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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 w

• 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.
    • kazinator 4y ago
      Basically, what you're asking is if we plant a time bomb, does it become morally neutral at a certain, sufficiently long time value, whereby it doesn't kill anyone who is alive today? That time could be a lot shorter than 150 years. Say a one-year-long time bomb kills someone's newborn infant, and only that infant. When the bomb was planted, that infant hadn't yet been conceived. Of course that bomber is going behind bars.
  • ohwellhere 4y ago
    I find the arguments in these areas absurd and not absurd in almost equal measure, but I don't think your argument is a strong one against. If we bite the hook then the thing we care about is something like expected value. That only applies for non-actualized future events. We tally the accident of Hitler's mother's death according to the probabilistic expected value of her contribution, which was approximately the same as any other woman of her time and place.
  • watwut 4y ago
    > Imagine if Adolf Hitler's mother had died in some accident before he had been conceived and born; how would you tally the accident? As a pretty positive development. But kinda, none of us have predictive abilities like that.
• 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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• 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