Better Never to Have Been

• 元非

  2014-07-17
  Children are brought into existence not in acts of great altruism, designed to bring the benefit of life to some pitiful non-being suspended in the metaphysical void and thereby denied the joys of life. In so far as children are ever brought into existence for anybody’s sake it is never for their own sake.... [T]he case of having a child in order to save a child is less problematic than ordinary cases of reproduction. In ordinary reproduction people produce children (a) to satisfy their procreative or parenting interests; (b) to provide siblings to existing children; (c) to propagate the species, nation, tribe, or family; or (d) for no reason at all. These are all clearly weaker reasons for producing a child than is the goal of saving the life of an existing person. It certainly seems stra...
• 元非

  2014-07-17
  [S]ome in the deaf community prefer to be deaf in much the same way that a French speaker might prefer being a Francophone to being an Anglophone.
• 鲁肃

  2013-10-12
  Never to have been is bestBut if we must see the light, the next bestIs quickly returning whence we came.When youth departs, with all its follies,Who does not stagger under evils? Who escapes them? Sophocles