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Do you mean to say you don't care for any living thing but your family?
by rbg246 6y ago
Do you mean to say you don't care for any living thing but your family?
- steerablesafe 6y agoPeople care for their close ones much more than for strangers. It's human nature. It's not binary between caring and not caring.
- rbg246 6y agoI think if you read the parent comment it was a binary question. Not disagreeing with your comment though.
- gostsamo 6y agoI mean that not having children is denying unborn people from the lives that they might have for no better reason that this might be easier for someone else unborn. This line of thinking leads to a suicide as a logical step which is rather bad extreme.
- fulafel 6y agoSaving potential people from being not-born leads to very bad extremes as well (maximizing reproduction). This is not a useful model of thinking.
- gostsamo 6y agoI agree. My point is that having children or not is the wrong argument. Decreasing population growth is much more ethically achievable by decreasing child mortality in developing countries, providing women there with the education to be self-reliant on their own, and providing them with birth control so that they can plan their parenthood.
- fulafel 6y agoRejecting the issue based on the fact that both logical extremes are failures is case of double headed reductio ad absurdum I think :)
- gostsamo 6y agoThe argument itself is reductionist in nature. No man, no problem. I'm not sure if you are arguing because of love for formal proofs or because you want the full treatise why it sucks, but if the latter, just say so.
- fulafel 6y agoI'm not sure what "it" is any more, but I think having modest amount of children is a good idea, and people from rich countries don't get to recuse themselves - we have such big carbon footprints. And appeals on behalf of unborn people sounds suspiciously like some of the dramatic appeals to emotion favoured by christian fundamentalists in the context of birth control.
- gostsamo 6y agoI definitely do not ask people to have children for any reason be it moral, ethical, religious, or any other. I'm not asking them to abstain either. Vice versa, my argument is that having children is not analogous to using plastics and should not be considered in one's carbon footprint.
- kolinko 6y agoThe point of fighting climate change is to preserve human life on earth (and in good conditions). If we destroy the environment, nature will survive - some spiecies will die off, but new ones will emerge. Nature was doing very well when co2 was a few times more than today. It’s just humans that were’t there to witness it.
- rbg246 6y agoThis is just so human centric surely you can see how caring for all of Earth's biome is important. Personally, I care about Earth's biome in its current state, and do not want to cause unnecessary suffering to animals or plant ecosystems because people trashed the joint especially since we had the ability not to.
- gostsamo 6y agoIt is human-centric, yes. However, the argument "don't have children for the only reason that they will trash the planet" is broken in its very core. First, because a person making it will have a difficulty explaining their own existence, and second, because if they don't have children, the chances are that their values will die with them and the Earth shall be inherited by the wasteful.
- mariusor 6y ago> First, because a person making it will have a difficulty explaining their own existence Maybe to you. I derive a great enjoyment from just being alive myself and living my own potential. Considering a life meaningless without procreation is a very unintellectual perspective in my opinion.
- gostsamo 6y agoYou miss the part where the very existence of the person brings suffering through the consumption of all kinds of nature destroying goods. Obviously such person values their enjoyment over the suffering of others. This is one of the main issues of utilitarian philosophy where the attempt of applying universal measures of cost-benefit analysis returns unpleasant results.