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> Also worth thinking about in this context is the so-called “repugnant conclusion”: I disagree, elaborate ponderings in the absence of non-hypothetical eviden
by kerkeslager 3y ago
> Also worth thinking about in this context is the so-called “repugnant conclusion”:
I disagree, elaborate ponderings in the absence of non-hypothetical evidence are not worth talking about.
I mean, read the section, "Arriving at the Repugnant Conclusion" with any critical eye at all and it becomes clear that it's total nonsense. They're treating "postponing a pregnancy" (not even aborting an existing pregnancy to have a later pregnancy--literally having sex at a later date) as if it's equivalent to killing the potential child. They've strung together a lot of fancy-sounding words but what they've said is stupid. It doesn't get better from there.
The best philosophers don't call themselves philosophers, because they have enough real-world knowledge to call themselves something else like a politician or an engineer. I have no interest whatsoever in the sort of philosopher who logics themselves around in the absence of any empirical connection to reality.
- smokel 3y agoYou might be interested in pragmatism.
- keiferski 3y agoNo, people that write comments like that one tend to be into Ayn Rand and think her pseudo-intellectual philosophy is something worth building a worldview around. The keywords, belligerence, and lack of actual intellectual engagement ("this is all stupid nonsense not worth talking about" is a key tell) are all there.
- kerkeslager 3y agoDear God no. I am not into Ayn Rand.
- keiferski 3y agoIf you don't have much interest in philosophy and don't care for thinking deeply about problems, why engage at all? Move over the comment in silence and leave it for people that are willing to think more about a topic. I assure you, Parfit and the other philosophers mentioned are not "stupid" and have thought about this far, far longer than your 3 minutes of read-and-dismiss. This "hostile anti-intellectualism" is so tiresome.
- AlexandrB 3y agoIt's interesting in the "spherical cow"[1] kind of way like many abstract ideas, but it quickly falls apart as soon as you try to use apply it to any real context. In particular it suffers from a problem similar to the one that plagues the Martingale betting strategy[2], where you might need an infinite[3] amount of resources to achieve a population large enough to make up for the loss in quality of life. So ultimately there's not an actionable idea here, because the true morality of the situation ends up depending on physical constraints that are hard to predict in advance. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system) [3] Not literally infinite, but more than can be obtained by the civilization you're applying this to. As a trivial example, what if the population required is so large that there's not enough water in the earth's oceans to constitute their bodies?
- keiferski 3y agoI don't think that's the case at all. The fundamental question of whether the basic low-level life existence of a human being is preferable to a smaller number of high-quality lives is a difficult question and isn't just some abstract spherical cow thought experiment.
- kerkeslager 3y agoAbstract spherical cow thought experiments can be difficult and still be abstract spherical cow thought experiments. What makes this completely irrelevant to anything I care about, is that "many shitty lives" vs. "few high-quality lives" aren't options that exist in a void. Whatever complex worldwide system you're talking about that would put those two choices on the table would have all sorts of massive side effects, and those side effects matter in deciding which is preferable. It's just not useful to discuss it in some hypothetical infinite blank frictionless flat surface where you've arbitrarily decided that having a baby later is murdering the potential baby you might have had earlier. That's not reality and it has no impact or relation to reality.
- 3y ago
- AlexandrB 3y agoMaybe I'm missing something, but it also seems innumerate. It's possible that the resources needed for each additional person reduces the quality of life for all other people enough to more than entirely cancel out their own contribution to the "sum". The resulting sequence would approach a sum of 0 as the population increases instead of always increasing with population.
- kerkeslager 3y agoI mean, you can make up any model of the situation in a void, which is why this whole discussion doesn't matter. What if it's a normal distribution, and there's a number of people where quality of life is maximized? Since we're making shit up now, what if it's an exponential decay and there's a number of people where quality of life jumps from negative infinity to positive infinity?