That consent/or lack of it can exist when the entity doesn't.
So you claim that consent
can exist when the entity doesn't exist? This isn't really any more clear than just saying "I disagree."
I feel you're deliberately manufacturing a false paradox, so you can try to force a conclusion you've predetermined (that being to say having children is immoral).
On the contrary, I feel that having children is immoral is sort of the inescapable conclusion of the reasoning I have laid out. I stumbled upon these ideas quite by accident, and as I already said (poking fun at myself), this is a subject of very little practical value, so I'm not deeply invested in the position that it is immoral to have children. I would describe myself
maybe as a tentative anti-natalist.
You can't ask for someone's consent to come into creation, because he or she hasn't been born and you can't ask. I don't agree with your anesthesia comparison, because you certainly can ask someone for consent for procedures before you put her unconscious for operation, but you're creating a false comparison to pre-birth, I don't see how those two are similar at all so I don't feel you're right applying misleading equivalency.
Again, those points were simply a response to what Synsensa said, I was not saying that I believe pre-birth and being under anesthesia are equivalent. The answer as to how they are similar is the condition Synsensa had initially specified: non-perception or non-sentience.
My understanding is if your criteria's impossible, you've got to use something else. You can't ask for someone's consent for birth, so you can't use asking for consent as a moral judgement. So you'd need to find something else, like maybe your fitness as a parent and what environment you'd be raising your child in.
On the contrary the obvious conclusion, as illustrated e.g. in the case of a rape victim who is too inebriated to consent to sex, is that
if consent is impossible to obtain, it is a moral imperative to proceed as if we do not have it.
One possible objection to this is of course the Good Samaritan case: for example, an unconscious person can be presumed to consent to first aid. There are laws which prevent a Good Samaritan in those cases from incurring legal liability. It would be easy enough to posit a similar exception for the case of birth, but we should be clear that this is what we're doing.
But yes, it's all opinion.
It is an opinion that is obviously a product of the fact that coming into existence creates a strong preference for continuing to exist. Death would plainly be a matter of profound indifference to something that had never come into existence in the first place. This is actually an important part of the argument here, because this desire combined with the knowledge that existence will end entails suffering.
It requires uncomfortable thinking to reach, especially since most societies affirm life is good and must be continued. I can't blame people for believing that.
Indeed. Viewed from the right angle, literally all of human culture can be seen as an elaborate avoidance mechanism (avoiding the fact that existence will end and that this sucks if you happen to already exist), so it is hardly surprising that people should react defensively, even angrily, at the suggestion that non-existence is to be preferred.
