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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I think Toby Ord's "The Precipice" has a pretty good treatment of these issues, and is very thorough.
<i>> 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.</i><p>If the last human dies and there is no one there to witness it, who is there to claim this a catastrophe?<p>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.
This same concept comes up frequently, when you have two opposing states of the same entity, which both oppose changing to the other.<p>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.<p>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".<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>Sort of the repugnant option without actually being all that repugnant.
[0]:<p>> 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.<p>Something to keep in mind when thinking about population ethics.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZGSd5K5Jzn6wrKckC/embracing-the-sadistic-conclusion" rel="nofollow">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZGSd5K5Jzn6wrKckC/embracing-...</a>
> cost of preventing temperatures rising... With a smaller population of 8.7bn, the cost would drop to $471. The second option is cheaper.<p>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?
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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"<p>also opens the door to scanning the developing fetus for diseases (+- other attributes) and termination if the fetus fails to meet some quality control.
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.
Does this argument extend to suggesting that we have a moral duty to create life as long as that life lives a good life?<p>If you you only have one child, should you have more?<p>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?
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
The leading story about the HMS Birkenhead is fascinating, though looking up further info finds that of the 193 saved <i>"the survivors comprised 113 soldiers (all ranks), 6 Royal Marines, 54 seamen (all ranks), 7 women, 13 children and at least one male civilian"</i>.<p>"Why are women and children on a troop transport?" is a natural next question, and apparently they were family of senior officers.
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.<p>Locations have had massive wipeouts of residents, nothing changes, people want it this way is the only logical conclusion.
> population ethics<p>The new word for "eugenics," repackaged for the hip new urbanite narcissist who believes their life is more important than others.<p>I'd applaud their ability to word twist if it wasn't so sinister.