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Consciousness is the root cause of sufferingknowledge of inevitable, painful

demise causes limitless agony that we attempt to repress, but can never displace.
Ligotti, 12 [Thomas Ligotti, contemporary American philosopher and horror author, THE
CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE, p. 24-26, Evan]
Undoing I For the rest of the earths

organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three

reproduction, deathand nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves
with surviving, reproducing, dyingand nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We
also know we will suffer during our lives before sufferingslowly or quickly as we draw near to death .
This is the knowledge we enjoy as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel
shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die . We want there to be more
to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us
into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we
arehunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones . Nonhuman occupants of this
planet are unaware of death. But we are susceptible to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need some
fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves,
hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and
standing stark naked before the silent, staring void .
things: survival,

Pleasure doesnt exist --- fulfilling our desires only leads to an absence of suffering,
not happiness --- you should ONLY evaluate suffering in your decision calculus. The
OPTIMAL STATE is being dead.
Aveek, 11 [Aveek, political philosopher, extensively citing Arthur Schopenhauer, German
philosopher extraordinaire, In Search of Negative Utilitarianism, 16 January 2011,
http://socialproblemsarelikemaths.blogspot.com/2011/01/in-search-of-negativeutilitarianism.html, Evan]
There is yet a third reason why proposition A might be rejected. If we believe that happiness

is illusory or unattainable,

then there is nothing to give moral weight to. Proposition A is rendered meaningless or redundant. The most
famous proponent of such pessimism in Western philosophy is Arthur Schopenhauer. To better understand the reasoning behind the pessimistic
denial of happiness, it is instructive to investigate his treatment of the concept. The first premise of Schopenhauers philosophy is that
existence, for all living creatures, entails striving. We are all particular manifestations of the will to life,

and as such, we are all perpetually consumed by desires of one sort or another, which tend generally to our survival
and reproduction as a species (Note the striking parallels with evolutionary biology). For Schopenhauer, happiness consists
in the satisfaction of the will, in the fulfilment of our desires. Now it is unclear from Schopenhauers philosophy how this
specialised use of the term happiness relates to the more common meaning of happiness as a positive feeling or disposition. On one reading,

Schopenhauer seems to deny that happiness in this second sense is ever possible:
Schopenhauer scholar Christopher Janaway calls this the negativity of satisfaction thesis. Alternatively, Schopenhauer may merely
be saying that the satisfaction of preferences produces positive feelings only rarely and/or fleetingly. With
the negativity of satisfaction thesis, Schopenhauer suggests that happiness is an illusion: "All satisfaction, or what
is commonly called happiness, is really and essentially always negative only, and never
positive.satisfaction or gratification can never be more than deliverance from a pain,
from a want.consequently, we are only in the same position as we were before this pain or
suffering appeared."

A vast body of psychology provesfear of death is inevitablestruggling to stay

alive guarantees lashout to preserve our fragile fantasies through genocide and
oppression. Vote negative to promote collective suicide.
Ligotti, 12 [Thomas Ligotti, contemporary American philosopher and horror author, THE
CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE, p. 126-128, Evan] ***gender modified: note
that I modified a modification to a quote originally was [Man] literally drives himself into; we
also dont defend ableist language in this text
Be that as it may, there

is a school of psychology that has us all figured as morbid citizens. Known as Terror
Management Theory (TMT), its principles were inspired by the writings of the Canadian cultural anthropologist Ernest
Becker, who was one with Zapffe in wondering why a damning surplus of consciousness had not caused
humanity to go extinct during great epidemics of madness. In his best-known work, The Denial of
Death (1973), Becker wrote: I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of [hu]man[ity]s
condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right. Zapffe concluded that we kept our heads by artificially
limiting the content of consciousness. Becker stated his identical conclusion as follows: [[hu]Man[ity]] literally drives
himself [itself] into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so
far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same. Outlawed truisms. Taboo commonplaces.
Synthesizing and expanding Beckers core ideas, three psychology professors Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and
Tom Pyszczynskipresented the concepts of TMT

to the psychological community in the mid-1980s. In its clinical

indicates that the mainspring of human behavior is thanatophobia, and that
this fear determines the entire landscape of our lives. To subdue our death anxiety, we
have trumped up a world to deceive ourselves into believing that we will persistif only symbolically beyond
the breakdown of our bodies. We know this fabricated world because we see it around us every day, and to perpetuate our
sanity we apotheosize it as the best world in the world . Housing the most cyclopean fabrications are houses of worship where
some people go to get a whiff of meaning, which to such people means only one thingimmortality. In heaven or hell or
reincarnated life forms, we must go on and onus without end. Travesties of immortalism are effected
day and night in obstetrics wards, factories of our future that turn out a product made in its makers image, a miracle granted by entering into
a devils bargain with God, who is glorified with all the credit for giving us a chance to have our names and
genetics projected into a time we will not live to see .4 However, as TMT analyzes this scheme, getting the
better of our death anxiety is not as simple as it might appear . If we are to be at peace with our mortality,
we need to know that what we leave behind us when we die will survive just as we left it. Those churches cannot be
just any churchesthey must be our churches, whoever we may be. The same holds true of progeny and its stand-ins. In lieu of
personal immortality, we are willing to accept the survival of persons and institutions that we regard as
extensions of usour families, our heroes, our religions, our countries.5 And anyone who presents a threat to our
continuance as a branded society of selves, anyone who does not look and live as we do, should
think twice before treading on our turf, because from here to eternity it is every self for itself and all
its facsimiles. In such a world, one might extrapolate that the only honest personsfrom the angle of self-delusion,
naturallyare those who brazenly implement genocide against outsiders who impinge
upon them and their world. With that riff-raff out of the way, there will be more room on earth and in eternity for the right sort of people
and their fabrications. That said, promulgators of TMT believe that a universal dispersion of their ideas will make
people more tolerant of the alien worldviews of others and not kill them because those worldviews
remind them of how ephemeral or unfounded their own may be. The paradox of this belief is that it requires
everyone to abandon the very techniques of terror management by which TMT claims we so far have
managed our terror, or some of it. As usual, though, there is an upbeat way out for terror management theorists in that they argue that the
studies and research, TMT

best worldviews are ones that value tolerance of different others, that are flexible and open to modifications, and that offer paths to self-esteem
minimally likely to encourage hurting others (Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology, ed. Jeff Greenberg et al.). Of course, this is

just another worldview that brandishes itself as the best worldview in the world, meaning that it would
agitate others with a sense of how ephemeral or unfounded their own may be and cause them to retaliate. But
terror management theorists also have a back-up plan, which is that in the future we will not need terror
management and instead will discover that serious confrontations with mortality can have positive,
liberating effects, facilitating real growth and life satisfaction. There is no arguing that humanity may someday reap

the benefits of a serious confrontation with mortality. While waiting for that day, we still have
genocide as the ultimate insurance of our worldviews. In categorical opposition to genocide on an as-needed basis are
such individuals as Gloria Beatty. Without making too much of a mess, they quietly shut the door on a single life, caring not
that they leave behind people who are not like them. Most of these antisocial types are only following the
logic of pain to its conclusion. Some plan their last bow to serve the double duty of both delivering them from life and
avenging themselves for some wrong, real or imagined, against them. Also worthy of mention is a clique among the suicidal for
whom the meaning of their act is a darker thing. Frustrated as perpetrators of an all-inclusive extermination, they
would kill themselves only because killing it all is closed off to them . They hate having been delivered into a world
only to be told, by and by, This way to the abattoir, Ladies and Gentlemen. They despise the conspiracy of Lies for Life
almost as much as they despise themselves for being a party to it. If they could unmake the world by
pushing a button, they would do so without a second thought. There is no satisfaction in a lonesome
suicide. The phenomenon of suicide euphoria aside, there is only fear, bitterness, or depression beforehand, then the
troublesomeness of the method, and nothingness afterward. But to push that button, to depopulate this
earth and arrest its rotation as wellwhat satisfaction, as of a job prettily done. This would be for
the good of all, for even those who know nothing about the conspiracy against the human race are
among its injured parties.6

Group their extinction offense

1. Turn. There's always another extinction impact to stop; we'll NEVER find ethical truth in your
world. There's a risk in mine.
2. We'll be dead even if future people agree on ethics. The idea that we're obligated for the future
wills of non-existent people is an incredibly controversial philosophical claim in a field that
Bostrom thinks we lack confidence in.
3. Circular. You assume the good is something to maximize and that we only care about endeffects, so you assume util in the premise.
1). Extinction has no moral value beyond immediate death of those involvedYou cant harm
nonexistent persons after extinction since they dont exist
2). Extinction inevitablethe sun will eventually explode and the expansion of the universe
proves eventual heat death in trillions of trillions of yearsproves no uniqueness for their
offense
3). Dont evaluate risk of offenseany action of sufficiently low probability has an equal chance
of preventing extinction from a similarly low chance