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99%+ of people who claim to value consent are mistaken

  • Thread starter Despondent Dreamer
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Despondent Dreamer

Despondent Dreamer

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To all the supposedly horrified normies who take issue with all the posting about rape on this site, whether ironic or genuine, and say that we're all somehow terrible people, I'm guessing that you probably break your own rules. Or if you don't break your own rules, you instead selectively apply a value which you don't ultimately hold. Bear with me here.

Lets start with the obvious premise, why is rape bad? If you could travel through different points in history you'd get different answers, but this is a digression. The answer which is relevant here is that people who are raped are of course given no choice, the lack of consent being the primary offense (made worse if it's particularly violent). But do you know what's bothered me about this for quite a long time? Why do people only apply consent to specific contexts, chief of them being sex, yet still claim to value consent as a standard? If the problem with rape is that people are being forced into participating in something which they don't want, and they're being harmed, then why do the vast majority of people who claim to value consent not apply it other things people are forced into which also harm them?

Do you know what's incalculably worse than rape, both in the harm that it brings, and in facilitating the very capacity for suffering at all? Birth. When it comes to procreating consent is completely impossible to obtain, since one cannot ask the nonexistent if they'd like to exist. No matter what wordplay you want to use to try and spin this, if you have a child who ends up wishing they had never been born at all, you have wronged them in manner really no different from that of a rapist. Worse actually, since while a particularly sadistic rapist might be able to inflict an incredible amount of suffering upon someone, they can't create the capacity for sentient beings to suffer. Even if we set procreation aside for a moment, things like mgm/fgm, child rearing as a whole, school, and nearly everything else we subject children to would be breaches of consent that vary in severity.

One of the primary reasons why this bothers me so much is because it comes across as extremely disingenuous. To me it seems like most people only value consent when it suits them, and that it's entirely motivated by self-interest. You care about consent when it's something which could tangibly affect you, that being rape (and yes rape is as much of an issue for men as it is for women), but you stop caring the moment this value might prevent you from creating those whom you hope to be your little mini-mes, children to ensure emotional satisfaction, financial security in old age, to ease the pain of your mortality salience, or to be used as a hedge against loneliness.

Personally I don't claim to value consent, because it's a value which is basically impossible to truly uphold, that it's silly in some specific contexts, and it's a value which everyone seems to arbitrarily decide when it matters anyway. Instead I value harm reduction, so that puts me opposed rape for a related, but still ultimately distinct reason.
 
They are not bringing the someone into the world and forcing it to stay here and most people are happy, so of course birth [just look at overall suicide rates, most people (>99900 in 100000) prefer to live than to die and they still have the option to do the latter] is not as worse as rape.

Though its true that people only value consent when the lack of it could be used against them.

By birth bringing more happiness than suffering, your premise is flawed
 
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You have the right to refuse sex if you don't want it. How would we know whether you want to be born or not? With sex, you can either refuse it or accept it. Birth you can't weigh in on. So this doesn't really compare.
 
You have the right to refuse sex if you don't want it. How would we know whether you want to be born or not?
You decide after being born that you didn't want to be born.

With sex, you can either refuse it or accept it.
You can't in the case of rape.

Birth you can't weigh in on. So this doesn't really compare.
You can't weigh in on rape, just like birth, so it's the same concept.
 
They are not bringing the someone into the world and forcing it to stay here and most people are happy, so of course birth (just look at overall suicide rates, most people (>99900 in 100000) prefer to live than to die and they still have the option to do the latter) is not as worse as rape.

Though its true that people only value consent when the lack of it could be used against them.

By birth bringing more happiness than suffering, your premise is flawed
That's a complete misunderstanding of what pleasure even is, which I talked about in another comment earlier. Moreover suicide rates aren't a very good argument, given that killing ourselves goes against our primary programming, and it's very difficult to get a human to the point where they're psychologically capable of doing it.
You have the right to refuse sex if you don't want it. How would we know whether you want to be born or not? With sex, you can either refuse it or accept it. Birth you can't weigh in on. So this doesn't really compare.
So the lack of knowledge of what someone would prefer gives you the right to act in their stead? So if someone is unconscious, is rape alright then? This is the sort of shit which leads me to believe most of the arguments against this reasoning are wordplay, and that consent is totally arbitrary nonsense.
 
Didntread
 
That's a complete misunderstanding of what pleasure even is, which I talked about in another comment earlier. Moreover suicide rates aren't a very good argument, given that killing ourselves goes against our primary programming, and it's very difficult to get a human to the point where they're psychologically capable of doing it.

So the lack of knowledge of what someone would prefer gives you the right to act in their stead? So if someone is unconscious, is rape alright then? This is the sort of shit which leads me to believe most of the arguments against this reasoning are wordplay, and that consent it totally arbitrary nonsense.
For sure they are, since you are arguing that non existence is better than life, while suicide rates show the opposite. Advocating for antinatalism has no sense in a world where most people prefer to live.

Also, you think this primary programming isn't relevant when evaluating the value people give to life and non existence?

And when you bring someone to the world, they can reverse what was done to them, while the same doesn't happen with rape.

You are a contradiction to your own argument ffs
 
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You can stop life at any time and no-one can (should) stop you, you can't opt out of rape, and for some, it stays with them forever. Secondly your not guaranteed to hate life, most do like life (to my knowledge), however most of the time women do not like rape. I think this is a common theory among incels and it seems pretty misguided for a group that commonly uses statistics and facts.
 
For sure they are, since you are arguing that non existence is better than life, while suicide rates show the opposite. Advocating for antinatalism has no sense in a world where most people prefer to live.

Also, you think this primary programming isn't relevant when evaluating the value people give to life?

And when you bring someone to the world, they can reverse what was done to them, while the same doesn't happen with rape.

You are a contradiction to your own argument ffs
You evidently don't even understand the argument that I'm attempting to make. But beyond that, you're really just conflating creating life with continuing it. Even if I were to grant that people prefer life, that life is somehow of positive value, that life is within the best interest of humans, birth is still a breach of consent.

The only thing that I'm really advocating is the notion that consent is nonsense.
 
To all the supposedly horrified normies who take issue with all the posting about rape on this site, whether ironic or genuine, and say that we're all somehow terrible people, I'm guessing that you probably break your own rules. Or if you don't break your own rules, you instead selectively apply a value which you don't ultimately hold. Bear with me here.

Lets start with the obvious premise, why is rape bad? If you could travel through different points in history you'd get different answers, but this is a digression. The answer which is relevant here is that people who are raped are of course given no choice, the lack of consent being the primary offense (made worse if it's particularly violent). But do you know what's bothered me about this for quite a long time? Why do people only apply consent to specific contexts, chief of them being sex, yet still claim to value consent as a standard? If the problem with rape is that people are being forced into participating in something which they don't want, and they're being harmed, then why do the vast majority of people who claim to value consent not apply it other things people are forced into which also harm them?

Do you know what's incalculably worse than rape, both in the harm that it brings, and in facilitating the very capacity for suffering at all? Birth. When it comes to procreating consent is completely impossible to obtain, since one cannot ask the nonexistent if they'd like to exist. No matter what wordplay you want to use to try and spin this, if you have a child who ends up wishing they had never been born at all, you have wronged them in manner really no different from that of a rapist. Worse actually, since while a particularly sadistic rapist might be able to inflict an incredible amount of suffering upon someone, they can't create the capacity for sentient beings to suffer. Even if we set procreation aside for a moment, things like mgm/fgm, child rearing as a whole, school, and nearly everything else we subject children to would be breaches of consent that vary in severity.

One of the primary reasons why this bothers me so much is because it comes across as extremely disingenuous. To me it seems like most people only value consent when it suits them, and that it's entirely motivated by self-interest. You care about consent when it's something which could tangibly affect you, that being rape (and yes rape is as much of an issue for men as it is for women), but you stop caring the moment this value might prevent you from creating those whom you hope to be your little mini-mes, children to ensure emotional satisfaction, financial security in old age, to ease the pain of your mortality salience, or to be used as a hedge against loneliness.

Personally I don't claim to value consent, because it's a value which is basically impossible to truly uphold, that it's silly in some specific contexts, and it's a value which everyone seems to arbitrarily decide when it matters anyway. Instead I value harm reduction, so that puts me opposed rape for a related, but still ultimately distinct reason.
This was disappointing, you started of with a great thread title, and everything was progressing nicely, and then you waste the entire foundation you built on some retarded anti-natalism rant, which is you comparing apples to oranges.

You can't compare consent in the case where both parties are alive and have self awareness, to consent in a case where the other party doesn't even exist yet lol

You could have talked about the fact that it's a normal social convention for humans to ply eachother with drugs and alcohol to "lower inhibition" and manipulate each other into being more likely to consenting to sex.

Its pretty "rapey" when you think about it, its normal and accepted for men to go up to women at bars and buy them drinks in hopes of making them tipsy and more likely to be coerced into having sex.

Its normal for women to be willing to accept being taken advantage of so long as they feel the guy is attractive enough for it to be "sexy".

That's a great example of consent being subjective and only being applied to specific contexts.

Waste opportunity man, as soon as I saw "Birth" when reading I just said "fuck!" in my head, why the hell would you take this great thread and do this smh lol.

There's so many different things you could have argued, arguing consent when it comes to the non-existent makes no sense, consent only applies to those that have consciousness.
 
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You evidently don't even understand the argument that I'm attempting to make. But beyond that, you're really just conflating creating life with continuing it. Even if I were to grant that people prefer life, that life is somehow of positive value, that life is within the best interest of humans, birth is still a breach of consent.

The only thing that I'm really advocating is the notion that consent is nonsense.
I literally responded to all your points in the main post and you didn't adress any new ones in your response, what am I missing out?

For sure I was, that's one of the reasons why rape is not comparable with creating a life.

Also, I don't even know if you can apply consent (but let's assume you can) to those situations, since even children can't consent and are forced by their parents to do what is better for them (no one complains about it).

My main objection, as I adressed in my first comment, is that you are comparing two situations where the breach of consent is going to cause more harm than suffering and just aims to benefit the one violating it. It would be the same as comparing parents forcing a child to take vaccines or go to school against its consent to rape and saying that people are hypocrites that don't value consent.

You don't seem to understand (or want to ignore on bad faith) that people don't have problem if the breach consent will bring more benefits than harm to someone (especially when it comes to someone who can't consent), people are utilitarian and this won't change soon. But this doesn't mean that the notion of consent is flawed, just that consent can be violated for a greater good (especially if the other part can't think of the consequences of its own actions), therefore a breach of consent is not bad by itself.
 
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I literally responded to all your points in the main post and you didn't adress any new ones in your response, what am I missing out?

Also, I don't even know if you can apply consent (but let's assume you can) to those situations, since even child can't consent and are forced by their parents to do what is better for them (no one complains about it).

My main objection, as I adressed in my first comment, is that you are comparing two situations where the breach of consent is going to cause more harm than suffering and just aims to benefit the one violating it. It would be the same as comparing parents forcing a child to take vaccines or go to school against its consent to rape and saying that people are hypocrites that don't value consent.

You don't want to understand (or seem to ignore on bad faith) that people breach consent if it will bring more benefits than harm to someone, people are utilitarian and this will never change. But this doesn't mean that the notion of consent is flawed, just that consent can be violated for a greater good (especially if the other part can't think of the consequences of its own actions), therefore a breach of consent is not bad by itself.
And I disagree with your assertion that birth is a benefit to potential children, or that it could ever be. If you like I can link my previous comment where I talk about pleasure and positive value, but really I don't think there is much point. The thing is that I learned years ago I can write thousands of words explaining this shit to people but it really doesn't matter what I say or don't say.

The point of this post wasn't to advocate for antinatalism (it's an exercise in futility), rather I was trying to use the premise to make people realize what an arbitrary value consent is, and how people choose to decide when it matters, which you're doing with this very comment.

You could have talked about the fact it is a normal social convention for humans to ply eachother with drugs and alcohol to "lower inhibition" and manipulate each other into being more likely to consenting

Its pretty "rapey" when you think about it, its normal and accepted for men to go up to women at bars and buy them drinks in hopes of making them tipsy and more likely to be coerced into having sex

That's a great example of consent being subjective and only being applied to specific contexts.
This is a good suggestion tbh, and more evidence to show that people don't give a fuck about it at all. It's complete self-interest.
 
This was disappointing, you started of with a great thread title, and everything was progressing nicely, and then you waste the entire foundation you built on some retarded anti-natalism rant, which is you comparing apples to oranges.

You can't compare consent in the case where both parties are live and have self awareness, to consent in a case where the other party doesn't even exist yet

You could have talked about the fact it is a normal social convention for humans to ply eachother with drugs and alcohol to "lower inhibition" and manipulate each other into being more likely to consenting

Its pretty "rapey" when you think about it, its normal and accepted for men to go up to women at bars and buy them drinks in hopes of making them tipsy and more likely to be coerced into having sex

That's a great example of consent being subjective and only being applied to specific contexts.

Waste oppurtunity man, as soon as I saw "Birth" when reading I just said "fuck!" in my head, why the hell would you take this great thread and do this smh lol.

There's so many different things you could have argued, arguing consent when it comes to the non-existent makes no sense, consent only applies to those that have consciousness.
What makes you think drugging out a girl and having sex with her doesn't count as rape to soys
 
What makes you think drugging out a girl and having sex with her doesn't count as rape to soys
What they profess publicly and what they do privately are two different things.

Talk to any normie about alcohol and dating and you'll see them start making excuses and talking about "there are grey areas".

What women mean when they say that is that they don't mind actually being assaulted and taken advantage of if the guy is attractive enough.

What guys mean when they say that is its alright to take advantage of women sexually under certain circumstances.

There are arbitrary and "convenient" rules of consent when it comes to drugs, alcohol and sex.

For women the guy must be attractive enough, for men they are willing to do it no matter what lol.

AND IT'S COMPLETELY SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE.
 
You tackled a good point, not rape and violence but consent, ability to chose and consent. Society and government already pushed million rules that constrict and are not best for regular citizens and we dont have the option to change them its either play by rules or dont play at all, than why are arranged marriages seen as barbaric and inhuman, if you cant choose most things why is so awful to not be able to choose a spouse.
 
Actually perhaps I will make a different thread in a day or two asking people what benefit there is in procreating, if they can name a few. As I said I haven't had any interest in trying to convince people of my position for years, but maybe someone can convince me instead.
You tackled a good point, not rape and violence but consent, ability to chose and consent. Society and government already pushed million rules that constrict and are not best for regular citizens and we dont have the option to change them its either play by rules or dont play at all, than why are arranged marriages seen as barbaric and inhuman, if you cant choose most things why is so awful to not be able to choose a spouse.
Yeah it's completely arbitrary, a selective application of an arbitrary value which we pretend is neither.
 
And I disagree with your assertion that birth is a benefit to potential children, or that it could ever be. If you like I can link my previous comment where I talk about pleasure and positive value, but really I don't think there is much point. The thing is that I learned years ago I can write thousands of words explaining this shit to people but it really doesn't matter what I say or don't say.

The point of this post wasn't to advocate for antinatalism (it's an exercise in futility), rather I was trying to use the premise to make people realize what an arbitrary value consent is, and how people choose to decide when it matters, which you're doing with this very comment.


This is a good suggestion tbh, and more evidence to show that people don't give a fuck about it at all. It's complete self-interest.
I know, I'm just saying that this comparison is not enough to prove your point and I even agreed with it in my first comment
 
I know, I'm just saying that this comparison is not enough to prove your point and I even agreed with it in my first comment
You might be right about that. Tbh I didn't want to make this thread so long that people wouldn't read it. I find it difficult to express my thoughts on the subject concisely.

The issue is that to fully prove my point requires people to accept that needs are impositions that we'd be better off without, that pleasure is a measured reduction in negative utility, and that procreating is creating problems for the sake of resolving them. I dislike Benatar's asymmetry argument, as it's too subjective, and too easy to misinterpret.

Ultimately though I think @BlkPillPres is right, I should've approached this thread from a completely different angle, as the primary point I was trying to make was about consent, not antinatalism. That would require either another thread, or a much longer one.
 
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That's a complete misunderstanding of what pleasure even is, which I talked about in another comment earlier. Moreover suicide rates aren't a very good argument, given that killing ourselves goes against our primary programming, and it's very difficult to get a human to the point where they're psychologically capable of doing it.

So the lack of knowledge of what someone would prefer gives you the right to act in their stead? So if someone is unconscious, is rape alright then? This is the sort of shit which leads me to believe most of the arguments against this reasoning are wordplay, and that consent is totally arbitrary nonsense.

No, the reason that doesn't apply is because when they wake from consciousness, they can consent. You'll never get any word from someone about whether or not they'd like to exist before they exist.
 
No, the reason that doesn't apply is because when they wake from consciousness, they can consent. You'll never get any word from someone about whether or not they'd like to exist before they exist.
I don't see how that's different from someone being able to consent (or choose to not consent) upon coming into existence. In fact these situations are essentially identical, hence my point, and I don't understand how this could be seen as anything other than a complete parallel.

This one doesn't even require accepting antinatalism to prove, in fact it is even used as a counterargument to antinatalism(albeit one that I don't agree with since it's selectively applied and arbitrary nonsense, same as consent arguments in favor of it).

In both cases we could make the argument that as a result of absence, it only makes sense to speculate upon what someone would be willing to consent to, and what they would and wouldn't mind being done. People accept such reasoning when it comes to procreation, but not when it comes to having sex with someone who is unconscious. But the thing is regardless of how much one is supposedly likely to be okay with something, or how much they'd potentially be against it, either way the decision to act is absolutely a breach of consent. This is why I called consent a selective application of an arbitrary value.
 
I don't see how that's different from someone being able to consent (or choose to not consent) upon coming into existence. In fact these situations are essentially identical, hence my point, and I don't understand how this could be seen as anything other than a complete parallel.

This one doesn't even require accepting antinatalism to prove, in fact it is even used as a counterargument to antinatalism(albeit one that I don't agree with since it's selectively applied and arbitrary nonsense, same as consent arguments in favor of it).

In both cases we could make the argument that as a result of absence, it only makes sense to speculate upon what someone would be willing to consent to, and what they would and wouldn't mind being done. People accept such reasoning when it comes to procreation, but not when it comes to having sex with someone who is unconscious. But the thing is regardless of how much one is supposedly likely to be okay with something, or how much they'd potentially be against it, either way the decision to act is absolutely a breach of consent. This is why I called consent a selective application of an arbitrary value.

But there is no person when it comes to the question of "Does this person want to exist?" You can't ask how a nonexistent entity feels.
 
But there is no person when it comes to the question of "Does this person want to exist?" You can't ask how a nonexistent entity feels.
Do unconscious people exist? Do you experience unconsciousness? As far as I can tell when I'm unconscious I'm a nonexistent entity. You can't ask me how I feel while I'm unconscious.

But tbh this is further than I even need to go because I don't understand the position that you're arguing. This has basically been semantics from the very beginning.
 
Do unconscious people exist? Do you experience unconsciousness? As far as I can tell when I'm unconscious I'm a nonexistent entity. You can't ask me how I feel while I'm unconscious.

But tbh this is further than I even need to go because I don't understand the position that you're arguing. This has basically been semantics from the very beginning.

Being unconscious is not the same as not existing. If you're unconscious, you can't consent, but there's still a "you." If you aren't a living organism, and have never been a living organism, there is no "you" to violate the consent of yet.
 
I agree in that the focus on consent as the end-all-be-all paragon of virtue is fucking stupid as hell. It's the naive college libertarian mindset applied to the dating market all over again, and it's dumb for the same reasons. Namely, there are other values than consent - duty, for example, being one. Honor, another. If you give your word, you should honor it, even if you later decide that it isn't in your best interest. If you bear a duty to aid somebody, be it family, society in general, friends, you should fulfill that duty even if you don't want to. Of course there's nuance there - if your mom is a fucking bitch then you have no duty to wipe her ass when she's old, she can forget that. Same with society, same with friends, etc.

These days people forget about the old values. They're still there, but we never use their names so we forget to think of them.
 
Being unconscious is not the same as not existing.
This ventures into the nature of the self, both in existential and ontological terms, and I can already see that my understanding of such things is entirely different from your own. So I don't see any reason to continue a discussion beyond this post, as it will have no end, and we're probably at an impasse. But I'll at least briefly explain my point of view.
If you're unconscious, you can't consent, but there's still a "you." If you aren't a living organism, and have never been a living organism, there is no "you" to violate the consent of yet.
Do you consider yourself to be a living organism? If so are you specifically a combination of it's component parts? Surely not, as if you were to lose a finger "you" wouldn't disappear. So it stands to reason that you're saying we are our brains.

To me however this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Certainly it's true that our existence is facilitated by the brain, but this doesn't mean that the brain is the one that you call "I", and moreover the brain can continue to exist and function while we are entirely absent (unconsciousness, coma). This is indicative that are neither our bodies, nor are we our brains, but rather we are beings who exist because of them. We're something akin to a program, or maybe an OS.

The beginning of our existence doesn't perfectly align with birth, given that nobody can remember their birth, and humans aren't capable of complex thought at birth. What's more is that we have nothing to prove the continuity of consciousness throughout life, and it could be the case that the unity and cohesion of memory and experience is an illusion. Given all of this, I find the notion of a person continuing to exist throughout unconsciousness to be ridiculous.
 
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This ventures into the nature of the self, both in existential and ontological terms, and I can already see that my understanding of such things is entirely different from your own. So I don't see any reason to continue a discussion beyond this post, as it will have no end, and we're probably at an impasse. But I'll at least briefly explain my point of view.

Do you consider yourself to be a living organism? If so are you specifically a combination of it's component parts? Surely not, as if you were to lose a finger "you" wouldn't disappear. So it stands to reason that you're saying we are our brains.

To me however this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Certainly it's true that our existence is facilitated by the brain, but this doesn't mean that the brain is the one that you call "I", and moreover the brain can continue to exist and function while we are entirely absent (unconsciousness, coma). This is indicative that are neither our bodies, nor are we our brains, but rather we are beings who exist because of them. We're something akin to a program, or maybe an OS.

The beginning of our existence doesn't perfectly align with birth, given that nobody can remember their birth, and humans aren't capable of complex thought at birth. What's more is that we have nothing to prove the continuity of consciousness throughout life, and it could be the case that the unity and cohesion of memory and experience is an illusion. Given all of this, I find the notion of a person continuing to exist throughout unconsciousness to be ridiculous.

I'm a living organism because I'm alive, man. This is not complicated.
 
good read. a consent taken by force is not consent. by their logic all marriages are rape because foids will never consent to be fucked by non chad. they are provided by one family to the other family. and by law consent can be only given by those capable having sound mind and attaining majority age. i never consented to be sent to school.
 
cant compare birth and sex blah blah like others have already said and if you see the statistics 95% of people Dont want to die so
 
Also, I don't even know if you can apply consent (but let's assume you can) to those situations, since even children can't consent and are forced by their parents to do what is better for them (no one complains about it).

My main objection, as I adressed in my first comment, is that you are comparing two situations where the breach of consent is going to cause more harm than suffering and just aims to benefit the one violating it. It would be the same as comparing parents forcing a child to take vaccines or go to school against its consent to rape and saying that people are hypocrites that don't value consent.

You don't seem to understand (or want to ignore on bad faith) that people don't have problem if the breach consent will bring more benefits than harm to someone (especially when it comes to someone who can't consent), people are utilitarian and this won't change soon. But this doesn't mean that the notion of consent is flawed, just that consent can be violated for a greater good (especially if the other part can't think of the consequences of its own actions), therefore a breach of consent is not bad by itself.
I'd say that exactly means that normies don't value consent (at least as the unbreachable value as they often seem to claim). The absolutist view of consent that normies sometimes signal in discussion with incels would be a form of deontology, but by default humans don't follow any ethical system too precisely (that's not an attack, it is confusing and often more or less futile) and if anything, they're closer to some variation of utilitarianism.

Sometimes incels use, more or less seriously, utilitarian arguments to argue for some kind of state-enforced gfs or arranged marriage, like "the amount of pain it would reduce among incels (of the amount of pleasure it would increase) would exceed the amount of pain it would cause among foids/chads (or the amount of pleasure it would decrease)" or "non-monogamy makes the entire society unstable, so enforcing it is the lesser of two evils". Normies then don't reply from the utilitarian standpoint i. e. they don't argue that the amounts of pleasure/pain are actually different, but rather they pull out "consent" as the end-of-it-all moral standard, and that's just so obviously inconsistent with what they practice (and you don't have to give edge case arguments like OP did).

They are not bringing the someone into the world and forcing it to stay here and most people are happy, so of course birth [just look at overall suicide rates, most people (>99900 in 100000) prefer to live than to die and they still have the option to do the latter] is not as worse as rape.
I don't think the matter whether humans generally prefer life to death or not is in any way relevant for the discussion about them valuing consent, but fair enough, because OP started talking in utilitarian terms.

Whether people "want" or "prefer" to die is, I think, largely a matter of semantic i. e. how you understand these words. People usually understand "wanting" very broadly, including the future and potential scenarios. For example, if you ask most people "do you want to speak Japanese?", most people would say "yeah, why not", but most of them won't run to a bookstore to buy a Japanese textbook or sign up for a Japanese course. Now, if you offered them a good free tutor or some magical method to learn it quickly or some kinda incentive (if you pass the JLPT N1 Japanese test, I'll give you money or a good job), the number of people who'd immediately start learning would quickly rise. Also, many of these people (asked the first question) won't learn Japanese right away, because they have different priorities, but they may start learning it in the future.

You could, of course, use a narrow definition of "want" (or "prefer") and say that people in the example above don't really "want" to learn Japanese, because only the current reality matters (and they may, of course, being to want in the future or in another scenario, but right now, they do not want), but people rarely seem to use language this way. Most if not all European languages "realize" this issue and have tools like "to wish" or quasi-subjunctive/conditional constructions like "would like", but I guess people aren't that precise (well, the lines of different levels of "want"/desire are blurry).

What I mean is, "do you prefer death to life" could be expressed in at least two ways: narrow "given current circumstances, do you want to die? " (if so, you should do it) and more broad (i. e. including potential scenarios) "would you prefer not to be born? " or even "would you prefer to be dead given this or that condition" (like painless euthanasia, perfect assurance there's no punishment for suicide in the afterlife etc. ). These are two different questions you and OP pose. You could say that OP is being imprecise, but most people would say "I want to give up drugs, but I can't" (because I have a mental or physical dependence) is a valid sentence.

I guess I could go on about this issue intersecting with the issue of free will, but I'll stop at semantic, because it's already a wall of text, lol. You can probably predict what I'd say.

I agree in that the focus on consent as the end-all-be-all paragon of virtue is fucking stupid as hell. It's the naive college libertarian mindset applied to the dating market all over again, and it's dumb for the same reasons. Namely, there are other values than consent - duty, for example, being one. Honor, another. If you give your word, you should honor it, even if you later decide that it isn't in your best interest. If you bear a duty to aid somebody, be it family, society in general, friends, you should fulfill that duty even if you don't want to. Of course there's nuance there - if your mom is a fucking bitch then you have no duty to wipe her ass when she's old, she can forget that. Same with society, same with friends, etc.
Exactly, bro. I'm a big fan of virtue ethics (even if some could argue that this "system" is as vague as it gets) for this reason. :feelsautistic:

I love the comparison to libertarianism, because that's exactly what it is: after making fun of ancap/lolbertarian reduction of ethics to the holy NAP, normies just renamed it to "consent" and started claiming that's the basis for their entire morality (even if that's obviously not true).

Most would agree that "consent" (however you call it) is something worth taking account of, but it's just a variable within a broader system of ethics (and even people who claim it's the end-all-be-all for them are usually if not always just disingenuous).

I find it funny how the easiest way to disprove the absolute value of consent is the same as in the case of NAP i. e. children, unconscious people or just the everyday life where you can't apply it in practice without going insane (I remember the debates on ancap groups from my teenage years about fumes from your neighbor's bbq violating your NAP; the consent equivalent is shit like "raping someone with their eyes"). :feelsgah:

As a probable autist, I understand the attractiveness of putting everything into neat boxes and reducing the entire ethics to some simple principle, but the world is just complex af, man. :smonk:
 

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