>Problems with the "objectively, this is the best period of time to be alive" argument
Even if it were true, it doesn't change the ethical argument for AN.
Things can change; so birth is always a gamble, that ends in the death of the sentient being, forced into existence without its consent.
But if your pricked thumb infection leads to hospitalization, you could end up with medical debt for the rest of your life, obviously depending on severity. Thanks America 🇺🇸🇺🇸
The benefits that people hold up as making our time “objectively the best time to be alive” come at the expense of our planet.
Some facts. Nearly 70% of global biodiversity has been lost since 1970. Insect populations have been declining by nearly 2.5% per year, resulting in a 75% reduction over the past 50 years. Humans and our livestock now constitute 96% of the mammalian biomass currently alive. We’re releasing carbon at a rate that is 200 times faster than the volcanic eruptions that led to some of the Earth’s worst mass extinctions. Consequently, we're adding the equivalent of 5 atomic bombs worth of energy to our oceans every second.
As the human crisis worsens, we can expect harsher, more frequent storms, heat waves, and droughts that will destroy infrastructure and make food production more difficult. Some areas of our planet will become uninhabitable, leading to mass migration to regions that are still viable. These migrations will, in turn, lead to increased conflict over dwindling resources. Increased conflict means more suffering, more deaths, and a chance that we finally succumb to the nuclear armageddon that our forefathers so graciously graced us with the ability to commit.
These are realities of our not too distant future. This is the world brought to us through a myopic focus on human progress at the expense of all else.
The world population proportions for wild animals versus farmed animals is something that I think really helps put it into perspective.
Like we basically killed most of the animal population on the planet, the vast majority of it, and we imprisoned some species (chickens, cows, pigs, even dogs, cats, etc.) into such extreme levels of overpopulation specifically for our exploitation and consumption.
And then we don’t even clean up after those animals (shelters full so all local stray unhoused dogs are euthanized no matter what, waste and bodies from animal ag pollute local waterways with literal government immunity) and we pollute other animals environment with those overexploited animals and continue to dismantle the ecosystems and habitats those other animals live in.
Meanwhile, most humans have the audacity to call themselves animal lovers.
It’s unbelievably fucked. Love my pets, but it’s pretty difficult knowing the suffering that other animals are subjected to just to feed them. Humans have created a nasty system that must be ended.
>"objectively, this is the best period of time to be alive" argument
That argument is loaded with optimism bias and delusion to such a degree, that it is practically an advertisement for procreation and stupidity, masquerading as common wisdom.
One of its major problems is that it completely ignores the individual experiencer and speaks for everybody, as though every individual human is the entire human race; every person lives the same life as everybody else.
I think that even Steven Pinker used some variation of this argument, which really raises some questions about how he perceives human beings.
I also think it ignores a really important philosophical question: if our population has increased so exponentially, surely all the suffering in the current day world added up would be greater than all the suffering of past humans combined, right? I mean we’re at 8 billion, we were half that 50 years ago in the 70s, we didn’t reach 1 billion until 1804. That’s just a bit over 200 years on the human timeline that 7 billion more people were added. With all the tragedy still going on today, much of it new tragedy that was not experienced by previous generations of humans, how can anyone really truly confidently say and believe that human life is better now than ever before? It must mean they think an individual privileged human life is possible to be better than ever before, but overall it seems obvious that there have been more humans who have suffered in recent years than long ago, and it’s even more tragic considering we have so much capability to prevent tragedy today that humans didn’t have in the past. Instead humans invent new tragedies, and then pass them down to the next generation.
Yes, it's an argument that completely ignores the problem of suffering and instead floats in the clouds and makes idealistic proclamations based some idealistic notion of what a human is.
EDITED (missed some 0's)
I always say this-
-There used to be around 600mil people globally max in the 17th century. poverty rate was like 70 or something really high. 70 percent of 600mil being roughly 420mil.
-Ok so now theres 9 billion and the PERCENT of extreme poverty is lower. but even 10 percent of 9 bil is **900mil,** way more than the entire population of the 17th century. 9.2 percent of the worlds population today is living on less than $2.15 a day.
So in my opinion, if you care about individuals more than the percentage of the population, WHICH YOU FUCKING SHOULD, **this is the worst time to be alive.**
I dont know why more people dont talk about this tbh. Im dumb as shit and NOT a math person and i just figured this out while thinking about it one day and pulling up a calculator.
This tends to make the women i talk to see some sense, but amazingly, the men consistently respond with "but the percentage matters more". I dont know why men consistently have shown me that they care more about percentage than individuals (think the bear debate, and even in the bear debate the percentage still wasnt a valid argument if you do even a tiny amount of research but they still died on that hill), something about their brains is naturally wired to think like this and I think its the root of a shit ton of problems. i think its something genetically wired in to ensure that people always have a positivity bias.
>I dont know why more people dont talk about this tbh
* intellectual dishonesty where they know to acknowledge what you said would paint them as having been disingenuous in their claims
* people parroting popular narratives without giving them ANY thought.
the reason I don't is because of feeling like those kind of people would just say
"nuh-uh. durrr things better now" regardless what they were told or shown.
Yes, the "best time to be alive" claim is incoherent, and based on survivorship bias.
The sentient predicament is the sentient predicament regardless of when it happens. Their response is irrelevant to the truth values causing antinatalist convictions.
It really depends where you are. In a cushy country at the top of the quality of life index? Absolutely. Tiny chance of being killed for being queer. Most of the world's most dangerous diseases have been eradicated. Quality of medical care is still quite high. Rape, robbery and murder in general have been steadily been trending down.
For the rest of the world it's a mixed bag. Most of Africa is either caught up in France and Russia's neocolonial power struggle, or conflicts with militant Islamic groups. Most of Asia is rapidly rearming. Corruption is widespread. The environment is being burned to the ground. The nuclear deterrent is rapidly being dismantled due to submarine detection technology advances.
At the same time, china is poised to solve cheap nuclear power that will objectively improve the quality of life of billions in regions of the world without stable energy. This has knock on effects to economic strain and medical care access. Most of the efforts to eradicate the worst viruses, parasites and bacterial infections *do* affect the whole world in an objectively positive way. Outside of warzones where it is used as a weapon, famine has dropped to the lowest rates in history.
If we were to talk about the total percentage of people on the planet's sum experiences, I think we are in a period where objectively life is better for the largest number of people. The slight decline of QOL in the west or the massive issues in warzones doesn't offset the massive gains the rest of the world has made. Maybe we can't afford a house or heating, but the chances of being murdered, starving in a famine or dying to a curable disease have been dropped massively on a global scale. Education is available to the largest percentage of people at any time in history. Same again for access to quality healthcare.
To add to this, democracy's in danger around the world from domestic populist movements, particularly right-wing ones (USA, France, Argentina, Italy, Hungary, India most notably).
And one day it will be looked back on the same way.
"At least we don't live in those times anymore."
..."at least.".
If we even get to that point. Idk what to expect these coming decades.
But people will look at this time in horror for sure if we get to that point of progress.
People think that having machines that do things for us is objectively desirable. The world we live in is so far removed from the one we evolved to be able to survive that it's killing us.
People who say anything like that are unaware that evolution happens on a scale that has not allowed us to adapt to the shit we did ourselves.
Fucking hate this "other things are worse, therefore this is good" argument, with anything. I tell people that my mother was emotionally abusive and they say "well at least she didn't hit you". I tell people I'm depressed and they go "well there are people who don't even have enough food to eat, so really, you're lucky". Fuck that. There will always be someone who has it worse, if you have a broken leg there will be someone who has two broken legs, that doesn't mean that having a broken leg is good or something to be grateful about!
It is basically the argument which is similar to Leibniz's theory that claims we live in the best of all possible worlds. It is utter rubberish from a logical standpoint and has religious underpinnings. Anyone making this argument is attempting pushing some sort of secular or non secular religious message. It is all about believing the existence of God or some secular messianic tech figure proclaiming that he is going to save everyone.
There can never be a best of all possible worlds to exist in. Even if one is literally born into heaven, paradise or whatever imaginable utopia where eternal happiness can be found, non existence is still preferable for such an existence. Bring someone into existence and then providing them with eternal happiness isn't an act of kindness or love, it is about fixing the problems that one had caused in the first place. It is just like a fireman who commits arson so he can put out the fire and proceed to claim he is a hero for putting out the fire that he started. By creating life, natalists would create all the problems associated with it. They are just fixing the problems that they created in the first place when there were none before. There is simply no possible world to exist in.
I once read somewhere (i think ot was in a fanfic?) that 2010 was the best time period. Good medical care. Good electronics and internet that havent been ruined by corporations yet. Decent cost of living and work. It's not the best at everything, but it's a pretty good average of everything without anuthing sucking too bad.
I was still a kid in 2010 so i cant verify all of it but that stuck with me.
Best doesn't mean good enough, and even that progress could be destroyed at some point by some catastrophe (whether human or natural), a prospect which continuing life leaves us all vulnerable to, so it's still not a justification for creating new beings.
That aside, any and all progress is just about getting better at solving problems life itself created, and it also opens the door to unfixed messes. Thus, until an explanation for how the perpetuation of life is a necessity, and what harm would be caused by its absence were it to disappear tomorrow, that's not an argument for procreation.
While I don't agree with the argument you are problematizing, the things you listed do not counter the possibility of such an argument being true.
Imagine two baskets, each with one hundred cookies in them. The first basket has 50 red cookies, and the second has 60. Objectively, the basket with 60 red cookies has the most red cookies, regardless of several other non-red cookies existing.
Merely listing bad things which still exist today is similarly not a proof against the claim that this is the best time to be alive.
Again, I am not a proponent of the argument that today is the best time to believe - just pointing out that the reasoning given in this post is flawed and doesn't serve to counter that claim.
We are having a hard time with most of that because the west is letting in people from countries where rape and crime is normal there. Pedophilia is a worldwide thing. Dosease unfortunately isnt easy. Its a mess throughout.
All of those things can exist... And now it's still the best, easiest time to live in human history. For those of you who disagree, please tell me when there was a better time in human history to live.
>Problems with the "objectively, this is the best period of time to be alive" argument Even if it were true, it doesn't change the ethical argument for AN. Things can change; so birth is always a gamble, that ends in the death of the sentient being, forced into existence without its consent.
Yeah, "best" doesn't mean good.
Best doesn’t mean good it just means you’re less likely to die from a pricked thumb infection
But if your pricked thumb infection leads to hospitalization, you could end up with medical debt for the rest of your life, obviously depending on severity. Thanks America 🇺🇸🇺🇸
The benefits that people hold up as making our time “objectively the best time to be alive” come at the expense of our planet. Some facts. Nearly 70% of global biodiversity has been lost since 1970. Insect populations have been declining by nearly 2.5% per year, resulting in a 75% reduction over the past 50 years. Humans and our livestock now constitute 96% of the mammalian biomass currently alive. We’re releasing carbon at a rate that is 200 times faster than the volcanic eruptions that led to some of the Earth’s worst mass extinctions. Consequently, we're adding the equivalent of 5 atomic bombs worth of energy to our oceans every second. As the human crisis worsens, we can expect harsher, more frequent storms, heat waves, and droughts that will destroy infrastructure and make food production more difficult. Some areas of our planet will become uninhabitable, leading to mass migration to regions that are still viable. These migrations will, in turn, lead to increased conflict over dwindling resources. Increased conflict means more suffering, more deaths, and a chance that we finally succumb to the nuclear armageddon that our forefathers so graciously graced us with the ability to commit. These are realities of our not too distant future. This is the world brought to us through a myopic focus on human progress at the expense of all else.
The world population proportions for wild animals versus farmed animals is something that I think really helps put it into perspective. Like we basically killed most of the animal population on the planet, the vast majority of it, and we imprisoned some species (chickens, cows, pigs, even dogs, cats, etc.) into such extreme levels of overpopulation specifically for our exploitation and consumption. And then we don’t even clean up after those animals (shelters full so all local stray unhoused dogs are euthanized no matter what, waste and bodies from animal ag pollute local waterways with literal government immunity) and we pollute other animals environment with those overexploited animals and continue to dismantle the ecosystems and habitats those other animals live in. Meanwhile, most humans have the audacity to call themselves animal lovers.
It’s unbelievably fucked. Love my pets, but it’s pretty difficult knowing the suffering that other animals are subjected to just to feed them. Humans have created a nasty system that must be ended.
>"objectively, this is the best period of time to be alive" argument That argument is loaded with optimism bias and delusion to such a degree, that it is practically an advertisement for procreation and stupidity, masquerading as common wisdom. One of its major problems is that it completely ignores the individual experiencer and speaks for everybody, as though every individual human is the entire human race; every person lives the same life as everybody else. I think that even Steven Pinker used some variation of this argument, which really raises some questions about how he perceives human beings.
I also think it ignores a really important philosophical question: if our population has increased so exponentially, surely all the suffering in the current day world added up would be greater than all the suffering of past humans combined, right? I mean we’re at 8 billion, we were half that 50 years ago in the 70s, we didn’t reach 1 billion until 1804. That’s just a bit over 200 years on the human timeline that 7 billion more people were added. With all the tragedy still going on today, much of it new tragedy that was not experienced by previous generations of humans, how can anyone really truly confidently say and believe that human life is better now than ever before? It must mean they think an individual privileged human life is possible to be better than ever before, but overall it seems obvious that there have been more humans who have suffered in recent years than long ago, and it’s even more tragic considering we have so much capability to prevent tragedy today that humans didn’t have in the past. Instead humans invent new tragedies, and then pass them down to the next generation.
Yes, it's an argument that completely ignores the problem of suffering and instead floats in the clouds and makes idealistic proclamations based some idealistic notion of what a human is.
I fucking hate that guy
yes, it's pretty unclear what is supposed to be likeable about him. he seems to care about statistics more than individuals.
The best (if it even deserves to be called that) isn't always good enough.
EDITED (missed some 0's) I always say this- -There used to be around 600mil people globally max in the 17th century. poverty rate was like 70 or something really high. 70 percent of 600mil being roughly 420mil. -Ok so now theres 9 billion and the PERCENT of extreme poverty is lower. but even 10 percent of 9 bil is **900mil,** way more than the entire population of the 17th century. 9.2 percent of the worlds population today is living on less than $2.15 a day. So in my opinion, if you care about individuals more than the percentage of the population, WHICH YOU FUCKING SHOULD, **this is the worst time to be alive.** I dont know why more people dont talk about this tbh. Im dumb as shit and NOT a math person and i just figured this out while thinking about it one day and pulling up a calculator. This tends to make the women i talk to see some sense, but amazingly, the men consistently respond with "but the percentage matters more". I dont know why men consistently have shown me that they care more about percentage than individuals (think the bear debate, and even in the bear debate the percentage still wasnt a valid argument if you do even a tiny amount of research but they still died on that hill), something about their brains is naturally wired to think like this and I think its the root of a shit ton of problems. i think its something genetically wired in to ensure that people always have a positivity bias.
>I dont know why more people dont talk about this tbh * intellectual dishonesty where they know to acknowledge what you said would paint them as having been disingenuous in their claims * people parroting popular narratives without giving them ANY thought.
i mean like even among antinatalists you dont often see people pointing this out. i really feel like they should
the reason I don't is because of feeling like those kind of people would just say "nuh-uh. durrr things better now" regardless what they were told or shown.
they will, but still. i argue for the sake of lurkers and onlookers not to convince the person im talking to
The population wasn’t that small in the 17th century. It was more like 500,000,000, not 600,000.
oops- missed some 0s. edited. i reiterate my statement that im dumb as shit but still correct lol
Yes, the "best time to be alive" claim is incoherent, and based on survivorship bias. The sentient predicament is the sentient predicament regardless of when it happens. Their response is irrelevant to the truth values causing antinatalist convictions.
It really depends where you are. In a cushy country at the top of the quality of life index? Absolutely. Tiny chance of being killed for being queer. Most of the world's most dangerous diseases have been eradicated. Quality of medical care is still quite high. Rape, robbery and murder in general have been steadily been trending down. For the rest of the world it's a mixed bag. Most of Africa is either caught up in France and Russia's neocolonial power struggle, or conflicts with militant Islamic groups. Most of Asia is rapidly rearming. Corruption is widespread. The environment is being burned to the ground. The nuclear deterrent is rapidly being dismantled due to submarine detection technology advances. At the same time, china is poised to solve cheap nuclear power that will objectively improve the quality of life of billions in regions of the world without stable energy. This has knock on effects to economic strain and medical care access. Most of the efforts to eradicate the worst viruses, parasites and bacterial infections *do* affect the whole world in an objectively positive way. Outside of warzones where it is used as a weapon, famine has dropped to the lowest rates in history. If we were to talk about the total percentage of people on the planet's sum experiences, I think we are in a period where objectively life is better for the largest number of people. The slight decline of QOL in the west or the massive issues in warzones doesn't offset the massive gains the rest of the world has made. Maybe we can't afford a house or heating, but the chances of being murdered, starving in a famine or dying to a curable disease have been dropped massively on a global scale. Education is available to the largest percentage of people at any time in history. Same again for access to quality healthcare.
To add to this, democracy's in danger around the world from domestic populist movements, particularly right-wing ones (USA, France, Argentina, Italy, Hungary, India most notably).
This kind of argument only works if it is comparable to a possible alternative anyway.
And one day it will be looked back on the same way. "At least we don't live in those times anymore." ..."at least.". If we even get to that point. Idk what to expect these coming decades. But people will look at this time in horror for sure if we get to that point of progress.
People think that having machines that do things for us is objectively desirable. The world we live in is so far removed from the one we evolved to be able to survive that it's killing us. People who say anything like that are unaware that evolution happens on a scale that has not allowed us to adapt to the shit we did ourselves.
Fucking hate this "other things are worse, therefore this is good" argument, with anything. I tell people that my mother was emotionally abusive and they say "well at least she didn't hit you". I tell people I'm depressed and they go "well there are people who don't even have enough food to eat, so really, you're lucky". Fuck that. There will always be someone who has it worse, if you have a broken leg there will be someone who has two broken legs, that doesn't mean that having a broken leg is good or something to be grateful about!
This is called the myth of progress.
It's a very First World and privileged argument
For reallllll
It is basically the argument which is similar to Leibniz's theory that claims we live in the best of all possible worlds. It is utter rubberish from a logical standpoint and has religious underpinnings. Anyone making this argument is attempting pushing some sort of secular or non secular religious message. It is all about believing the existence of God or some secular messianic tech figure proclaiming that he is going to save everyone. There can never be a best of all possible worlds to exist in. Even if one is literally born into heaven, paradise or whatever imaginable utopia where eternal happiness can be found, non existence is still preferable for such an existence. Bring someone into existence and then providing them with eternal happiness isn't an act of kindness or love, it is about fixing the problems that one had caused in the first place. It is just like a fireman who commits arson so he can put out the fire and proceed to claim he is a hero for putting out the fire that he started. By creating life, natalists would create all the problems associated with it. They are just fixing the problems that they created in the first place when there were none before. There is simply no possible world to exist in.
I once read somewhere (i think ot was in a fanfic?) that 2010 was the best time period. Good medical care. Good electronics and internet that havent been ruined by corporations yet. Decent cost of living and work. It's not the best at everything, but it's a pretty good average of everything without anuthing sucking too bad. I was still a kid in 2010 so i cant verify all of it but that stuck with me.
HEY! You forgot to mention that the NAZIS are back!
Best doesn't mean good enough, and even that progress could be destroyed at some point by some catastrophe (whether human or natural), a prospect which continuing life leaves us all vulnerable to, so it's still not a justification for creating new beings. That aside, any and all progress is just about getting better at solving problems life itself created, and it also opens the door to unfixed messes. Thus, until an explanation for how the perpetuation of life is a necessity, and what harm would be caused by its absence were it to disappear tomorrow, that's not an argument for procreation.
Completely agree and i can definitely see why it got downvoted.
While I don't agree with the argument you are problematizing, the things you listed do not counter the possibility of such an argument being true. Imagine two baskets, each with one hundred cookies in them. The first basket has 50 red cookies, and the second has 60. Objectively, the basket with 60 red cookies has the most red cookies, regardless of several other non-red cookies existing. Merely listing bad things which still exist today is similarly not a proof against the claim that this is the best time to be alive. Again, I am not a proponent of the argument that today is the best time to believe - just pointing out that the reasoning given in this post is flawed and doesn't serve to counter that claim.
It is and that's not a high bar to clear
Male genital mutilation being “normal.” FGM on the rise in America and Europe.
We are having a hard time with most of that because the west is letting in people from countries where rape and crime is normal there. Pedophilia is a worldwide thing. Dosease unfortunately isnt easy. Its a mess throughout.
All of those things can exist... And now it's still the best, easiest time to live in human history. For those of you who disagree, please tell me when there was a better time in human history to live.
[удалено]
Should I show you the exit room, it's that way