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Open Individualism and Antinatalism: If God could be killed, it’d be dead already
Hraness cites a source capture. The source author remains the source.
gist
Andrés Gómez Emilsson treats personal-identity theories like conservation laws: Closed, Empty, and Open Individualism reframe whether birth harms anyone. Benatar-style antinatalism usually assumes Closed Individualism; Empty Individualism makes some moments wholly suffering; Open plus Eternalism says the one subject already exists across block time, so preventing births cannot unmake it. He argues ethical antinatalism is self-limiting, and that peaceful hedonic abolition beats attempts to destroy life.
ideas
- Identity views act like conservation laws. Closed, Empty, and Open Individualism recast hard ethical questions the way energy conservation simplifies physics problems.
- Antinatalism usually smuggles Closed Individualism. Harm-by-coming-into-existence talk assumes narrative persons who might never have been born.
- Empty Individualism raises the stakes. Moments of experience can be beings whose entire existence is pain, with no later compensation to that subject.
- Open Individualism plus Eternalism blocks cosmic off-switches. The subject is already born across tenseless block time; destruction, if any, is limited to our forward light-cone.
- Prefer hedonic abolition over anti-natal policy. Antinatalist temperaments may self-select out of reproduction; commercially successful valence-recalibration is the surer path to close hell.
quotes
“Personal identity views (closed, empty, open) serve in philosophy the role that conservation laws play in physics.”
“In my assessment, the mere possibility of Empty Individualism is a good reason to take antinatalism very seriously.”
“it is not possible to help anyone by preventing their birth; the one subject of existence has already been born”
“Till then, us ethically-minded folks shall relentlessly work on building universe-sized fire-extinguishers to put out the fire of Hell.”