FreeNerd

In the western society today, a certain level of respect for life, especially human life, is considered a norm. Although the origin of need for our judicial system concerning life and death arose much from the human tendency for vengeance, the system today also encompasses people that would die without anyone caring. This change has made the shift from respect for the mourners to respect for life, and this same idea seems to have been incorporated in the moral of many people.

Yet, there is a very clear and mostly unintended conflict with this moral and the de facto human practice that goes completely unnoticed, since we have another instinct concerning life and death apart from killing, namely reproduction.

Around the world, childbirth is mostly seen as a happy event, with the exceptions of some countries in which certain genders are unwanted, such as India. A mother is held in higher regard than women in general, and pregnancy is often glorified, especially in the western world, often to the point of obscenity. Now what is the problem you may ask? The answer is quite simple, yet so hard to properly comprehend in all it’s depth. Thus, I shall try to explain this as thoroughly as I can, for the sake of avoiding misunderstandings.

To be able to reason around justice of life and death as humans, we need to base our reasoning upon certain axioms. The first one is quite obvious: that which is born has not existed before it was born, in the same way as a house does not exist before it is built. Secondly, we need to assume causality, which I doubt many will reject.

Now, when humans reproduce, they give birth to a new being that has emotions and at some point will arise from the vegetative state into being conscious. Now, if we view this situation from a causal perspective, the parent is the rootnode of the child’s causality tree, the cause of the child. And the child will, supposing it stays alive for some time, partake in different forms of causality through its actions as well, and those affected will be parts of the causal tree of the child, and because the the parents are the cause of the child, the child’s causal tree is part of the parents’ causal tree. All saints, all murderers and all rapists had parents.

Thus, everything that the child does, and everything the descendants of that child do, is the cause and responsibility of the child’s parent.

Now you might think “No, children have a will and direction apart from their parents”, which certainly is true, but is not a counter-argument, since the parents had the child and thus made possible all the actions of the child in the first place. So unless the parenthood was without consent, each human bears the responsibility of all his descendants. This might seem absurd to many, and has to me been a puzzling realization, but is completely rational. It is a simple concept derived easily by logic: responsibility rests on causality, causality implies recursion. Still, it is interestingly unthinkable for the human, probably because we are hard-wired not to think about this. The idea of children clouds our judgement.

But it gets even more serious; every human that is brought to this world is brought without consent; you have no way of asking nobody if that nobody wants to be born. Birth and death are comparable events; they are radical shifts in the state of life to say the least. And there is no reason to why creating new life should be considered good, or even less wrong than murder. Both are making radical shifts to somebody’s existence without consent. We can quite easily imagine the possible pains of different forms of murder, so it is easy for us to comprehend the wrong because it is evident and acute. Yet birth (apart from the imminent bloodbath) is not an act of violence in that sense, and the problematics are indirect; most people will not torture their child (at least consciously), so it is easy to think that no damage is done. What constitutes a fundamental blindness to us and flaws our sense of justice, is probably our perception of time; the suffering of the child might roughly be divided evenly upon seventy years or so, assuming natural death of age. This dilution in no way decreases the total of the suffering, in the same way as it is wrongful to assume that constant abdominal pain for three years is any less than a kick in the head that hurts but does no apparent damage; in many cases the abdominal pain will cause much more suffering. Also, happiness in no way makes up for suffering; they are separate totals. Happiness does not remove the memories of pain from your brain, it just adds happy memories. If a person is tortured and alternately pleased, it only makes the person experienced, not necessarily happy.

What the above implies is simply that creating new emotional, conscious beings is a violation of respect for life comparable to murder. It is because of this realization that I nowadays advocate voluntary human extinction, meaning that we simply stop reproducing (no I don’t want people to kill each other ’til extinction). If someone wants to claim me a murderer for “not allowing children to be born”, I suggest they get psychiatrical help; I can’t act on anyone that does not exist. If we are to continue on that path of thought that people exist before they are created, it would imply that any human is a murderer if he does not reproduce as fast as his body allows him to. I shouldn’t need to mention the obvious suffering of overpopulation evident in many parts of the world.

My notion is based upon true respect for life, and because of that, I wish nobody would have to be created to this world. Any human that claims to respect life but embraces birth is a hypocrite; what that person respects is upkeep of life, which is obvious to our nature as animals, but inherently becomes a circular argument if one tries to reason with it.

Why is this not a fundamental part of our moral? Why did humans not go extinct ages ago? From an evolutionary perspective it is obviously beneficial for a creature’s success of reproduction that the creature reproduces, so evolution emphasizes those genes that keep the species from “thinking too much”. Thus, those who didn’t reproduce a thousand years ago won’t have descendants that live today; we are descendants of those who either had their way like animals or rapists and rape victims. What does this make us? It makes the human a hypocrite who is blind to his own crimes. It makes us the descendants of people whose minds were blurred by bestial desire, and the descendants of rapists.

This is our heritage, our legacy. Evolution prefers strong rapists and weak women as well as it prefers blinding stupidity. This way, evolution sets an upper limit for intelligence.

Reproduction with this in mind is a choice, and each and every one of us make that decision. My decision is not to partake in this insanity, and by doing so, neither will my genes that apparently helped me get rational and skeptical. I leave the reproduction to beasts, who one day might evolve into someone rational, who also chooses not to partake.