31 ms·

Should we care about people who need never exist?

76 points by Leary 4y ago

nahkoots 4y ago
https://archive.ph/y4vso https://archive.ph/y4vso
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jefftk 4y ago
The article gives the example of us deciding how much we should pay as a society to reduce the number of road deaths. Do we count only the lives of the people who would otherwise die in the accidents? Or do we also count the lives of the children that they might have? Valuing descendants gets you to weird conclusions pretty quickly: preventing the death of someone in a culture where people typically have large numbers of children would seem much more important than saving the life of someone past childbearing age as you consider the exponential increase in descendents over time. Similarly, there are likely a lot of ways that you could increase the number of children born other than by preventing the deaths of their would-be parents. Policies that made housing, childcare, and education cheaper could have a very large impact -- I know a lot of people who have decided to have fewer kids than they otherwise would have because of the cost. Even more dramatically, consider policies that have an effect on whether humanity continues to exist. If we wipe ourselves out with nukes, bioengineering, etc, that's a lot of potential future people who won't get to exist in addition to all of the current people who would die. I think Toby Ord's "The Precipice" has a pretty good treatment of these issues, and is very thorough.
- kazinator 4y ago
  > Or do we also count the lives of the children that they might have? No; it is absurd to even talk about. Run from anyone who thinks this is legitimate intellectual discourse. Let's bite this trolling hook for a second. If you're going to count the lives of those nonexistent children, you have to also count and subtract the deaths they will cause. A few of those children might turn out to be be murderers. Others will cause accidents, maybe big ones. Others still will have consumption habits that snuff out future lives. Imagine if Adolf Hitler's mother had died in some accident before he had been conceived and born; how would you tally the accident?
  - Stupulous 4y ago
    Tangential: This argument comes up a lot, and I get that it's a specific example to make a general point, but are we that confident that removing Hitler from the equation means no Holocaust? It can't be denied that he had significant influence, but Nazis existed without him and antisemitism was widespread in Germany at least as far back as its founding. Am I wrong to think Hitler's contribution was not necessary for that outcome?
    - komadori 4y ago
      The novel "Time and Time again" by Ben Elton explores the possibility of averting of the world wars via time travel. I really enjoyed the book and would recommend. Without wanting to spoil anything, I would say it broadly agrees with your thesis.
    - kazinator 4y ago
      > but are we that confident that removing Hitler from the equation means no Holocaust? No.
    - watwut 4y ago
      Afaik, Hitler was instrumental in making Nazi party big and popular. They became big due to his speaking abilities. Antisemitism was widespread all around Europe. Germany was not the most antisemitic one - the Jews were running to Germany from Easter Europe. The nazi party was not the only competitor for power and among those, it was only genocidal by ideology. Germany could end up as military dictatorship - there would be imperialism but it would not be the same. It could end up as actual democratic country too. But, the party that won were Nazi and there, Hitler was the one who made that party big.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    Imagine in 1900 if people had some technology that would make the earth vanish into nothingness in 2050, after everyone currently alive had died. Would it have been morally neutral for them to deploy that technology, since the only people it would affect are nonexistent hypothetical people? On your specific points: > you have to also count and subtract the deaths they will cause Agreed. > A few of those children might turn out to be be murderers. Others will cause accidents, maybe big ones. Others still will have consumption habits that snuff out future lives. That's right: each person that comes into existence has some chance of making the world worse for others, and some chance of making it better. I think that overall new people are a positive contribution, especially if you consider their own enjoyment of life, but if you think it's the other way then it's completely to reasonable count "more people will be born" as a negative feature of a policy. > Imagine if Adolf Hitler's mother had died in some accident before he had been conceived and born; how would you tally the accident? When looking at moral questions you're generally concerned with decisions: do I try jump in to help with this accident in front of me? Do I give money to this person that seems to need it more than I do? Do I advocate for this policy? It's not clear to me what sort of moral question your hypothetical corresponds to, since at the time of the accident (or before that if we're considering the value of some sort of policy that might have affected the chance of her dying) no one knows that it's her child in particular that would end up causing such enormous harm.
- dcow 4y ago
  This is a can of worms, for sure. But we must facilitate and celebrate childbearing as a society. We’ve been able to do it in previous generations. But recently our priorities lie elsewhere: careers, money, status. When the worth of an individual is measured by how much money they make, children take a back seat. Read into that what you will, but we are not headed the right direction.
  - stouset 4y ago
    Given our demonstrated inability to act as responsible stewards for the limited resources available to us on this planet—not to mention one another in the face of this scarcity—perhaps we would stand a better chance of being a healthier and happier society as a population of 700 million rather than 7 billion? To be clear, I understand that getting there will be undeniably painful given our economic systems’ expectations of and reliance upon indefinite and unlimited growth. But such an outcome may be unavoidable in any case and it’s one I’d rather see us plan for and soften the impact of than continue to rush blindly into. I just don’t believe any more that the Earth can support the number of people we have at anything vaguely shaped like a modern Western lifestyle for much longer. We can and should continue to try to reduce our rate of consumption. But we’re too big at this point to have many good solutions left. I mean, for fuck’s sake, we’re running out of usable sand.
    - dumpsterlid 4y ago
      [dead]
    - pzo 4y ago
      This would definity create some issues if the change would be fast but also there would be some possitive side effects where it would solve few problems, e.g. if population over time decreases by 50% suddenly current real estates problems would be much easier to solve.
      - kevinmchugh 4y ago
        Who's going to do the maintenance on the existing housing stock? Who's going to demolish the decrepit and abandoned buildings?
- akadruid1 4y ago
  Even if you limit yourself to considering only currently living humans, calculating the cost of preventing deaths is almost universally avoided by government policy makers of any sort. Even worse is considering the cost per healthy life year. It's very rare to find any policy maker even willing to discuss this. One that have seen is Britain's NHS, who will spend £20,000 - £30,000 to give cancer patients 1 extra "Quality adjusted life year"[1]. But this is only used to compare drug prices and never mentioned even in the context of other UK government health interventions, which might have a much higher cost (e.g. COVID measures which might have cost 100x more per Qaly) or much lower (e.g. teen mental health might cost 100x less per Qaly). And that's just discussing health care inside a single country. The cost per Qaly of foreign aid to areas experiencing famine might be 10,000x lower than other policies. [1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28983924 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28983924
- kortilla 4y ago
  > I know a lot of people who have decided to have fewer kids than they otherwise would have because of the cost. How many? Nobody I know has done this with an actual spreadsheet of cost per child. What I see instead (in my professional friend circles) is people keep putting off having kids until their mid thirties because they end up so focused on their career. Then biology just makes is statistically much less likely to have lots of kids. So it’s not really, “we didn’t have our 3rd because I didn’t get that promotion.” Instead it’s, “we didn’t have kids until we had advanced careers because society for the past 3 decades said anything else was irresponsible.”
  - dumpsterlid 4y ago
    [dead]
  - jefftk 4y ago
    I can think of at least three people who've told me this is why they decided to stop at two children. I do think you're right, though, that a lot of people gesture at the cost as a reason not to have kids when even if you removed that barrier they still wouldn't. (In thinking about the effects of policies like this you need to think at the marginal parents: people who are close to the border on whether to have another kid and could be most easily swayed one way or the other.)
    - mordechai9000 4y ago
      We could've afforded one or two more, but we stopped at two because it was a good balance for us between work, family, and personal interests. Neither one of us wanted to be a full time stay at home parent, and neither one of us wanted to subsume ourselves and our lives to the basic biological imperative just to have a bunch of kids. Kids are a big commitment and a lot of work. I feel like having two gave us enough leeway to have the time and energy to devote to them as individuals when they needed it. In a larger family, that might not work out as well.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Most of the people I know with kids would have had more if it wasn't so finances-wreckingly expensive. My wife and I would have had at least one more in that case, certainly. The ones who have no kids and don't want any—I don't know any of those for whom it would have made a difference, though. > What I see instead (in my professional friend circles) is people keep putting off having kids until their mid thirties because they end up so focused on their career. Some of them are doing this because having kids is so expensive. It doesn't seem possible to provide adequately for them without mid-career income (often two mid-career incomes).
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  We should be investing literally all of our money into artificial wombs so that we can churn out humans like a factory. The technology is extremely close, and we could likely manufacture more lives than we could ever save with any kind of safety measures, even if we sunk all of our GDP into keeping everyone living alive.
  - urfullofsht 4y ago
    [dead]
  - jckahn 4y ago
    This is the description of a dystopia.
    - atq2119 4y ago
      Of Brave New World, to be precise. I do sometimes wonder though if people who actually lived in such a world would truly perceive it as a dystopia, or if that's just our status quo bias.
  - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    Why should we do something so awful? How do you come to the conclusion that that is something we should do?
  - novok 4y ago
    Lol the hard part is not getting pregnant and birthing children comparatively, it's the next 20+ years of raising and financially supporting them.
    - Analogbullfrog 4y ago
      I’m a woman, and most of the women my age (30s) view pregnancy as the source of a lot of body horror. I know I’d be a lot more interested in having a child if I knew for a fact that after giving birth I would have no chronic conditions. A lot can and does go wrong, even if it doesn’t result in death, and this is more and more common as average child-birthing age goes up.
- vl 4y ago
  This explicitly implies that population growth is desired. However, our total resources are limited, and at some point growing population is unsustainable. It can be argued that some countries are already at this point. Ie they have stagnant population numbers because they are already over-populated, and there is economic pressure to reduce population growth.
  - gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
    You need to look at the fact that our rate of population growth is negative. Sperm counts are averaging around 40 mill which is enough to require medical assistance. The human race is, in fact past peak growth and declining.
    - elmomle 4y ago
      So our second derivative is negative. It is fundamentally unsustainable for anything else to be the case forever, right? That would imply linear or greater growth in perpetuity on a finite planet where we and our livestock already comprise 96% of all mammal biomass. The drop in sperm count is of course concerning, though if we can't get our act together on birth control and family planning then it's probably one of the least tragic ways for our population to get knocked down to a more sustainable level. Humans generally fail at prisoner's dilemma ("if we have fewer babies, other nations will overtake us!"), so it seems necessary that some outside force eventually mitigate our continual failure there--and again, when compared to mass wars or starvation, a lower fertility rate is actually a pretty peaceful course-correction, so long as it doesn't plummet too low.
      - vidarh 4y ago
        We largely have gotten our act together on family planning, which is why birth rates are below replacement everywhere but sub-Saharan Africa, and dripping there too. Only reason population is still increasing is a combination of lag (it takes the smaller year groups now growing up in India and China to become adults before those countries will tip into population decline (excluding immigration), and waiting for the decline in Africa to hit replacement as well. UN projections indicate somewhere around the end of the century for a net reduction in people, but long before that we'll see developed countries starting to compete agressively for immigrants, combined with campaigns to push fertility up to try for a soft landing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- naasking 4y ago
  > Do we count only the lives of the people who would otherwise die in the accidents? Or do we also count the lives of the children that they might have? You never account for potential people because it inevitably leads to so-called repugnant conclusions that causes involuntary suffering among some number of currently existing people in order to secure some hypothetical good outcome for some set of hypothetical future people. People can voluntarily make such sacrifices, as parents do for their children, but this sort of argument should never be compulsory as with government policy. > Even more dramatically, consider policies that have an effect on whether humanity continues to exist. If we wipe ourselves out with nukes, bioengineering, etc, that's a lot of potential future people But more importantly, this impacts all current people and the things they value. What existing people want and value should always take precedence over hypothetical people, if only because their values may be entirely different than your own.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    > You never account for potential people ... to secure some hypothetical good outcome for some set of hypothetical future people ... this sort of argument should never be compulsory as with government policy. To extend the analogy I made in my reply to kazinator above [1], imagine that in 1900 someone invented a technology that had some kind of benefits to the users, but would make the earth uninhabitable in 2050. Kind of like an even more extreme version of climate change. I think you're saying it would have been wrong for governments to prohibit using this technology, because the only beneficiaries didn't yet exist? Alternatively, would a government policy that tried to reduce the incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome be unacceptable on the grounds that the people who are less likely to be born with FAS don't exist yet? > But more importantly, this impacts all current people and the things they value. Yes, but it affects prioritization. For example, imagine that $10B could either avert 2M deaths from malaria or reduce the risk of us human extinction in the next 20 years by 0.1 percentage points (averting 8B * 0.1% = 0.8M deaths now). If you only care about currently living people then you'd likely prefer the former, where if you also put some weight on future people you might prefer the latter. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34222098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34222098
    - 4y ago
phoe-krk 4y ago
> One obvious objection to neutrality is the threat of extinction. If one couple refuses to have a child, it is neither good nor bad. But if every couple refuses, it is a catastrophe. If the last human dies and there is no one there to witness it, who is there to claim this a catastrophe? This article makes a big, implicit assumption about a very human-centric world, which I consider kind of naïve; the universe, including Earth, does not care or need to care about humanity in order to keep on existing. According to all current knowledge, it did just fine before us, and it will likely do just fine after us, even if we do our best to make it inhospitable e.g. via global nuclear warfare.
- bundie 4y ago
  Do you think there are intelligent lifeforms out there in the universe?
  - phoe-krk 4y ago
    Sure, the universe seems infinite enough both in time and space. Assuming that laws of statistics hold, there should be other areas where there's optimum for life as we know it to develop - even if we won't get to meet it because we miss it by a few millions or billions of years.
- thegrimmest 4y ago
  This seems a bit nihilistic, what other sort of universe is there for humans besides a human-centric one? Shouldn't humans indeed pursue human-centric concerns?
  - phoe-krk 4y ago
    I think the mistake is to consider "human" something separate from the rest of the world as opposed to a more holistic point of view. The fact that we have a somewhat complicated mind capable of abstract thinking doesn't mean we're anything more than bacteria on the grander scale. The fact that our species has developed all over Earth and became its self-appointed "stewards" doesn't mean that a well-placed asteroid can't turn our "stewardship" into a futile battle for survival.
uwagar 4y ago
depopulation agenda for all to see. with eugenics from the back door bolted on: "the fear of large populations of low-quality lives has overshadowed the field of population ethics" also opens the door to scanning the developing fetus for diseases (+- other attributes) and termination if the fetus fails to meet some quality control.
- theCrowing 4y ago
  I don't get it do you want to be the biggest but only biomass left on the planet just to own the libs?
  - nuc1e0n 4y ago
    That's not your decision to make one way or the other.
    - theCrowing 4y ago
      What? Answer the question in word and meaning if you answer and not your deranged interpretation of it. People are voluntary getting less children in almost every western society.
      - uwagar 4y ago
        with the noble view to save the planet?
        theCrowing 4y ago
        I bet that's the case for more than you would expect.
        uwagar 4y ago
        lol.
      - 4y ago
bfgoodrich 4y ago
The leading story about the HMS Birkenhead is fascinating, though looking up further info finds that of the 193 saved "the survivors comprised 113 soldiers (all ranks), 6 Royal Marines, 54 seamen (all ranks), 7 women, 13 children and at least one male civilian". "Why are women and children on a troop transport?" is a natural next question, and apparently they were family of senior officers.
ck2 4y ago
We've already collectively decided the past few years it is perfectly okay to allow workers and visitors into nursing/retirement-homes unvaccinated and unmasked and sometimes even known sick because they aren't going to change their lives in the slightest for anyone else. Locations have had massive wipeouts of residents, nothing changes, people want it this way is the only logical conclusion.
nmca 4y ago
I wonder if the finite growth rate of the light-cone disarms the repugnant conclusion, by limiting the bound on population size that you can trade up to.
nuc1e0n 4y ago
It seems the goal of these types of policy decisions is to ensure continuity and prevent catastrophes (i.e. a sudden loss of diversity). A range of potential populations could fit these criteria. Beyond that, agonizing about what you should do one way or the other seems egotistical to me. Just trust in the wisdom of the crowd.
jl6 4y ago
The party boat is more fun with more passengers, but if you keep inviting people on board without limit, it’s going to sink.
labrador 4y ago
I think we should care more about people who actually do exist first
epivosism 4y ago
This same concept comes up frequently, when you have two opposing states of the same entity, which both oppose changing to the other. i.e. a sleepy kid who doesn't want to go to bed vs that same kid, well-rested the next day. They both resist becoming each other, yet they're the same person. There doesn't seem to be a way to rectify this conflict without a unifying value system (or just letting nature decide). Parents frequently overrule one version of an entity and force it to another. There are more contentious examples like forcing an alcoholic to get sober, or putting a resistant kid through boot camp "for their own good". The general point is that there's an argument against always obeying an entity's local preferences. But, generally accepting the right to overrule someone's preferences opens the door to all kinds of exploitation, too. It doesn't seem clear how to resolve this, and there may not be a single answer. Some people argue as if all potential states are equally valid, and we should judge by the retroactive reward we would get from adjusting states.
- hammock 4y ago
  Plato said: “Good actions strengthen ourselves and inspire good actions in others.” I believe that is a tidy, principled way of resolving the conundrum of self-interest vs utilitarianism.
  - epivosism 4y ago
    It also gets probabilistic. Resisting change is generally smart (to avoid exploitation) - there have always been charlatans and innate stubbornness seems to me to be valuable to resist them. Particularly when the cost of evaluating a claim is high, just dumbly resisting change can be beneficial. But change can also be good, obviously. So I'm trying to figure out what you meant! Are you pointing to 'strengthen' as the main value? i.e. to preserve your existence in the world as one of the primary values? That makes sense to me and would certainly often be selected for.
    - hammock 4y ago
      I sort of took your argument a level further before responding. Your line of reasoning begs the age-old ethical question of if and how we should compel behavior in others (whether “the other” is physically someone else or simply our future self) for some longer-term or greater benefit? The “strengthening” part of the answer is in essence a rejection of hedonism, as well. Hopefully that helps
anselm 4y ago
It's nice to hear of a few other philosophers in this area aside from Peter Singer, the Effective Altruism community and trolley car problems. These moral scales philosophers employ do seem to rest on unquestioned axioms about the value of human time spent alive. I constantly wonder why if they are philosophers that they don't examine the axioms themselves more? Often it feels like they try to weigh say the potential of a younger person to live longer versus the weight of an older person with less time to live. I don't know that this kind of calculus really makes sense - it feels like it quickly leads to logical conundrums because it's extremely hard to precisely weigh one life versus another. If I had to decide between two lives (or say if the Earth was going to be struck by an asteroid) it feels like a better scheme is to weight 'diversity' - to focus less on the happiness or joy or quality of life and more on trying to select for many different kinds of minds. So for example I'd try to save a diverse mixture of kinds of people from a sinking ship, or I'd try to select for people from say indigenous tribal cultures that were under-represented in outcomes. I'd probably bias mostly towards humans simply because I don't know of anything else that can cogitate, but I'd also try to include larger systems of living organisms. Selecting for diversity rather than quality of life feels like it avoids some of the tyranny of the masses kind of thinking and the worst of human-centric thinking.
- akira2501 4y ago
  > because it's extremely hard to precisely weigh one life versus another. I'd say it's impossible to do this in any ethical way without perfect knowledge of the future. When it comes to solving this as a civil issue, this is not at all what we do. We look at the future potential value of that individual persons life and then ask a jury to decide the award. > So for example I'd try to save a diverse mixture of kinds of people from a sinking ship Assuming you can actually measure diversity acceptably in such conditions. > or I'd try to select for people from say indigenous tribal cultures that were under-represented in outcomes Without asking why they're under represented? Is a tribe of cannibals or a classroom of children more valuable? > Selecting for diversity rather than quality of life feels like it avoids some of the tyranny of the masses kind of thinking and the worst of human-centric thinking. You've only described racial diversity. What about diversity of lived experience? Diversity of thought? Diversity of religion? Where do these rank against race?
rglover 4y ago
> population ethics The new word for "eugenics," repackaged for the hip new urbanite narcissist who believes their life is more important than others. I'd applaud their ability to word twist if it wasn't so sinister.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I know I don't. That's not good or bad, it just is a simple opinion/sentiment. It's not an ethical question either. Ethics are about informing our actions, not our opinions about how things are regardless of our actions. Accidents happen, people get sick and die, etc. All of them eventually. Sucks for the people involved when that happens of course. And that's a reason to work to prevent/delay the things that kill us. But not because of their future offspring. Nature has this nice self regulating principle where species try to procreate as much as needed to sustain or grow the population while the rest of nature tries to treat that as manna from heaven (i.e. food). That cycle might just be a bit out of wack with our species judging from the explosive growth in the last century. We have few natural predators left that are hunting and eating us. Many of the people that fail to die end up procreating and that offspring is collectively becoming a burden on our planet. 8 billion and counting apparently. At the same time we figured out how to have fun without committing to more offspring (i.e. birth control). So, an actual ethical question directly related to the titular question is whether it is ethical to use birth control. In many places people opt into that (with some level of enthusiasm even). In other places it is enforced/strongly encouraged by governments, which raises a few other ethical issues. But overall the effect is that our populations start shrinking as wealth and prosperity increase and more people refrain from procreating as much as they would have otherwise. China no longer needs to enforce their former one child policy. They only needed that while they were poor. Now India, which has no such policy, is taking over as the largest country by population. They are still growing rapidly. And more so in the poorer regions. But it suggests to me that the ethical thing is to actually promote wealth and prosperity everywhere. People live nicer lives, make more informed choices, and they procreate less (i.e. only when they really want to). Might cause a few individuals to never exist but it might also make it easier to fix our planet for the rest of us. Sort of the repugnant option without actually being all that repugnant.
nostromo177 4y ago
[dead]
thenerdhead 4y ago
This whole article seems to talk about policy and regulation while ignoring the natural chaos/order to the world. There are too many myths/stories/recent lessons where we have learned that mankind cannot control nature. The more we try, the more devastating it can be. Also another reason why the most noble thing is when one sacrifices their own life for another. To even consider putting a cost/benefit on life is a fool's errand. There's no satisfactory solution to the trolley problem(Unless self-sacrifice is allowed) nor absolute to the potential of one's life(including your own). The titanic is an overused example, but those who sacrificed their lives can be thought as reaching immortality given their names and story continue to be told and learned from. Many more lives were saved because of their sacrifices beyond those saved at the time. I can't help but feel these viewpoints are very egotistical/selfish concerned about individual happiness and comfort while ignoring the inevitable of our deaths and the future of our species thriving alongside the ever-changing world without us.
jmyeet 4y ago
Should we care about people who need never exist? Absolutely not. Why? As we've seen in the US in 2022, the idea of giving the conceived rights as people is weaponized to rob their carriers of autonomy and the access to medical care. I find it strange that an article that talks about theoretical people never once mentions abortion. Also, the example of the Titanic is brought up without even mentioning sufferage, which is another perplexing omission. The "women and children first" idea catalyzed the idea that women should have the same rights as men. Talking about "potential people" is a step backwards. There's a lot of talk about low-quality lives. This is colonial thinking, which is unsurprising coming from such an august neoliberal institution. The "savages" and the "poor" shouldn't be having children, the argument goes. But why are African countries, for example, generally poor? That wasn't an accident. It is the result of a policy of exploitation going back centuries. So if we really want more happy people, maybe we should stop making so many people needlessly unhappy.
- Nikkuni 4y ago
  Is it really policy of exploitation or is their poverty a result of having 7 children per woman? Anybody would have trouble feeding, dressing and educating that many kids. Even the colonizing Brits who were having too many kids were living in poverty.
walkhour 4y ago
[0]: > Modulo a few technical assumptions - any system of population ethics has to embrace either the Repugnant Conclusion, the Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion or the Sadistic conclusion. Something to keep in mind when thinking about population ethics. If you think this is taking the theory to the extreme with no contact in the real world you may want to think why China instituted the one child policy. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZGSd5K5Jzn6wrKckC/embracing-the-sadistic-conclusion https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZGSd5K5Jzn6wrKckC/embracing-...
alexb_ 4y ago
Valuing "future lives" is way, way too quick of a road to justifying eugenical thinking. No thanks.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
The huge flaw here is that this analysis only cares about genetic impact. Here's a grandma who is past childbearing age. But her grandchildren still really want their grandma. Her children still really want her advice. She's trying to keep her young neighbor from committing suicide. And so on. The impact of her death is far broader than the future children she could have.
csense 4y ago
The problem with these sorts of arguments is that you quickly run into hypothetical situations with large moral costs, creating Pascal's Wager-type issues where you have a moral duty to go to absurd lengths to avoid them.
leros 4y ago
Does this argument extend to suggesting that we have a moral duty to create life as long as that life lives a good life? If you you only have one child, should you have more? If we can raise animals humanely and kill them humanely, is that actually ethical? Is it better for a cow to have lived a couple of years versus have never been born at all?
8bitsrule 4y ago
> cost of preventing temperatures rising... With a smaller population of 8.7bn, the cost would drop to $471. The second option is cheaper. Interesting, analyzing hypotheticals that are based on loads of half-baked presumptions. It'd be even cheaper with a smaller population of 0.7bn. (Were the huge gains to be made by switching to renewables factored in here?) Maybe mixing those who will never-be-born into this drunken calculus is an attempt to suggest that some humanity is involved?

76 points by Leary 4y ago

nahkoots 4y ago

https://archive.ph/y4vso https://archive.ph/y4vso

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jefftk 4y ago

The article gives the example of us deciding how much we should pay as a society to reduce the number of road deaths. Do we count only the lives of the people who would otherwise die in the accidents? Or do we also count the lives of the children that they might have? Valuing descendants gets you to weird conclusions pretty quickly: preventing the death of someone in a culture where people typically have large numbers of children would seem much more important than saving the life of someone past childbearing age as you consider the exponential increase in descendents over time. Similarly, there are likely a lot of ways that you could increase the number of children born other than by preventing the deaths of their would-be parents. Policies that made housing, childcare, and education cheaper could have a very large impact -- I know a lot of people who have decided to have fewer kids than they otherwise would have because of the cost. Even more dramatically, consider policies that have an effect on whether humanity continues to exist. If we wipe ourselves out with nukes, bioengineering, etc, that's a lot of potential future people who won't get to exist in addition to all of the current people who would die. I think Toby Ord's "The Precipice" has a pretty good treatment of these issues, and is very thorough.

kazinator 4y ago
> Or do we also count the lives of the children that they might have? No; it is absurd to even talk about. Run from anyone who thinks this is legitimate intellectual discourse. Let's bite this trolling hook for a second. If you're going to count the lives of those nonexistent children, you have to also count and subtract the deaths they will cause. A few of those children might turn out to be be murderers. Others will cause accidents, maybe big ones. Others still will have consumption habits that snuff out future lives. Imagine if Adolf Hitler's mother had died in some accident before he had been conceived and born; how would you tally the accident?
- Stupulous 4y ago
  Tangential: This argument comes up a lot, and I get that it's a specific example to make a general point, but are we that confident that removing Hitler from the equation means no Holocaust? It can't be denied that he had significant influence, but Nazis existed without him and antisemitism was widespread in Germany at least as far back as its founding. Am I wrong to think Hitler's contribution was not necessary for that outcome?
  - komadori 4y ago
    The novel "Time and Time again" by Ben Elton explores the possibility of averting of the world wars via time travel. I really enjoyed the book and would recommend. Without wanting to spoil anything, I would say it broadly agrees with your thesis.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    > but are we that confident that removing Hitler from the equation means no Holocaust? No.
  - watwut 4y ago
    Afaik, Hitler was instrumental in making Nazi party big and popular. They became big due to his speaking abilities. Antisemitism was widespread all around Europe. Germany was not the most antisemitic one - the Jews were running to Germany from Easter Europe. The nazi party was not the only competitor for power and among those, it was only genocidal by ideology. Germany could end up as military dictatorship - there would be imperialism but it would not be the same. It could end up as actual democratic country too. But, the party that won were Nazi and there, Hitler was the one who made that party big.
- jefftk 4y ago
  Imagine in 1900 if people had some technology that would make the earth vanish into nothingness in 2050, after everyone currently alive had died. Would it have been morally neutral for them to deploy that technology, since the only people it would affect are nonexistent hypothetical people? On your specific points: > you have to also count and subtract the deaths they will cause Agreed. > A few of those children might turn out to be be murderers. Others will cause accidents, maybe big ones. Others still will have consumption habits that snuff out future lives. That's right: each person that comes into existence has some chance of making the world worse for others, and some chance of making it better. I think that overall new people are a positive contribution, especially if you consider their own enjoyment of life, but if you think it's the other way then it's completely to reasonable count "more people will be born" as a negative feature of a policy. > Imagine if Adolf Hitler's mother had died in some accident before he had been conceived and born; how would you tally the accident? When looking at moral questions you're generally concerned with decisions: do I try jump in to help with this accident in front of me? Do I give money to this person that seems to need it more than I do? Do I advocate for this policy? It's not clear to me what sort of moral question your hypothetical corresponds to, since at the time of the accident (or before that if we're considering the value of some sort of policy that might have affected the chance of her dying) no one knows that it's her child in particular that would end up causing such enormous harm.
dcow 4y ago
This is a can of worms, for sure. But we must facilitate and celebrate childbearing as a society. We’ve been able to do it in previous generations. But recently our priorities lie elsewhere: careers, money, status. When the worth of an individual is measured by how much money they make, children take a back seat. Read into that what you will, but we are not headed the right direction.
- stouset 4y ago
  Given our demonstrated inability to act as responsible stewards for the limited resources available to us on this planet—not to mention one another in the face of this scarcity—perhaps we would stand a better chance of being a healthier and happier society as a population of 700 million rather than 7 billion? To be clear, I understand that getting there will be undeniably painful given our economic systems’ expectations of and reliance upon indefinite and unlimited growth. But such an outcome may be unavoidable in any case and it’s one I’d rather see us plan for and soften the impact of than continue to rush blindly into. I just don’t believe any more that the Earth can support the number of people we have at anything vaguely shaped like a modern Western lifestyle for much longer. We can and should continue to try to reduce our rate of consumption. But we’re too big at this point to have many good solutions left. I mean, for fuck’s sake, we’re running out of usable sand.
  - dumpsterlid 4y ago
    [dead]
  - pzo 4y ago
    This would definity create some issues if the change would be fast but also there would be some possitive side effects where it would solve few problems, e.g. if population over time decreases by 50% suddenly current real estates problems would be much easier to solve.
    - kevinmchugh 4y ago
      Who's going to do the maintenance on the existing housing stock? Who's going to demolish the decrepit and abandoned buildings?
akadruid1 4y ago
Even if you limit yourself to considering only currently living humans, calculating the cost of preventing deaths is almost universally avoided by government policy makers of any sort. Even worse is considering the cost per healthy life year. It's very rare to find any policy maker even willing to discuss this. One that have seen is Britain's NHS, who will spend £20,000 - £30,000 to give cancer patients 1 extra "Quality adjusted life year"[1]. But this is only used to compare drug prices and never mentioned even in the context of other UK government health interventions, which might have a much higher cost (e.g. COVID measures which might have cost 100x more per Qaly) or much lower (e.g. teen mental health might cost 100x less per Qaly). And that's just discussing health care inside a single country. The cost per Qaly of foreign aid to areas experiencing famine might be 10,000x lower than other policies. [1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28983924 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28983924
kortilla 4y ago
> I know a lot of people who have decided to have fewer kids than they otherwise would have because of the cost. How many? Nobody I know has done this with an actual spreadsheet of cost per child. What I see instead (in my professional friend circles) is people keep putting off having kids until their mid thirties because they end up so focused on their career. Then biology just makes is statistically much less likely to have lots of kids. So it’s not really, “we didn’t have our 3rd because I didn’t get that promotion.” Instead it’s, “we didn’t have kids until we had advanced careers because society for the past 3 decades said anything else was irresponsible.”
- dumpsterlid 4y ago
  [dead]
- jefftk 4y ago
  I can think of at least three people who've told me this is why they decided to stop at two children. I do think you're right, though, that a lot of people gesture at the cost as a reason not to have kids when even if you removed that barrier they still wouldn't. (In thinking about the effects of policies like this you need to think at the marginal parents: people who are close to the border on whether to have another kid and could be most easily swayed one way or the other.)
  - mordechai9000 4y ago
    We could've afforded one or two more, but we stopped at two because it was a good balance for us between work, family, and personal interests. Neither one of us wanted to be a full time stay at home parent, and neither one of us wanted to subsume ourselves and our lives to the basic biological imperative just to have a bunch of kids. Kids are a big commitment and a lot of work. I feel like having two gave us enough leeway to have the time and energy to devote to them as individuals when they needed it. In a larger family, that might not work out as well.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Most of the people I know with kids would have had more if it wasn't so finances-wreckingly expensive. My wife and I would have had at least one more in that case, certainly. The ones who have no kids and don't want any—I don't know any of those for whom it would have made a difference, though. > What I see instead (in my professional friend circles) is people keep putting off having kids until their mid thirties because they end up so focused on their career. Some of them are doing this because having kids is so expensive. It doesn't seem possible to provide adequately for them without mid-career income (often two mid-career incomes).
BobbyJo 4y ago
We should be investing literally all of our money into artificial wombs so that we can churn out humans like a factory. The technology is extremely close, and we could likely manufacture more lives than we could ever save with any kind of safety measures, even if we sunk all of our GDP into keeping everyone living alive.
- urfullofsht 4y ago
  [dead]
- jckahn 4y ago
  This is the description of a dystopia.
  - atq2119 4y ago
    Of Brave New World, to be precise. I do sometimes wonder though if people who actually lived in such a world would truly perceive it as a dystopia, or if that's just our status quo bias.
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  Why should we do something so awful? How do you come to the conclusion that that is something we should do?
- novok 4y ago
  Lol the hard part is not getting pregnant and birthing children comparatively, it's the next 20+ years of raising and financially supporting them.
  - Analogbullfrog 4y ago
    I’m a woman, and most of the women my age (30s) view pregnancy as the source of a lot of body horror. I know I’d be a lot more interested in having a child if I knew for a fact that after giving birth I would have no chronic conditions. A lot can and does go wrong, even if it doesn’t result in death, and this is more and more common as average child-birthing age goes up.
vl 4y ago
This explicitly implies that population growth is desired. However, our total resources are limited, and at some point growing population is unsustainable. It can be argued that some countries are already at this point. Ie they have stagnant population numbers because they are already over-populated, and there is economic pressure to reduce population growth.
- gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
  You need to look at the fact that our rate of population growth is negative. Sperm counts are averaging around 40 mill which is enough to require medical assistance. The human race is, in fact past peak growth and declining.
  - elmomle 4y ago
    So our second derivative is negative. It is fundamentally unsustainable for anything else to be the case forever, right? That would imply linear or greater growth in perpetuity on a finite planet where we and our livestock already comprise 96% of all mammal biomass. The drop in sperm count is of course concerning, though if we can't get our act together on birth control and family planning then it's probably one of the least tragic ways for our population to get knocked down to a more sustainable level. Humans generally fail at prisoner's dilemma ("if we have fewer babies, other nations will overtake us!"), so it seems necessary that some outside force eventually mitigate our continual failure there--and again, when compared to mass wars or starvation, a lower fertility rate is actually a pretty peaceful course-correction, so long as it doesn't plummet too low.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      We largely have gotten our act together on family planning, which is why birth rates are below replacement everywhere but sub-Saharan Africa, and dripping there too. Only reason population is still increasing is a combination of lag (it takes the smaller year groups now growing up in India and China to become adults before those countries will tip into population decline (excluding immigration), and waiting for the decline in Africa to hit replacement as well. UN projections indicate somewhere around the end of the century for a net reduction in people, but long before that we'll see developed countries starting to compete agressively for immigrants, combined with campaigns to push fertility up to try for a soft landing.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
naasking 4y ago
> Do we count only the lives of the people who would otherwise die in the accidents? Or do we also count the lives of the children that they might have? You never account for potential people because it inevitably leads to so-called repugnant conclusions that causes involuntary suffering among some number of currently existing people in order to secure some hypothetical good outcome for some set of hypothetical future people. People can voluntarily make such sacrifices, as parents do for their children, but this sort of argument should never be compulsory as with government policy. > Even more dramatically, consider policies that have an effect on whether humanity continues to exist. If we wipe ourselves out with nukes, bioengineering, etc, that's a lot of potential future people But more importantly, this impacts all current people and the things they value. What existing people want and value should always take precedence over hypothetical people, if only because their values may be entirely different than your own.
- jefftk 4y ago
  > You never account for potential people ... to secure some hypothetical good outcome for some set of hypothetical future people ... this sort of argument should never be compulsory as with government policy. To extend the analogy I made in my reply to kazinator above [1], imagine that in 1900 someone invented a technology that had some kind of benefits to the users, but would make the earth uninhabitable in 2050. Kind of like an even more extreme version of climate change. I think you're saying it would have been wrong for governments to prohibit using this technology, because the only beneficiaries didn't yet exist? Alternatively, would a government policy that tried to reduce the incidence of fetal alcohol syndrome be unacceptable on the grounds that the people who are less likely to be born with FAS don't exist yet? > But more importantly, this impacts all current people and the things they value. Yes, but it affects prioritization. For example, imagine that $10B could either avert 2M deaths from malaria or reduce the risk of us human extinction in the next 20 years by 0.1 percentage points (averting 8B * 0.1% = 0.8M deaths now). If you only care about currently living people then you'd likely prefer the former, where if you also put some weight on future people you might prefer the latter. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34222098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34222098
  - 4y ago

phoe-krk 4y ago

> One obvious objection to neutrality is the threat of extinction. If one couple refuses to have a child, it is neither good nor bad. But if every couple refuses, it is a catastrophe. If the last human dies and there is no one there to witness it, who is there to claim this a catastrophe? This article makes a big, implicit assumption about a very human-centric world, which I consider kind of naïve; the universe, including Earth, does not care or need to care about humanity in order to keep on existing. According to all current knowledge, it did just fine before us, and it will likely do just fine after us, even if we do our best to make it inhospitable e.g. via global nuclear warfare.

bundie 4y ago
Do you think there are intelligent lifeforms out there in the universe?
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  Sure, the universe seems infinite enough both in time and space. Assuming that laws of statistics hold, there should be other areas where there's optimum for life as we know it to develop - even if we won't get to meet it because we miss it by a few millions or billions of years.
thegrimmest 4y ago
This seems a bit nihilistic, what other sort of universe is there for humans besides a human-centric one? Shouldn't humans indeed pursue human-centric concerns?
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  I think the mistake is to consider "human" something separate from the rest of the world as opposed to a more holistic point of view. The fact that we have a somewhat complicated mind capable of abstract thinking doesn't mean we're anything more than bacteria on the grander scale. The fact that our species has developed all over Earth and became its self-appointed "stewards" doesn't mean that a well-placed asteroid can't turn our "stewardship" into a futile battle for survival.

uwagar 4y ago

depopulation agenda for all to see. with eugenics from the back door bolted on: "the fear of large populations of low-quality lives has overshadowed the field of population ethics" also opens the door to scanning the developing fetus for diseases (+- other attributes) and termination if the fetus fails to meet some quality control.

theCrowing 4y ago
I don't get it do you want to be the biggest but only biomass left on the planet just to own the libs?
- nuc1e0n 4y ago
  That's not your decision to make one way or the other.
  - theCrowing 4y ago
    What? Answer the question in word and meaning if you answer and not your deranged interpretation of it. People are voluntary getting less children in almost every western society.
    - uwagar 4y ago
      with the noble view to save the planet?
      - theCrowing 4y ago
        I bet that's the case for more than you would expect.
        uwagar 4y ago
        lol.
    - 4y ago

bfgoodrich 4y ago

The leading story about the HMS Birkenhead is fascinating, though looking up further info finds that of the 193 saved "the survivors comprised 113 soldiers (all ranks), 6 Royal Marines, 54 seamen (all ranks), 7 women, 13 children and at least one male civilian". "Why are women and children on a troop transport?" is a natural next question, and apparently they were family of senior officers.

ck2 4y ago

We've already collectively decided the past few years it is perfectly okay to allow workers and visitors into nursing/retirement-homes unvaccinated and unmasked and sometimes even known sick because they aren't going to change their lives in the slightest for anyone else. Locations have had massive wipeouts of residents, nothing changes, people want it this way is the only logical conclusion.

nmca 4y ago

I wonder if the finite growth rate of the light-cone disarms the repugnant conclusion, by limiting the bound on population size that you can trade up to.

nuc1e0n 4y ago

It seems the goal of these types of policy decisions is to ensure continuity and prevent catastrophes (i.e. a sudden loss of diversity). A range of potential populations could fit these criteria. Beyond that, agonizing about what you should do one way or the other seems egotistical to me. Just trust in the wisdom of the crowd.

jl6 4y ago

The party boat is more fun with more passengers, but if you keep inviting people on board without limit, it’s going to sink.

labrador 4y ago

I think we should care more about people who actually do exist first

epivosism 4y ago

This same concept comes up frequently, when you have two opposing states of the same entity, which both oppose changing to the other. i.e. a sleepy kid who doesn't want to go to bed vs that same kid, well-rested the next day. They both resist becoming each other, yet they're the same person. There doesn't seem to be a way to rectify this conflict without a unifying value system (or just letting nature decide). Parents frequently overrule one version of an entity and force it to another. There are more contentious examples like forcing an alcoholic to get sober, or putting a resistant kid through boot camp "for their own good". The general point is that there's an argument against always obeying an entity's local preferences. But, generally accepting the right to overrule someone's preferences opens the door to all kinds of exploitation, too. It doesn't seem clear how to resolve this, and there may not be a single answer. Some people argue as if all potential states are equally valid, and we should judge by the retroactive reward we would get from adjusting states.

hammock 4y ago
Plato said: “Good actions strengthen ourselves and inspire good actions in others.” I believe that is a tidy, principled way of resolving the conundrum of self-interest vs utilitarianism.
- epivosism 4y ago
  It also gets probabilistic. Resisting change is generally smart (to avoid exploitation) - there have always been charlatans and innate stubbornness seems to me to be valuable to resist them. Particularly when the cost of evaluating a claim is high, just dumbly resisting change can be beneficial. But change can also be good, obviously. So I'm trying to figure out what you meant! Are you pointing to 'strengthen' as the main value? i.e. to preserve your existence in the world as one of the primary values? That makes sense to me and would certainly often be selected for.
  - hammock 4y ago
    I sort of took your argument a level further before responding. Your line of reasoning begs the age-old ethical question of if and how we should compel behavior in others (whether “the other” is physically someone else or simply our future self) for some longer-term or greater benefit? The “strengthening” part of the answer is in essence a rejection of hedonism, as well. Hopefully that helps

anselm 4y ago

It's nice to hear of a few other philosophers in this area aside from Peter Singer, the Effective Altruism community and trolley car problems. These moral scales philosophers employ do seem to rest on unquestioned axioms about the value of human time spent alive. I constantly wonder why if they are philosophers that they don't examine the axioms themselves more? Often it feels like they try to weigh say the potential of a younger person to live longer versus the weight of an older person with less time to live. I don't know that this kind of calculus really makes sense - it feels like it quickly leads to logical conundrums because it's extremely hard to precisely weigh one life versus another. If I had to decide between two lives (or say if the Earth was going to be struck by an asteroid) it feels like a better scheme is to weight 'diversity' - to focus less on the happiness or joy or quality of life and more on trying to select for many different kinds of minds. So for example I'd try to save a diverse mixture of kinds of people from a sinking ship, or I'd try to select for people from say indigenous tribal cultures that were under-represented in outcomes. I'd probably bias mostly towards humans simply because I don't know of anything else that can cogitate, but I'd also try to include larger systems of living organisms. Selecting for diversity rather than quality of life feels like it avoids some of the tyranny of the masses kind of thinking and the worst of human-centric thinking.

akira2501 4y ago
> because it's extremely hard to precisely weigh one life versus another. I'd say it's impossible to do this in any ethical way without perfect knowledge of the future. When it comes to solving this as a civil issue, this is not at all what we do. We look at the future potential value of that individual persons life and then ask a jury to decide the award. > So for example I'd try to save a diverse mixture of kinds of people from a sinking ship Assuming you can actually measure diversity acceptably in such conditions. > or I'd try to select for people from say indigenous tribal cultures that were under-represented in outcomes Without asking why they're under represented? Is a tribe of cannibals or a classroom of children more valuable? > Selecting for diversity rather than quality of life feels like it avoids some of the tyranny of the masses kind of thinking and the worst of human-centric thinking. You've only described racial diversity. What about diversity of lived experience? Diversity of thought? Diversity of religion? Where do these rank against race?

rglover 4y ago

> population ethics The new word for "eugenics," repackaged for the hip new urbanite narcissist who believes their life is more important than others. I'd applaud their ability to word twist if it wasn't so sinister.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

I know I don't. That's not good or bad, it just is a simple opinion/sentiment. It's not an ethical question either. Ethics are about informing our actions, not our opinions about how things are regardless of our actions. Accidents happen, people get sick and die, etc. All of them eventually. Sucks for the people involved when that happens of course. And that's a reason to work to prevent/delay the things that kill us. But not because of their future offspring. Nature has this nice self regulating principle where species try to procreate as much as needed to sustain or grow the population while the rest of nature tries to treat that as manna from heaven (i.e. food). That cycle might just be a bit out of wack with our species judging from the explosive growth in the last century. We have few natural predators left that are hunting and eating us. Many of the people that fail to die end up procreating and that offspring is collectively becoming a burden on our planet. 8 billion and counting apparently. At the same time we figured out how to have fun without committing to more offspring (i.e. birth control). So, an actual ethical question directly related to the titular question is whether it is ethical to use birth control. In many places people opt into that (with some level of enthusiasm even). In other places it is enforced/strongly encouraged by governments, which raises a few other ethical issues. But overall the effect is that our populations start shrinking as wealth and prosperity increase and more people refrain from procreating as much as they would have otherwise. China no longer needs to enforce their former one child policy. They only needed that while they were poor. Now India, which has no such policy, is taking over as the largest country by population. They are still growing rapidly. And more so in the poorer regions. But it suggests to me that the ethical thing is to actually promote wealth and prosperity everywhere. People live nicer lives, make more informed choices, and they procreate less (i.e. only when they really want to). Might cause a few individuals to never exist but it might also make it easier to fix our planet for the rest of us. Sort of the repugnant option without actually being all that repugnant.

nostromo177 4y ago

[dead]

thenerdhead 4y ago

This whole article seems to talk about policy and regulation while ignoring the natural chaos/order to the world. There are too many myths/stories/recent lessons where we have learned that mankind cannot control nature. The more we try, the more devastating it can be. Also another reason why the most noble thing is when one sacrifices their own life for another. To even consider putting a cost/benefit on life is a fool's errand. There's no satisfactory solution to the trolley problem(Unless self-sacrifice is allowed) nor absolute to the potential of one's life(including your own). The titanic is an overused example, but those who sacrificed their lives can be thought as reaching immortality given their names and story continue to be told and learned from. Many more lives were saved because of their sacrifices beyond those saved at the time. I can't help but feel these viewpoints are very egotistical/selfish concerned about individual happiness and comfort while ignoring the inevitable of our deaths and the future of our species thriving alongside the ever-changing world without us.

jmyeet 4y ago

Should we care about people who need never exist? Absolutely not. Why? As we've seen in the US in 2022, the idea of giving the conceived rights as people is weaponized to rob their carriers of autonomy and the access to medical care. I find it strange that an article that talks about theoretical people never once mentions abortion. Also, the example of the Titanic is brought up without even mentioning sufferage, which is another perplexing omission. The "women and children first" idea catalyzed the idea that women should have the same rights as men. Talking about "potential people" is a step backwards. There's a lot of talk about low-quality lives. This is colonial thinking, which is unsurprising coming from such an august neoliberal institution. The "savages" and the "poor" shouldn't be having children, the argument goes. But why are African countries, for example, generally poor? That wasn't an accident. It is the result of a policy of exploitation going back centuries. So if we really want more happy people, maybe we should stop making so many people needlessly unhappy.

Nikkuni 4y ago
Is it really policy of exploitation or is their poverty a result of having 7 children per woman? Anybody would have trouble feeding, dressing and educating that many kids. Even the colonizing Brits who were having too many kids were living in poverty.

walkhour 4y ago

[0]: > Modulo a few technical assumptions - any system of population ethics has to embrace either the Repugnant Conclusion, the Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion or the Sadistic conclusion. Something to keep in mind when thinking about population ethics. If you think this is taking the theory to the extreme with no contact in the real world you may want to think why China instituted the one child policy. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZGSd5K5Jzn6wrKckC/embracing-the-sadistic-conclusion https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZGSd5K5Jzn6wrKckC/embracing-...

alexb_ 4y ago

Valuing "future lives" is way, way too quick of a road to justifying eugenical thinking. No thanks.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

The huge flaw here is that this analysis only cares about genetic impact. Here's a grandma who is past childbearing age. But her grandchildren still really want their grandma. Her children still really want her advice. She's trying to keep her young neighbor from committing suicide. And so on. The impact of her death is far broader than the future children she could have.

csense 4y ago

The problem with these sorts of arguments is that you quickly run into hypothetical situations with large moral costs, creating Pascal's Wager-type issues where you have a moral duty to go to absurd lengths to avoid them.

leros 4y ago

Does this argument extend to suggesting that we have a moral duty to create life as long as that life lives a good life? If you you only have one child, should you have more? If we can raise animals humanely and kill them humanely, is that actually ethical? Is it better for a cow to have lived a couple of years versus have never been born at all?

8bitsrule 4y ago

> cost of preventing temperatures rising... With a smaller population of 8.7bn, the cost would drop to $471. The second option is cheaper. Interesting, analyzing hypotheticals that are based on loads of half-baked presumptions. It'd be even cheaper with a smaller population of 0.7bn. (Were the huge gains to be made by switching to renewables factored in here?) Maybe mixing those who will never-be-born into this drunken calculus is an attempt to suggest that some humanity is involved?