I am disturbed at the absolutely horrific things that some humans go through. The very worst things I can think of include child sex trafficking and the fact that young children are sometimes raped and abused by family members, including their parents. I have read stories about the torture of children by psychopaths. The suffering these children must go through must be unimaginable to those that have not experienced it.
I was thinking about sharing specific details of the most disturbing acts I have read about but decided that may be inappropriate, even though I think sharing specific details of atrocities may strengthen my argument. If anyone’s interested, read the Wikipedia page of serial killer Albert Fish (not for the faint of heart).
My point is that preventing human extinction inevitably subjects many, many more children to these atrocities. This doesn’t sit at all well with me and I don’t think it should sit well with any reasonable person.
I suspect the main comeback to this is that as humanity improves we will eventually see a day where these atrocities don’t occur. I think this is just way too optimistic. Even if this is achieved it could be millenia before we completely eradicate all abuse. I doubt that millions more abused children is a price worth paying.
I’m not saying we should encourage extinction, I’m saying we should cease efforts to prevent it. We should redirect these resources to making the world a better place, not prolonging its existence.
Some people don't have the choice to die, because they're prevented from it, like victims of abuse/torture or certain freak accidents.
I think this is a problem with the idea of "outweigh". Utilitarian interpersonal tradeoffs can be extremely cruel and unfair. If you think the happiness can aggregate to outweigh the worst instances of suffering:
1. How many additional happy people would need to be born to justify subjecting a child to a lifetime of abuse and torture?
2. How many extra years of happy life for yourself would you need to justify subjecting a child to a lifetime of abuse and torture?
The framings might invoke very different immediate reactions (2 seems much more accusatory because the person benefitting from another's abuse and torture is the one making the decision to subject them to it), but for someone just aggregating by summation, like a classical utilitarian, they're basically the same.
I think it's put pretty well here, too: