On 1/8/2013 1:49 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 17:49:04 -0500, the following appeared
> in sci.skeptic, posted by dh@.:
>
>> What do you want people to think is preventing you from benefitting from
>> life?
>
> Goalpost shift? Your assertion was that "life is a benefit",
> not that "one can benefit from life"; I certainly have no
> argument with the latter.

The problem is he's trying to be slippery. A living entity possibly
benefits from things *in* its life. If we say, as many people
colloquially do ("colloquially" is not in ****wit's vocabulary), that
your "life" is the events you experience, and if we make the assumption
that the good in your life outweighs the bad, then we might say that
*your* life - your set of experiences - is a benefit to *you*.

But that does not allow us to say that coming into existence, or
"getting to experience life", is a benefit in any way. As usual,
****wit is trying to equivocate on this. Coming into existence is not
the same thing at all as being in the middle of one's existence.

All along, ****wit has been plaintively trying to persuade people that
"vegans", who would like to see all domestic animal husbandry stopped,
are doing some kind of disservice to the livestock animals that aren't
yet conceived and born. He sees them as wishing to "withhold" some kind
of "benefit" from non-existent farm animals. He ties himself into knots
trying to deny that's what he is saying, but trust me, it is exactly
what he's saying. "vegans" aren't trying to do anything harmful to
existing livestock animals; they are not trying to withhold any benefit
from *them*. It is *future* livestock animals that "vegans" wish to
keep from ever existing, and ****wit does say that "vegans" are doing
something harmful to those non-existent, merely potential animals.
That's pure ****wittery.