Thoughts on painless killing

I do not want this to be true. I'm vegan and for various reasons I would hate to see a sound argument legitimizing the killing of animals, let alone the killing of humans. But I can't pretend, and if there is any value of knowing what's true and reasonable, I'll give it my best go and steelperson the best argument for murder I can make. I'm primarily looking for "instrinsic" reasons why it would be wrong.

Clearly murder has social consequences, it usually causes great suffering, it's probably traumatic to carry out until you're desensitized to it. I also believe murdering animals painlessly leads to negative consequences for animals overall. But these are not the primary concerns I'm looking for here, however they will be given their due attention. But for now, imagine a gun, a trigger and the lights going out.

P1) If it's bad for someone to be killed painlessly/without being aware, then either it's bad to violate their preferences, or it's bad to take potential future good experiences from them.

P2) Preferences are only instrumentally valuable for experiencing pleasure or avoiding the experience of suffering - and if being killed painlessly does not lead to any of the two, then preferences have no value in the scenario, and violating them cannot be bad for them.

P3) If the concern is for future good experiences being taken away from the individual, this concern should involve some kind of deprivation of a future. But there is no actual experienced deprivation, and therefore the individual isn't deprived of their future, and this cannot be bad for them.

C) It's not bad for someone to be killed painlessly/without being aware.

Simplified:
P1) If kill bad, it's because preferences or future pleasur

P2) Not preference

P3) Not future pleasure

C) Kill not bad (~P)

P1

These are the two objections I can see most likely being made.

P2

If X provides a positive experience compared to Y, a being will develop a preference for X over Y. I think this is how we should understand preferences. I believe all preferences point a being towards positive experiences or away from negative experiences that they expect to have or to continue having. So preferences are always forward-looking, and saying something about what mental state you want at some point between now and any future moment. We should care about someone's preference in so far as 1) someone is correct that their preferences lead to the experience they want, and 2) the act of not meeting their preference does not cause significant suffering as a secondary effect (distrust, trauma, harmful beliefs etc).

If a kid asks why going against someone's preference is bad, what do we tell them in order to make them understand why? Usually we explain how someone will feel when their preference is violated, and relating that to the kid and how they would feel if someone did that to them. So we're talking about an experience of violation - we don't talk about the preference itself without an associated negative experience. I think this is clearly because the experience is what matters, and the preference is a guideline for how to achieve good and avoid bad experiences for some individual.

Clearly when someone is wrong about what is good for them, we make a tradeoff between how they will feel when experiencing the unexpected outcome, and how they will feel when they learn that they weren't trusted to make their own decision.

Example #1: A child wants candy for dinner, but the parent is right not to respect this preference because they know what's best for the child.

Example #2: An animal is hit by a car, has no chance of a good life ahead, but still (irrationally) prefers to live or instinctively clings to life in some way. But it's more important to protect them from the harm ahead, because what the preference points to is bad for the animal.

There are social consequences to overriding someone's preference, depending on the severity of the outcome, which explains why we've developed such respect for the concept. We are also often wrong about the long term benefits of someone whose preferences we violate. For instance, a parent may force their child to attend a certain school and pressure them into choosing a certain career path, but we understand this often isn't good for the child when we really consider the life they want. One person touching another against their wish, will be viewed in a very negative light by the community if they continue their behaviour (of course some people get away with quite a lot). Consent has great social utility, no doubt, and it's a very important tool if you intend to treat others well.

However, while violating someone's preference will typically lead to harm being experienced, taking away someone's capacity to get any return on their preference can't harm that person as a result. It requires an experience in order to feel violated and to be harmed in any significant sense. So since the reason why we should respect preferences is not in play at any point during a painless killing, violated preferences are not a reason why killing someone is bad for them.

There may be social consequences for the one doing the killing, and someone's preferences and consent can be a part of that equation, but this argument says that it's not bad for the individual being killed to have their preferences violated. Therefore we need some other account for the badness of being killed than violated preferences.

P3

If we care about an existing being's continued existence, we value their future good experiences (presumably we don't want bad experiences for them). It seems to have to be the case that this particular individual's future is what is important, since the argument only makes the case that it's not bad for this particular individual to have their future taken away. Otherwise, some may object that it's not necessarily that this particular individual's future is taken away, but that the world is worse off somehow by not having someone there with a good life, or by not having this particular individual in it. So essentially, the world is deprived of the individual, rather than the individual deprived of the world. We can talk about this afterwards, but for now, let's focus on the latter - the individual is deprived of the world.

As with the previous premise, it seems nonsensical to say that someone can be deprived without an experience of deprivation. To just imagine this for a second - were you deprived of existence all the years before you were born? Clearly not. It requires an experience of deprivation, some negative emotional reaction.

Here's another example to make this a little more plausible: have you ever noticed how you don't really notice falling asleep, but at some point you just find yourself either dreaming or awake? Imagine that you're on guard duty, and you would be incredibly disappointed if you fell asleep, but you are also as tired as you have ever been. You don't feel deprived of your wakefulness the moment you fall asleep. That happens as you wake up and realize what has happened. That's when any feeling of deprivation could kick in, when you're conscious and aware. So in order not to repeat myself too much from the previous premise, I think it's simply clear that the one being killed cannot feel deprived, and thus can't be deprived any more than what they were before being born.

 

Objections to killing, unrelated to the argument

There is another protest against killing someone that doesn't necessarily say that it's bad for the one being killed, but that it's bad full stop that they are killed. We can attribute this badness to some kind of universal/cosmic badness, a moral badness (hereafter "the world"), but not one that is bad for the individual themselves:

The world is deprived of the individual (not to be confused with "others are deprived")

The world is deprived of a particular individual. There is some kind of cosmic importance, some moral importance perhaps, that this particular individual's positive experiences get to continue being instantiated into the world. That's not to say that it's not also good for the one existing, but that any deprivation of their continued existence would be some kind of extrinsic deprivation, something that the world loses and is worse off for.

To me this first of all seems like it requires ascribing some sort of personhood to the world itself, or some kind of objective moral standard that is not grounded in the experience of individuals. This already seems farfetched, but for the sake of being thorough, let's entertain a couple of thought experiments if we granted that the world could be deprived of an individual.

Presumably, if the world can be deprived of one individual, it can be satiated by receiving another, granted that their lives are good. Now there seems to be some importance to introducing good lives into the world, for the sake of the totality of "goodness". If this was true, then it could seem like a zero-sum game if we subtracted one and added one, assuming none of the intricacies of suffering is involved with the killing. We replace one individual with another, such that at any point someone is killed, we add another individual to take their place.

But what about the intuition that there is something about this particular individual that is important to continue? Let's say that their wishes for a future have some kind of meaning to the world, such that adding another individual couldn't simply replace that value. Well, what if we introduced an individual with the exact same properties as the one who was killed? Let's give them all the wishes the previous one had. Let's even give them the memories of the one who was killed, up until the time of death. If the world can't distinguish between them and someone who replaced them anymore, what is the importance of that particular individual to the world?

Furthermore, with issues of personal identity (see Derek Parfit's teletransportation paradox and Ship of Theseus), it seems implausible that a person with their future ahead of them actually will remain the same person in any way that distinguishes them from whoever replaced them, apart from the psychological continuity of their internal experience - of which there can be no deprivation, as discussed earlier. Consider that an organism's parts are exchanged for new ones over the course of years, such that they will actually not "be the same" in any way easy to pinpoint. A being that replaces them can also have the killed being's memories injected into them such that the replacement maintains psychological continuity.

Next up, a common intuition: it's not wrong to refrain from adding good lives into the world. Perhaps not everyone would agree, but this seems to be a strange consequence of valuing a potential future. Now suddenly the early abortion of a fetus does seem like taking away someone's potential future from the world. We could go further and say that wearing a condom, or even just abstaining from procreative love-acts altogether seems like we're taking away someone's potential future - from the world that is.

The premise in question works off this intuition - there's simply no deprivation going on by not putting lives into the world, even if they replace an existing person with practically full replication. It doesn't seem like a bad thing to do for any intrinsic reasons relating to the one who would be caused to exist, or to the "totality" being deprived of someone. Therefore it seems to me that holding the view that the world is in any meaningful way deprived of an individual comes with an intellectual price tag, so to speak, something that seems very implausible.

 

Painless killing is bad for society/others

I think this goes without saying, generally, that in terms of suffering, other individuals who live will be the destination of any harm caused by such a killing. I would also include the killer themselves as a target of the harm. I will write a dedicated article about the idea of harmful effects to animals as well, even if the victim isn't harmed by the killing, in case of raising and killing an animal.

The action cannot be "universalized"

The moment any policy is made for the permissibility of killing someone painlessly, it's no longer in a vacuum and the policy itself causes suffering to existing people. However, that does not mean it wrongs the person who dies before such a policy is implemented, but it would wrong the people who have to live with such a policy.

However, it can still be done in secret or by faking an accident, such that it would not be universalized, while remaining ethical.

Behind the veil of ignorance

One would likely not want to design society in such a way that you can be taken out at any time against your will. But that seems clearly to be because living in a society where that can happen feels scary and would lead to suffering. That doesn't mean that any instance of painless killing would lead to people living in a society in which they feared being killed at any time. So from behind the veil, with a good understanding of how there would be no bad experience in the actual world, it seems unproblematic to design society in such a way that no one would fear being painlessly killed, yet some would be.

 

Speciesism

A society with a painless killing policy is likely to act it out for the wrong reasons or it will lead to speciesism, even if not intended. Such discrimination would lead to harms to animals, and has a weak defense against human discrimination too.

Killing painlessly is too hard to do in practice

Hard to argue against. The risk of misfiring and imperfections is already large enough that it seriously undermines the argument for killing painlessly, for practical reasons.

Breeding animals for painless killing is still wrong

Breeding causes disease and bad lives not worth living for many animals, also on "happy farms".

 

Next up, here's a conversation going through one pathway on the badness of death.

 

Death conversation #1

Blarb: There is no humane way to kill someone who does not want to die. How could there be?

Grobl: How would you define humane?

Blarb: Showing compassion and benevolence. Animals don't want to die, and killing them is a violation of their preferences, and so can't be benevolent or compassionate. Just apply it to humans. There is no compassionate or benevolent way to kill someone who prefers to live.

Grobl: Wouldn't there be a sense of compassion if I did it in a way that caused no pain, since I don't wish suffering upon anyone else?

Blarb: I don't think it truly would be compassionate. You wouldn't want to be killed yourself, even if it was painless, so why would that be okay for someone else just because there's no suffering? It would be limited compassion at best.

Grobl: What if I thought it's not bad at all for the one being killed, for instance if they didn't know it was happening? Even if it goes against their preferences. Would it have to be a limited form of compassion?

Blarb: Well, if you truly thought that, maybe not - I just don't see how it could be good for someone to be killed, unless they were suffering beyond any decent chance of recovery.

Grobl: I'm not saying it's necessarily good for them to die, just that I'm not sure that it would be be bad. In fact I think it's very hard to say that it is bad for someone to die without any suffering.

Blarb: So if someone wants to shoot you in the back of the head, you see no issue with this?

Grobl: Oh, I think there are plenty of issues to take with it. What motivated them to do that and what will happen next? But besides that, assuming I didn't suffer, I don't see how that could be bad for me.

Blarb: Don't you want to live? Experience things, have a future?

Grobl: For sure I do. When I'm alive, which I am, I want to. When I'm dead, I don't. It can't harm me because there is no one left to be harmed, and no experience left to evaluate what happened as bad.

Blarb: Yeah, but since you want these things now, it would be bad for you to have those things taken from you.

Grobl: If you fall asleep accidentally, do you think whatever you were doing was taken away from you? Was there any moment before you woke up where you were deprived of doing whatever you would have done if you didn't fall asleep?

Blarb: If I fell asleep, that probably happened because I needed the sleep, because it was good for me. It wouldn't be good for me to fall asleep for no good reason while doing things I want or enjoy.

Grobl: Well, let's say you did just fall asleep without actually needing it then. Were you deprived?

Blarb: Yes, I could definitely miss out on things that I wanted.

Grobl: And why is that bad?

Blarb: I think it's common sense that being deprived of something you want doesn't feel nice.

Grobl: And when would it feel not nice?

Blarb: Well, I wouldn't feel it before waking up. But I'd realize then what I had missed out on while I was gone, the things I could have had.

Grobl: So if you never woke up, there wouldn't be any moment where it would feel bad, right?

Blarb: Well. Yeah, of course. But I'm saying that when I am awake again, then I can see why it was bad for me to miss out on things while I was gone. Not just that this realization would account for the entire badness of the situation.

Grobl: So when I asked why it's bad to miss out on something you want, you said that it doesn't feel nice to miss out. But given that it would never "feel bad" in this case, I understand it that you're pointing to something else that accounts for the badness, correct?

Blarb: Yes, it wouldn't be about feeling bad because of what you missed, just that this in retrospect can show us that it was bad for us to miss out.

Grobl: Okay, and what makes it bad then to miss out on something, if it's not related to a negative feeling?

Blarb: Well, consider this. If you could steal a considerable amount of money from a senile person, and they never notice that money is gone, don't you think this can be bad for them?

Grobl: I do think negative feelings are bad. The senile person may never find out, but may find themselves with less money than needed for preventing other negative feelings in the future, like a medical treatment or something else. So it can be bad for them even if they don't find out.

Blarb: I agree with that, but let's say instead that they will be healthy and no negative feelings are on their way, but instead they could have been even happier if they could spend more money on fun and enjoyable things.

Grobl: Then I'm unsure to what degree the word bad is appropriate. It can be relative or absolute, in a sense. Eating the tastiest meal you've ever had can be a bad experience compared to the best possible experience achievable. But I think it's nonsense to call it bad just because it could possibly be better. I think the person being stolen from could have had a nicer life, but being denied that isn't bad for them in the absolute sense, if we assume no suffering occurs as a consequence.

Blarb: Hmm, so are you saying it's not bad to be killed in the absolute sense then?

Grobl: Yes. The example with the senile person is hard to separate from consequent suffering, because they're gonna be alive to experience the consequences of having less money, and it's expected to lead to suffering in the real world. Killing someone painlessly does not involve any negative consequences in the same way, for the one being killed.

Blarb: Then perhaps what I'm saying is that relatively speaking, it would be bad for you to die.

Grobl: Yes, I think that can be true, but you can say that of anything. Anything can be relatively good or bad. Getting cancer can be good, relative to the experience of torture.

Blarb: I still can't shake the feeling that all the hopes and dreams someone has being vanquished against their will is bad for them, in some real sense.

Grobl: I think we've all been heavily conditioned, by our biology and our environment to feel that way, but we are often biased towards thinking certain unreasonable things. It's understandable.

Blarb: I don't know. I'm beginning to think it might be bad to deny someone a positive experience, even if the alternative isn't something that feels bad to them in any way.

Grobl: When you say "it would be bad to deny", it sounds to me like you're talking about the action of denying, rather than talking about whether it's good or bad for the person whose future positive experiences you are denying. But an action can be the wrong one, for a multitude of reasons. I'm more curious about whether the one who's killed is wronged in any meaningful sense, whether it's bad for them.

Blarb: Okay, let's stick to whether it's good or bad for the one who dies, and whether they are wronged. I think even if the alternative doesn't feel bad for them, since they don't exist, it's still bad for them to not be experiencing positives in the future. And I mean that in a way that can't be explained by negative feelings, but rather the absence of good feelings.

Grobl: Now I'm curious about a few things. Do you think it's bad for an unconscious fetus to never come into existence?

Blarb: Hmm. Oh, actually that's tricky. I'm not sure if those are the same.

Grobl: We're talking about denying someone good experiences, even if the alternative, whether that is death or abortion, doesn't result in any negative feelings on their part.

Blarb: I'm not sure if a fetus is 'someone' if they aren't sentient yet.

Grobl: Something then. Is it bad for something to not experience good things in the future, if the alternative leads to no bad experiences?

Blarb: I think even "bad for something" is problematic. Things can only be bad for 'someone', but a fetus isn't someone, it's something.

Grobl: In the same sense then, a dead body isn't a someone, so nothing can be bad for them.

Blarb: But in that case, they were someone, and the death was still bad for the version of them that was someone.

Grobl: Okay, so you're pointing to a difference between the fetus and the person: the former is not a sentient thing, something capable of having experiences, but the latter is, and someone with experiences can have things done to them that are bad, correct?

Blarb: Yes.

Grobl: But earlier we agreed that the badness is not explained in terms of negative experiences, right?

Blarb: Hmm, yes true. But we're still talking about experiences now, the positive experiences of someone who will still be alive.

Grobl: So the issue I see with this view is that something can be bad for someone, but it's not because of any experience of badness, yet an experience is needed in order for badness to apply to someone.

Blarb: I'm not sure that I see the issue with that. It makes sense that only someone who can experience things can be wronged, it's just that they are wronged as part of the process where they cease to be someone who can be wronged.

Grobl: I find it implausible. I'm unsure why an experience is relevant in one sense but not the other. It's relevant in some sense in order to be a "wrongable" individual, on your view, but the badness is not explained by any negative experience.

Blarb: Well, as I said earlier, the negative experience isn't really part of it anymore, but the lack of a future positive experience is what matters. But in order for it to be bad to have that taken away from you, you must necessarily have a potential future ahead, for which you need to be sentient.

Grobl: Okay, I don't see the difference between a fetus and an already sentient person, if the property we're caring about is "having a potential sentient future ahead". That clearly applies to a fetus and a person. It even applies to sperm cells.

Blarb: Hmm, I still feel there is something missing from this puzzle.

Grobl: Look, I'm afraid to donate my organs when I'm dead, because I'm in denial about actually having to die at some point. And I'm riddled with biased weird thinking, but I also recognize that these thoughts are irrational.

Blarb: I'm almost certain that it matters somehow that your future has value to you when you are in existence already. 

Grobl: Well, I wouldn't really disagree if we said that your imagined future has value to you right now. There's lots of things I aspire to do in my life, and they drive me forward and inspire me. But they are valuable to me right now, and have a potential to be valuable to me in the future, depending on whether or not I exist to benefit from those things at the point in time that I imagine for myself.

Blarb: Sure, I don't disagree with that. I just feel like it's a kind of loss.

Grobl: Like the world is losing out on someone, or they are losing out on the world?

Blarb: I'm sure both could be true, but I mean the latter.

Grobl: I just think this strongly implies that potential life itself has great value, since it would lose out on positive things. So every sperm cell would be a lost potential individual. It would be a sad thing to see a desert with very little life. Moons and planets would be a sad sight. Imagine all the lives that could have been there.

Blarb: I don't know, I don't think that's it. Look, I think there may be another thing that makes painless killing seem really wrong. A fetus, not having an experience, doesn't have a preference to live, but any sentient being probably has such a preference.

Grobl: And you think it's bad for them to have their preferences violated?

Blarb: Yes, I think there's something about this.

Grobl: Without repeating myself too much with regards to things being bad for you, I'm just curious. Can a fetus have a preference to live?

Blarb: They aren't sentient until much later during a pregnancy, so they can't have a preference either.

Grobl: So some kind of conscious experience is necessary in order to have a preference?

Blarb: Yeah. In order for you to prefer something, there must be some kind of concept about what it is you are preferring, and what the alternative is. For instance preferring pleasure over pain, both of which require an experience. So a fetus doesn't have preferences, but animals do, for instance.

Grobl: And do I need to be actively thinking about this preference in order to have it?

Blarb: No, of course not. You can prefer vanilla over chocolate without constantly be needing to make that evaluation.

Grobl: That just tells me that in regard to some situation, there is something in the brain, whether it's kept actively in mind, or if it's 'just there', that tells us what a being prefers.

Blarb: Sure.

Grobl: So even if a fetus can't keep their preference in mind, since they don't have any experience of 'a mind', isn't it possible that this preference is dormant? For instance, a fetus may have the 'blueprint' of the breathing mechanic in their brain, which leads to a preference for breathing being somewhat dormant.

Blarb: Well, if you started choking it, it couldn't really express that preference, even if it was somehow dormant in there. It's meaningless without an actual real thing that the preference points to, like the negative sensation of being choked.

Grobl: So a wish for the future should only be relevant as long as there's a real thing that this preference points to as well then, right? Like an actual future? Or an actual situation in which their wish for the future is relevant? Or can the wish for the future be dormant for a living person, same as how the wish to breathe is dormant for a fetus?

Blarb: I don't think it would be dormant simply because of how the body works. It keeps itself alive because it inherently wants to continue into the future, which is a constant thing going on whether you are consciously aware of it or not.

Grobl: So does a fetus as well, to be fair, even if they're not sentient. There's something that keeps them going into the future.

Blarb: But in the case of the sentient being's body, this inherent way the body works also provides a constant stream of experience along with pleasure and pain. So the preference for living is constantly expressed by the body and it's realized through a conscious experience of life, with the resulting pleasures of living.

Grobl: So we care in so far as the will to live is expressed in some sort of way, not just by the organism, but by the experience of the organism itself?

Blarb: Yeah. There's a whole lot of unconscious processes that still affect how your conscious life is experienced, and these are all part of the body's self preservation and provides the full experience which includes a constant expression of the desire to live and continue into the future.

Grobl: I think besides the original critcisms I've made which makes me hesitant to follow this preference-based concern in this manner, one thing does come up. It kind of sounds to me now like there should be no inherent difference, with regards to how we should treat these cases, between a fetus and a sleeping person. Because a sleeping person isn't consciously experiencing this stream of the organism's expression of the will to live.

Blarb: A sleeping person still experiences things somewhat consciously and subconsciously, so that would be accounted for in the same way. It doesn't have to be 'on your mind'.

Grobl: Surely then a person in deep coma would not be experiencing things in any way that counts as any meaningful form of experience? Some people have reported that they felt like they woke up instantly after becoming unconscious, even though many years had passed. Doesn't seem to be much room there for any experience of the will to live, besides the one we could consider dormant.

Blarb: Hmm. I think many comatose people do have experiences.

Grobl: And what if they don't, and only will have an experience if they get out of coma?

Blarb: Then... I guess it seems like the dormant preference still should matter. They clearly had the preference before they went into coma, and they will have it once they wake up.

Grobl: Should we really be looking backwards though, to something that was true of a person but isn't anymore?

Blarb: I guess only to determine that they really do have that preference on the inside somehow.

Grobl: And a fetus does not have this preference in the same way if their body is taking care of its own survival?

Blarb: It seems different when there has been a conscious expression of the preference before the coma.

Grobl: Why?

Blarb: It may have a different form than the one in the fetus.

Grobl: Like a part of the brain that's different in a significant way, because of a previously consciously expressed preference?

Blarb: Maybe. Yeah.

Grobl: What if that's just unverifiable, or verifiably untrue? This seems very implausible to me, as an account for the badness of death.

Blarb: I mean, memories are just physical parts of the brain, and they would recall this preference upon waking up, verifying that it was a part of this brain during the coma.

Grobl: So take a very suicidal person. Their body is expressing one thing ("live"), but their experience is bad enough that they consciously lean in a different direction ("die). Help me understand what their preference is in this context.

Blarb: So the body does provide some preference for life, but it can be consciously overridden by a stronger conscious preference to die.

Grobl: Does this mean that the subconscious' default preference is unreliable?

Blarb: Sure, it could be, but usually if someone is living, you should assume that the net preference is to live, unless they consciously state otherwise.

Grobl: So let me just try to summarize this. This theory you're presenting says that being killed is bad for you IF your brain contains a memory of the preference to live, and that this is expected to be there in the future.

Blarb: I think that's the best I could do for now.

Grobl: So this view, if I understand this correctly, says that it's bad to be killed, not because you take away potential life from an organism, but because you take away potential life from someone that has the 'true' preference to live stored in some kind of memory block in the brain.

Blarb: Yes.

Grobl: And the comatose person with no experience is covered by the fact that a physical memory of the true preference is present in the comatose person's brain, in a way that differentiates their brain in a significant way from a fetus' brain, such that it's not bad for the fetus to be killed, but it's bad for the comatose person to be killed.

Blarb: It does seem pretty complicated.

Grobl: So let's say we found the remnant of the brain of someone who died centuries ago. This brain likely contains the physical memory block of the wish to live, right? If we could revive them, would it be bad for the dead person's brain to not be revived? After all, they could have a potential future, they have a previously expressed preference to live being physically stored in a memory in the now dead brain.

Blarb: Well, they're not alive at all.

Grobl: What if the brain grew as part of a plant? What's the difference then from the comatose person?

Blarb: Yeah, I don't really know, I can't pinpoint it at the moment.

Grobl: I think preferences don't have value on their own, but I do think pleasure and pain do. And preferences tell us what kinds of experiences someone wants to have, and what things are likely good for them. Depending on how reasonable they are, of course. A child doesn't know what's good for them in many many ways, but in general if you want to provide someone with as many good and as few bad experiences, respecting their preferences is a good idea.

Blarb: And if providing someone with as many good experiences as possible is part of your goal, why even consider painlessly killing someone?

Grobl: I suppose because I find it so implausible that refraining from adding good lives into the world is a bad thing. It seems much easier to focus on the fact that there is no suffering, and investigate how all things that typically are bad for someone are strictly tied to suffering. There's nothing wrong with "nothing".

Blarb: It seems at least plausible to me that if you had to pick between two views, one that says that killing someone without suffering is alright, as long as it doesn't come with new negatives, and another that says it's bad to take away the future of unborn children, the latter at least seems more palatable.

Grobl: I think both are impractical to various degrees. It's hard to kill someone without causing suffering, and we haven't even talked about the suffering you could cause to those who aren't killed. And creating good lives that benefit others more than they take away may be practically hard. But I think we should try to pick the most reasonable one, not the one that fits the most neatly with our established worldview.

Blarb: Sure.