Should We Stop Having Babies?

This video was posted in another sub and got a lot more comments there. Here is one of the opposing comments I found interesting;

There are a couple of arguments in this video that argue that there is more suffering in life than pleasure, but all of them are either narrow-scoped in such a way as to favour suffering, or could just as well be argued the other way around. One example for each is:

  • The minor pleasure of a lion eating a deer is compared to the horrible suffering of being eaten by a lion. However from the point of view of each of these individual lives that is too narrow a scope: The deer may have had a very pleasant life for the rest. While you could argue that every animal must eat stuff and this interaction has in total more suffering than pleasure, a lot of eating involves non-sentient food too. For instance, the deer eating non-sentient blades of grass may balance out the scales of total suffering vs. pleasure. The lion may have had other pleasures or sufferings too. So the scope of this comparison is too small.
  • It is argued that when existing you experience suffering (bad) and pleasure (good), but when not existing you are missing out on suffering (good) but that missing out on pleasure is neutral. Thus on the whole, not existing averages out to be better. This argument is flawed logic. You might as well argue that missing out on suffering is neutral and missing out on pleasure is bad. A more proper argument would say that missing out on either pleasure or suffering are both neutral and thus that there is no advantage either way to be or not to be.

All other arguments are based on the premise that life contains more pain than pleasure on the whole. I was also annoyed by how the antinatalist philosophers then argue that we shouldn't commit suicide by claiming that preventing a life is different from ending a life. I'll concede that it is different, but they make no argument as to how that affects the balance between pain and pleasure. I'd argue that the difference is irrelevant. It's something that I see philosophers do quite often: Arguing that it is different, but not specifying how that difference is relevant for the argument.

This video is worded carefully to make clear that the views are those of the antinatalist philosophers, not that of the video author, but the video author did us wrong by not including the criticisms on the philosophy in the video. Refer to Wikipedia's criticisms section for a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism#Criticism

/r/antinatalism Thread Link - youtube.com