there were people thinking of this. Perhaps you have heard of Hegesias, the Greek who convinced multiple people to commit suicide with his philosophies? I still don't think that an unborn embryo is missing out on anything since it has no desire to see its potential fulfilled. An unborn embryo (or a dead person for that matter) are perfectly content and want for nothing. They are no worse off for not experiencing pleasure. I suppose that I would agree with you if we are talking about someone who has already been born and has a decent amount of potential, since suicide might be even more problematic for that person.

What follows assumes that no life after death exists and that a dead person returns to the state of pre-birth. This is not necessarily my opinion, but it seems to be the most logical conclusion. It is commonly said that life is a gift, or at least that you are lucky to have it. Being born means beating astronomical odds, so even the scientifically-inclined tend to characterize it as something that one should be happy about having. But is it really more fortunate to be born than to die in utero? Leaving all sentimentality aside, let us consider what life is like. 1. After birth, humans begins to have desires. Now, a desire is a form of discomfort. It drives us to do whatever it is that we end up doing. It could be a desire for pleasure or a desire to avoid pain. 2. Some humans have "good" lives. A good life is when a human generally succeeds at meeting his or her goals, avoiding pain and feeling pleasure. 3. Others will have "bad" lives. A bad life is when a human generally fails at meeting his or her goals, avoiding pain and feeling pleasure. 4. Those who have "bad" lives will either die quickly (in a primitive society) or suffer through their life in shame, frustration, depression or chronic pain. No compensation will ever be given. 5. Those who have "good" lives will still have to experience the death of loved ones and the dying of themselves. 6. The quest to find meaning or acquire knowledge is well within the arena of "avoiding pain" or "feeling pleasure" and is no different than having sex or moving up the corporate ladder. I know that in reality, there is no such thing as a "good" or "bad" life, but I am speaking roughly about a life where someone either suffers more than feels pleasure, or feels pleasure more than suffering. My conclusion is that being born means that you are astronomically unlucky rather that the opposite. You are free to dispute anything I have said up to this point. Other than that, I have two questions: 1. Is it more desirable for an individual human to be stillborn than to live? 2. Would it be better for all of humanity to go extinct?

You have my attention if you are planning to go somewhere with this. The issue that I have is whether it is the awareness that gives us direct input or whether the awareness is just needed so that our minds can obtain information that they could not have while unconscious. To use what is probably a woefully inadequate metaphor, the question is whether consciousness like steering the plane or turning it on autopilot? You are sitll there watching from the pilot's seat either way, but it is not the same thing.

I have never heard of this before. What do you mean by "solidification of the mind?" But is it really free or is the state of consciousness just a requirement? Is it possible to make any other decision now that one is aware of the thing that he or she is basing the decision off of? Just because there is a greater variety of choices for certain circumstances does not mean that they all were even a choice for a specific individual. True, someone who is insane has less possible choices, but the question is whether an insane man's final decision was any more of a choice than a sane man's final decision (from an admittedly larger amount of choices).

Yes, some people are more impulsive than others for various reasons. I would say that it could also be a learned behavior, such as having a strong work ethic, which is on the other side of the spectrum from being impulsive.

Yes, I think that it would be better for me not to have a position until I understand more, especially since I am just a layman. As far as Harris's book is concerned, I have not read it, but I'd like to check it out along with some of the things that Overtone suggested. I'm okay when it comes to concepts but I have difficulty judging a scientist's credibility as long as there aren't any red flags (like an endorsement for homeopathy). As for suicide, it can go from an ideation (I could make this pain stop) to an impulse (I can't take it anymore). Suicide is just one more way that humans can solve their problems. Someone sucides for the same reason that a kid runs away from home. The amount of failed suicide attempts that stem from improper methods (mainly drug poisoning with weak drugs) shows that people really don't think twice (even ruling out suicidal gestures). I would say that the only thing keeping a lot of people from suiciding is religious beliefs, the pain that it would immediately cause to themselves and the longterm suffering it would cause their friends/family.

When I say that you "want" to do something, I mean that it is what your brain has determined will be in your best interest. It's different from desiring something, because it is possible to do something contrary to what your conscious self desires. This would be like sacrificing pleasure in the short term for an investment that would pay off later, like going to college right away instead of skipping a year. So we could say that you don't desire to go to college but your brain has determined that it is a superior course of action. Okay, a better title would have been "if we have no free will, what purpose could consciousness serve?" Do you know of any good readings you would recommend on the subject of free will?

I am open to free will being proven to exist, but this was assuming that it didn't for the purpose of the thread. I was under the impression that no such thing as free will could exist because self awareness is only a passive process, like watching yourself do things. Am I wrong? I had come to hold that belief because I had heard of many scientists saying so (Sam Harris being the most notable). I'm a layman, so I really can't look past the jargon of something scientific and judge it unless it has any specific red flags like talk of metaphyiscal things or homeopathy. To me as a layman, it sounds reasonable. I know that most of these terms have no solid definition, so let me say that my idea of free will would be the ability to originate your own thoughts without external stimuli determining what you think and how you feel. And pondering things by yourself would still not count since that is just the long-lasting ripple of real life experiences. I honestly do not think that we can conceive of anything that isn't a shadow of something we already know of, and I think that it is impossible for someone to truly do something they do not want to do. People will say "you must do things you don't want to in life" but these people are simply choosing what they consider to be the best option (in this case, sacrificing pleasure to invest in the future). I don't think that it can demonstrated that someone could do something that they haven't made up their mind to do. They might have regret for it later, but at the time it was what they had made up their mind to do (and by that I mean their mind made up itself). It naturally follows that pride/pleasure would be used to trick your body into making the same decision over and over again and shame/pain would be used to trick your body into attemtping to make a better choice; your brain has a system by which it programs itself to act a certain way. Anyway, I wasn't really trying to say that has been proven definitively. I was wondering if consciousness could come about by evolution in the abscence of free will, and that is why I put the disclaimer at the top. I am open to discussion on that, but I wanted it to be assumed just for the sake of this topic. I came here because I was hoping that some of you people could make this easy for me to understand. It seemed the better alternative to reading jargon-filled scientific journals or searching the vile pit of yahoo answers. I was thinking, in my original post, that crying and consolation could happen without self awareness. I think that Overtone and the others explained it sufficiently to me, though. The idea is that the consciousness is a naturally emerging part of the neural processes that lead to decision making. So I guess that self-awareness is not separate from the decision-making process at all. And when I think of what Overtone said about the decisions we make when we are unconscious, it seems to make sense that consciousness is required to make more complex decisions. That is to say that nobody can tie their shoes while they are unconscious, although someone could probably do so while sleepwalking during REM sleep which is like being conscious. So it seems that consciousness does play a very important role in our every day activities regardless of whether or not free will exists. I meant calculations in the realm of subjectivity. I believe that I would be right in saying that your sub-conscious brain, when it decides what course of action is the best for your survival needs, must try to make sense of a situation that is very much different from a scientific formula. If someone asks "does this dress make me look fat" there is the factual answer (yes, no, somewhat - and indeed it would true because "fat" is only relative so she would look "fat" to you) but that is not the kind of calculations I am talking about. Your subconscious scans the situation in a way that a computer cannot (that I know of). The question here is whether or not to lie. So I mean that they are calculating machines in a sense that they find the answer to questions that have no objective answer. How would a computer decide whether or not to tell its dad that it is gay? There is no answer, and yet humans will consistently be able to determine one.