Culpability is an interesting subject.

For instance, if I belong to a group that committed atrocity in the past (before I joined the group), do I share culpability?

What if joining the group is obligatory, or even mandatory? What if I'm assumed to be part of the group, even though I did not volunteer to join? Is that justified? Am I morally required to go around renouncing group membership?

What if it's not possible to renounce membership? The governments of the world abhor "stateless" persons, so if I can't even renounce membership in a meaningful way without first securing membership to another group? Even then, I'd be forever stink-eyed and not considered a true member of the new group.

What if we're all just individuals, and the group membership thing is just some sort of shared delusion? How would you be able to blame anyone but the genociders themselves? How would you be able to extort other people if you couldn't pronounce them guilty by association?

And why does society have to exist? Society and humanity have no inherent value.

If this is your opinion, then it is only reasonable for those of us who do find value in society and humanity to ignore your opinions on how those things should work. Your statement is, in essence, a resignation from those groups.

avoiding things that have caused me suffering

I spend about 10 hours a week at the gym pursuing activities that (best that I can tell what you mean by "suffering") cause me suffering. I am better for it.

When we make a moral choice, we have to think of the future consequences of that choice.

Yes. And since the consequences of having children is good, at least net good, there's not much of a choice to make.

At most, I simply have to avoid the sorts of abuse that would cause them to turn out like yourself and believe absurdities such as "human extinction is a goal one should pursue".

How can you make such a blanket statement when you don’t know any of us personally?

Because these sorts of genetic issues are exceedingly rare, and the people who have them and know they have them would have a very different attitude which you do not present.

Moreso, I've spoken to such people as yourself in person before, and the "conditions" they specify would be jokeworthy except that they're typically friends or at least acquaintances I wouldn't want to be blunt with. "My grandparents have diabetes!" and such. WTF.

I live in an absurd world populated by absurd people hellbent on making certain it won't be populated at all anymore.

Suffering should be eradicated at all costs

What is suffering? I've lumped that word in with all the other religious claptrap like "soul" and "afterlife" and whatnot.

Are you talking about pain (the sensation)? It doesn't seem that you mean that, but if you did it would be absurd. "Pain should be eradicated" makes no sense. It can't even be said that pain should be avoided, since discomfort is often associated with worthwhile, and ultimately pleasant, activities.

Define suffering so we can be on the same page.

Humanity doesn’t have an inherent right to exist,

True, as far as it goes. But it's like "turnips have no inherent right to exist". Pretty meaningless, and in the context where people actually want to exist (and for others to exist), somewhat misleading.

I see your beliefs now.

Please, read my palm. Tell everyone what my beliefs are.

You’re making a strawman out of me in this argument.

We're on a public forum. Though my comment may be the literal reply to yours, it isn't necessarily true that I am speaking to you and only you. I'm speaking to others in response to what you've said.

I apologize if this makes it seem I'm hostile to you.

But I'll drop another rule on you and see what you make of this. Adoptions are about the children who need someone to care for them, and not for the people adopting who want to gratify their need for a human pet. If you're doing it for yourself, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Therefor, the only people who should adopt are those who do not want to, but out of a sense of duty.

And if people accepted that rule, then we'd have no discussion at all about adoption in this thread. Because adoption can no longer be a substitute for having one's own children.

There are no moral sources. Those who would adopt morally would be compelled to adopt children from their own family first... who better to not let an orphan forget their parents than someone who also loved and knew those parents?

And if there were no family, then friends of those parents for the same reason.

And if no friends, then that community... except today, there aren't really any communities left. Just people who live near each other as accidents of geography.

And if none in the community, then at least someone from that culture. So that the child might grow up knowing his or her own language and songs and whatnot. But western culture isn't a culture so much as the absence of one, a void, and so it can't imagine that anything like that's important.

But none of these rules allow hipsters who live in California but are too eco-conscious of their carbon footprint to want to "bring another child into this world" but want to raise a child to do so. So these rules are bad. And that's why adopting African children is good and moral. Because they want to, they have the money to do it, and that warlord uses a cutout so that the adoption has the appearance of being above-board.

It's a cult that hates you so much that it implores you to go out and make half-clones of yourself.

I’m not aware of any connection between VHEMT and flat earth theory

They both started out as jokes. But the latecomers to the joke took them seriously... somehow.

society can adapt around them in any way it sees fit

It can't adapt to this. Society ceases to exist if there are no people, so saying "it can adapt to no one performing the process by which people create their replacements in the world" is dumb.

Fertility is weird in that young children grow up in the same society that is doing these things... they internalize what they see around them as "normal". So if you teach children that having one or zero children is normal, they'll grow up to want the same. They can always go lower than 1, but never higher. This means fertility trends in one direction only, it never goes up.

And once it drops below replacement levels, it won't ever go back up to them (let alone above) ever again.

Your society is dying. It doesn't realize it yet, and by the time it does nothing will be possible to do about it.

Who can make that judgement, you?

Yes. I do not claim to be the only one capable of making that judgement. Though it seems those like me are rare.

Judgement is nothing more than the measurement of a thing or an event. We are not talking about a legal process... I sentence no one, I convict no one, I condemn no one.

But I've measured, and accurately.

Trauma seems like a damn good argument for not having kids.

It may seem that way, but it isn't. At most, it's an argument to delay having them.

If you wanted or needed to do something in your life, and you were in a car wreck and broke both your legs... would you think it sane for someone to say "now you should never do that thing again, you've experienced trauma!" ?

Why is it any more sane if the injury is psychological? You take the time you need to recover, you work hard to get back to where you should be, and you do that thing. And you do it whether it's having children or climbing some mountain or whatever. And you'd even agree with me if we hadn't prefaced the achievement as "having children", but some other trivial thing.

to subject another human being, who had no say in being born

This is a nonsense statement. Until the person exists, by definition they can have no say in anything because they do not exist. Therefor it is not necessary, and even irrational, to speak or think about whether someone has a say in "being born".

You're morally permitted to subject a non-existent non-person to "being born". Unless you've invented some sort of time travel, nothing else makes any sense.

especially when some of that suffering may be caused by genetics, which will be passed down to said human being

This is the first intelligent thing you've said. Those who have incurable genetic diseases that cause true misery are rational to not reproduce.

None of the people in this thread, and few of those (1 in 10,000 or even fewer) who are childfree are childless because of that reason. You don't have the Tay Sachs gene, and your receding hairline's not comparable.

i.e. saying "people who don’t want kids are mentally ill" and then wondering why people would consider that to be an insulting statement.

It's like saying "people who want to force themselves to vomit after every meal are mentally ill" and then wondering why the bulimics consider that to be insulting?

They're bulimic. It's a mental illness. They probably do find it insulting, at least when they can work up the nerve to do it... it wasn't always that way. But wasn't it Oprah who had a bunch of the crackpots on her show where they were starting to claim eating disorders were a lifestyle choice?

Same thing here. If you get enough mentally ill people together in one place, they can convince themselves that their perceived numbers alone make them not mentally ill.

I can't tell if you're playing devil's advocate or one of the mentally ill, and I don't care nearly enough to read your comment carefully to try to figure it out.

I did not know human trafficking is wholesome.

It can be. You just have to label it correctly. Call it "international adoption" and the money "adoption fees", and it's all good.

God, I remember reading that dumb thing nearly 30 years ago. Back when no one who read it could fail to understand that it was satire.

When did satire die? When did people start taking flat earth theory as more than a SNLesque comedy skit?

but I feel like I’m tempted to compulsively have one.

You're unusually perceptive. No joking.

I always wonder at the people who say they want none, then get drunk and fuck without contraceptives. They're unaware of their compulsions.

Two's a good number. Not sure I'd say it out loud, it's like daring fate to give you triplets.

Insulting people

I'm not aware of having insulted anyone. I've come to learn in my life that some people are insulted by reality... that's sad. Reality doesn't change just because you feel insulted, it never apologizes, and it definitely doesn't make amends.

that someone can rationally make that decision.

No. They can only irrationally make that decision. And it's not difficult to discern that truth... just open your eyes. Trauma, gluttony, there's always something right there at the surface pressuring that choice.

What a progressive take on psychiatry! That guy babbling about demons whispering in his ear as he uses feces to fingerpaint on the hospital walls isn't mentally ill... he's just making a choice.

A choice you or I might not make, but it's no less valid and no less healthy.

Thanks for changing my mind.

i don’t want to have kids because i believe it’s unethical for some average joe, or in fact anyone that isn’t an expert in child psychology and child development, to subject a human being to potential lifelong trauma

Only PhDs in child psychology should reproduce? So, you want humanity to be extinct, that's a more ethically sound position than "sometimes bad things happen to some people"?

society feeds you the lie that you need to have kids to feel fulfilled and happy,

You've got 4 billion years of genetic coding that insists, even demands that this is true. The last few tens of millions of years hardcodes it directly into your meat brain.

Society? If society ever did that, it ceased doing it almost a hundred years ago. Now, you can't turn your head or hear a dozen words from some random stranger proclaiming the opposite is true and that anyone who says otherwise is a misogynist, masochist, or biblethumper.

There of course are many reasons for that. If you believe transexuals are healthy, important individuals... how could they participate in parenting if they're mutilating their reproductive organs? So, parenting and reproduction now have to be bad or at least discouraged, to push the other message more fully. Not just them, of course, it's not fair to single them out when there are so many other degenerate lifestyles that, if you embrace them, you also can't embrace the idea that parenting is important without being hypocritical.

The end result will be, of course, that these lifestyles die out. The question is, will they take everything else with them.

Nah, for $50,000 you can buy an African child. Takes about a year or so. It's not human trafficking because it's good and wholesome.

How is it any more terrible than it's ever been these last few million years ago? I don't have to worry about my kids being eaten by some predator anymore, the smilodon problem's taken care of. Horrible diseases still about, but many that would have crippled or killed them just 100 years ago are now bad cultural memories. They have the comfort kings wouldn't have known in centuries past.

Only the neurotic would whine about how they can't bring children into a terrible world. I'm glad you've gotten over yours. As you have time, do what you can to dissect that old worldview and figure out how it works so that maybe you can help other people someday.

Haha. "Adoption". There haven't been any recent world wars. No plagues (close miss on that though). There are no children to adopt. So few, in fact, that those who want to adopt often find themselves on waiting lists...

So much so, that many give up on that course of action, and instead choose to fly halfway around the world to buy children from warlords and conmen in Africa.

Or, you could become a "foster parent", which is like adoption except that the kid's even less yours... they might come along and yank them away from you for a variety of reasons. The most heartbreaking of which, I'm told, is that the real parents have convinced some bureaucrat that they won't abuse or neglect them like they had been doing, when experience suggests that it will just happen again.

Though, don't be too sympathetic to the foster parents, they're helping the government prosecute the war on drugs and ruin families, just by supplying the demand for child abduction technicians. And all so they can scratch their itch of (fake) parenthood and feel self-righteous about it.

God no. I can't imagine a more horrific punishment than to be childless.

I wish we had more than the two we have, but my wife and I started late. My daughter (12) sometimes asks how many children she could realistically have... a good sign that she hasn't been tainted by whatever mental illness it is that the "childfree" people have.