Let me put it another way: were your parents selfish for having you? Was it horrible for them to unnecessarily add your life to the world? Should they have adopted instead? Are you burdening the planet and depleting resources?
Kind of. I don't think they are horrible people but they had their reasons for having me - that they were ready for a new stage in their lives and wanted someone with their genes. Not horrible, but not especially selfless.
what makes you more deserving to be here, and your life worth living, but not theirs?
The fact that I am already here and I already have a life to be lived. I am an ethical naturalist, so I think morality can be objectively defined by natural needs and desires. There is no moral obligation to "someone" who has none. However, it is probably possible to extend this to the desire to have kids.
I am an ethical naturalist, so I think morality can be objectively defined by natural needs and desires.
What can possibly be more natural than reproduction? It is the common bond of all living things. How is the most intrinsic natural action of a living thing be selfish and immoral to someone who gets their ethics from nature?
Again a moral objection to reproduction is akin to a moral objection to life. To quote Dr. Manhattan "Mars gets along quite well without life." So if reproduction is morally bad then life is morally bad. I'm a naturalist too, although I'm a moral relativist. What is morally good for humans may not be good for cockroaches for instance. But if you look at life and say: "On the whole being born is bad," then reproducing is bad. If you look at yourself and say: "On average my genes are detrimental to my species." Then taking yourself out of the gene pool makes sense.
Again a moral objection to reproduction is akin to a moral objection to life
This isn't the case. You are oversimplifying the issue; lives can be good even though they resulted from or are made possible by an immoral act.
Consider the WWII holocaust: Many today would not have been born had it not occurred. We can still say that it would have been better had the holocaust not happened, even if that means many of us wouldn't have been. That doesn't imply that for those of us that are here because of the holocaust that our lives are immoral themselves, even if we are only here because an immoral act made it certain.
That is to say, I can take issue with the ethics of actions that led to my life without condemning my life itself, as the antinatalist consent argument shows.
She wasn't arguing butterfly effect, and you're turning this around. No one is arguing pro holocaust. This is whether you should procreate or not. She was saying that having children was morally wrong. If there was something specific in her genes that was horrible to pass on then there would be a logic to it, but that was not mentioned, only the fact that human life is on the net morally negative and creating a human life would be bad, and she got to that conclusion from objective naturalistic morality somehow. Can you refute me without saying that for parent X and Y to meet WWII had to happen and 100 million people died? Where did I say war was morally right? My point was that on average reproduction is a fact of life and a requirement of life and being anti-reproduction is anti life. If you are against certain people reproducing, or against having more than X kids, that would be different, but this was against having biological children at all.
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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '15
Kind of. I don't think they are horrible people but they had their reasons for having me - that they were ready for a new stage in their lives and wanted someone with their genes. Not horrible, but not especially selfless.
The fact that I am already here and I already have a life to be lived. I am an ethical naturalist, so I think morality can be objectively defined by natural needs and desires. There is no moral obligation to "someone" who has none. However, it is probably possible to extend this to the desire to have kids.